“It was television that made the Quiet Revolution,” is convinced Guy Fournier, who is launching this Wednesday a biography without fluff, in the image of the public man he has always been – which makes him will have also caused embarrassment on more than one occasion. At 92 years old, and despite a recent diagnosis of cancer, the author of Never two without me remains the same. And if he is doing relatively well, the same cannot be said of the medium of which he was a true pioneer.
“If someone had told me in the 1970s that television would end up in the misery it is today, I wouldn’t have believed it. There was such a craze for TV, it had such social force, that we believed that this medium was to be eternal,” remembers with nostalgia the one that we can read in the Quebecor newspapers, a company which suffered quite a bit during the media crisis in recent weeks.
Television will not die: it will remain the medium of choice for live events – and for information, too –, Guy Fournier bets. But the golden age of the “image box”, which he knew well, is undeniably over.
According to him, Canadian broadcasters are currently paying the price for their sterile competitive spirit, which prevented them from uniting to form a common platform capable of competing with Netflix when there was still time.
We are the ones who brought the world to social networks, without realizing that they would end up stealing our advertisers.
The media were also victims, he emphasizes, of their naivety with regard to social networks, which they promoted without realizing that they were feeding the beast which would eventually swallow them. “There is not one scream broadcast for 10 years where we do not say in the end credits “Go follow us on our Facebook page”. My God, we were thick! We are the ones who brought the world to social networks, without realizing that they would end up stealing our advertisers. In history, I don’t think there have been other companies that have been entitled to as much free promotion as the digital giants,” thunders the nonagenarian.
The avant-garde
Screenwriter, producer, host, administrator… Guy Fournier has worn all the hats during his career. We owe him soap operas like Banana skin, The Duval heirs and especially Never two without youin which he staged for the first time on Quebec television a homosexual character, Bernie Lacasse (Serge Thériault), “who was not crazy”.
Guy Fournier was ahead of his time many times in his life. When he participated in the founding of Télévision Quatre-Saisons (TQS) in the mid-1980s, he demanded that there be as many women as men among the staff, “and not just in secretary positions” . He also wanted the faces on the screen to reflect the diversity of Montreal. He was the one who hired Dany Laferrière as weather presenter, even though the owner of TQS at the time, Jean Pouliot, wanted nothing to do with him on the air — and used the n-word in his diatribes.
“It was really those words that he used. So I told him that if he kicked Dany out, he would have to fire me too. And I knew he couldn’t fire me, as I was a shareholder,” relates Guy Fournier, who wanted to tell this anecdote in his biography Never two without mewritten in collaboration with Pierre Huet.
“Ridiculed” at TLMEP
As TQS program director, Guy Fournier also gave RBO members their first chance on TV, standing up to advertisers who complained about their vulgarity. This shows the extent to which he felt betrayed by Guy A. Lepage during his famous visit to Everybody talks about it in September 2006. “How would it feel to be ridiculed in front of a million and a half viewers? This is what I experienced. I was invited to a dinner for idiots,” saddens, still bitter, the man who never forgave Guy A. Lepage.
At that time, Guy Fournier was chairman of the board of directors of CBC/Radio-Canada. He had just made yet another blunder by writing in a column published in the magazine 7 days that the law in Lebanon allows men to have sexual relations with animals, as long as they are female. However, this is completely false, which aroused the ire of part of the Lebanese community. And to make matters worse, journalist Patrick Lagacé reported that Guy Fournier had given an interview to a Toronto community radio station in which he spoke at length about the pleasure he feels when defecating.
Even today, the main person believes that a trap was set for him, ensuring that he did not know that he was being recorded at that time. Still, the team of Everybody talks about it finds the recording and broadcasts extracts during the interview with Guy Fournier. Humiliated, he resigned from the board of directors of CBC/Radio-Canada. Guy Fournier then confided having had suicidal thoughts.
“How is it that this recording ended up in the hands of Patrick Lagacé, then of Everybody talks about it ? Did people try to take me down? I’ll never have proof, but I have my suspicions. It’s too many coincidences at once. But what I know is that it surely bothered several people at Radio-Canada at the time that I was humiliated in this way to push me to resign,” he suggests.
Trudeau, Péladeau and the others
Plot or not, Guy Fournier has never been a very modest person. And he proves it once again in this voluminous biography of more than 400 pages, speaking at length about his five marriages, including the highly publicized one with Louise Deschâtelets, but also about his numerous adventures, with Denise Bombardier among others.
But the most interesting passages in the book are those devoted to his friends. Among them: Judith Jasmin, Charles Daudelin, René Lévesque, Péladeau (father and son) and even Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whom he strives to rehabilitate. “When I hear people say that Trudeau was a traitor to Quebec, that’s not true. He truly believed that Canada could become a bilingual country. That French speakers had a place,” he insists.
Unlike director Claude Fournier, his twin brother who died last March, Guy Fournier was never an ardent sovereignist activist. He has always maintained relationships with political figures of all stripes. During the two referendums, he managed not to be in the country so as not to have to speak out and decide on an issue on which he had always procrastinated.
In the twilight of his life, he has now chosen his side: “If there was a referendum today, I would vote yes. Like Trudeau, I have long believed that we could change Canada, but I believe in it less and less. It is a country that has changed. The influence of French speakers is diminishing. All decisions are now made in Toronto. »