Patrick Sébastien will never forget October 12, 2018. After 23 years spent in public service hosting entertainment like “The greatest cabaret in the world”, the host was thanked to the general surprise of France Télévisions. Patrick Boutot, his real name, confided bluntly during an interview with our colleagues from Here in which he returned to this eviction which constituted a trauma in more ways than one.
Indeed, in addition to the professional shock of leaving an adventure of more than twenty years, this sidelining reminded him of his personal story, he who did not know his father. “Married at 16, dad at 17, bastard… The recognition that I didn’t have, I found it in the eyes of the public, it’s true. But my bastardy still sticks to my skin. When I got kicked off TV, if I reacted that badly, it sent me back to that. To the fatherless child who gets dumped and nobody wants to play with. It follows me all the time, but I learned to deal with it”, he acknowledged.
Already last September, the interpreter of “Sardines” or even of “Little man in foam” had split the shell during an interview granted to the magazine of TF1, “7 to 8”. “It took me back to the days when the kids at the time would hit me on the head saying ‘go complain to your father, you don’t have any’“, he had related. Patrick Sébastien had also expressed why he still did not want to know the identity of his biological father: “I do not want to know. I don’t want to, because I grew up with it. I think if I knew that, it would break everything. It was my engine“, he had assumed.