The controversy dates back to Tuesday, March 30, 2021. In the show Sofa 95 broadcast on TMC, Étienne Carbonnier, columnist for Daily, emerged from the archives of cult shows from the 1990s, including Pyramid. Étienne Carbonnier then chose to broadcast extracts to illustrate the ordinary racism and sexism that existed on certain TV shows at the time. One extract in particular had marked viewers. We could then find the presenter of the game, Patrice Laffont, saying to his collaborator Pépita: “Come in the dark, it will change you”. A way for the latter to joke about Pépita’s skin color.
In another excerpt, we could see Pepita hold the photo of a chimpanzee in her hands. The voice-over of the show then said to him: “Oh it’s you Pépit ‘on the picture! We recognized you!” A controversy to which Pépita had reacted after being contacted by Cyril Hanouna in Do not touch My TV, on C8, Thursday April 1, 2021. The former collaborator of Patrice Laffont accused Étienne Carbonnier of having broadcast misleading images. “It was extremely violent for me (…) I wasn’t watching the show. I was recording it. Someone called me to tell me that he was outraged (…) I said: ‘What is he talking to me about?’ (…) I saw the three sequences, and there, my blood has only turned, because, really, the way it was started, it was really misogynistic, racist. They used me to do this because it’s a montage these are not the complete pictures “, she had assured, while adding to have been “overprotected“throughout the years by Patrice Laffont and the co-host of the show Laurent Broomhead.
“We had a lot of fun”
A point of view shared by Jean-Luc Reichmann. During’an interview given to Free noon and posted on Monday April 12, 2021, the flagship host of TF1 remembers that customs were very different in the 1990s. “The television of the 1990s was jovial, carefree, we had a lot of fun, but we didn’t think badly”, he assures in order to send his support to Pépita, who said himself in Do not touch My TV “humiliated“by the archive images chosen by TMC.
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