OBesides his keen sense of the repartee, we must recognize Cyril Hanouna at least one thing: he is a casting genius. The characters that populate his sets are always creatures somewhere between reality and fiction, embodying both themselves and a wider stereotype, often interpreted in an ultra-caricatural way (the homo who lets himself be put noodles in his underpants, the Marseillais who make a fuss about OM, the facho who loves ribs of beef and firearms, the old media glory begging for crumbs of sunlight, the blonde who has things to say, the lawyer who always crosses apart from the nails, the “yellow vest” with a yellow vest…).
Recently, a new columnist appeared on the set: Amel, the veiled woman. Amel responds perfectly to the Hanounesque specifications, since she embodies, first and foremost, herself. It was as a guest that she came to the show for the first time in December 2022, on the occasion of a sequence whose title does honor to the canons of sensationalism: “The hallucinating images of a school without electricity and without heating create the scandal”.
That day, Amel, a parent of a 46-year-old student, intends to denounce the extreme dilapidation of the high school where her son is educated, in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis). Amel wears the chador and large thin-rimmed glasses, typical of a former columnist of “Touche pas à mon poste! », Agathe Auproux. She expresses herself well“We are the abandoned of the Republic”), captures the light perfectly, wields humor that hits the mark with the ease of an old tanned sniper under spotlights.
Telegenic potential
Cyril Hanouna immediately smells the telegenic potential of the lady. His Barnum always needs new faces, even if they are partly covered up, to feed the great controversy machine. That’s good. Amel, for whom the host had a ” heart stroke “, responds perfectly to the second part of the Hanounesque specifications – to be more than oneself –, figuring out the fractures of French society around the question of the veil. Is this piece of fabric an instrument of political oppression, of phallocratic domination, as the women’s revolt in Iran recently illustrated? Or on the contrary a simple piece of dressing room testifying to the right of women to dress as they want?
If it is so difficult to answer this question, it is because, depending on the context, the veil could be one or the other. Depending on the point of view that one adopts, one will then see the initiative of Hanouna either as a courageous choice consisting in bringing diversity to the screen (after all, does not the media world suffer from a suffocating self-segregation where the uniformity of profiles borders on social cloning?) or else like the Trojan horse of political Islam at prime time (the veil being considered by some as a potentially epidemic symbol).
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