With 1.3 million viewers, To the blackboard ! had created the event in 2017. Five years later, the program created by Caroline Delage and produced by Mélissa Theuriau is back from Tuesday March 22 for free on the MyCanal platform and Sunday in prime time on C8.
The concept: presidential candidates submit themselves to questions from children aged 8 to 12 in a classroom. For the only issue of this 2022 campaign, Valérie Pécresse, Eric Zemmour, Fabien Roussel and Yannick Jadot responded.
“They had never come, unlike Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Anne Hidalgo and Emmanuel Macron. I think the president would have liked to come back, the news did not allow him. Suddenly, we have a program with four novice candidates”, says Mélissa Theuriau at the microphone of franceinfo. As for Marine Le Pen, as in 2017, she refused to participate.
“It’s always advantageous for everyone to dare, to have the courage to come and lend themselves to the exercise. Because they can be destabilized. There are always very touching and very revealing moments.”
Melissa Theuriauon franceinfo
“I seem to discover a facet of their personality that the other TV sets, the debates, had not shown us until then. We see them adapt to the child, become pedagogues. And then there is sometimes a silence , a stutter, ‘What am I going to answer?‘, then this moment of authenticity. When Valérie Pécresse answers the question: ‘Why has there never been a female president?’ and she lets go ‘Cause we ain’t been good enough‘, it’s interesting to hear that”, commented Mélissa Theuriau.
After having tested, without much success, the format with personalities from other horizons, such as Bernard Tapie, Anne Sinclair, Teddy Riner or Gad Elmaleh, To the blackboard ! should not repeat the experience: “I think the vocation of the show is really political”concludes Mélissa Theuriau.