Pcould we both be and have been? Yes, if we are to believe the cathodic quarry by Christophe Dechavanne, who has made a comeback since September on Léa Salamé’s talk show, “Quelle époque! “, broadcast on Saturday evening on France 2. Big dark glasses on his nose, Dechavanne officiates there as a “permanent guest”, authorized to open it on almost everything and anything. TV monument of the 1980s-1990s with “Heaven, my Tuesday! » and « Hi, it’s us! », this putative son of Louis de Funès, who pushed the art of clash, supercharged entertainment and pantomime in front of the camera to their incandescent point, once embodied a real modernity, in the company of his friend Patrice Carmouze ( the equivalent of the Laurel and Hardy duo).
Between social debates that ended in fights and happenings on the back of an elephant, Dechavanne synthesized Barnum pop culture before the Canal+ era, when TF1 could also be seen mainstream than avant-garde, bitchy than pointed. After a new show that was less successful than the others (“Everything!”), Dechavanne became, in the unfriendly terms of his then employer Patrick Le Lay, a “industrial accident”. There followed a long journey through the desert, punctuated by mainstream entertainment and production activities, where the capacities of this gifted of the small screen were largely underused. Then, like the prodigal son, Dechavanne made his big comeback on September 24 to the sound of AC/DC. “We all grew up with him,” enthuses Léa Salamé, like a child touching a temporal comforter.
Teleported from a world where everything could still be said, the somewhat thickened troublemaker now has the arduous task of reactivating an almost anachronistic freedom of tone in a time when we no longer know very well whether progressivism rhymes with societal progress or screed. moral lead – probably a bit of both. When he speaks, Dechavanne is speaking less to viewers than to an omnipresent digital superego, which he imagines with wokism wedged between his teeth. “I’m going to get fucked up by feminists”he said, as he spoke in front of Emmanuelle Seigner, who had come to present her book A burnt life (The Observatory, 192 pages, 18 euros).
Boomer next to the plate
The actress recounts the imprisonment of her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski, accused of having drugged and raped, in 1977 in Los Angeles, the young Samantha Geimer, 13 years old at the time of the facts, and of having partly stolen to American justice. If Dechavanne fears the backlash, it is because he is embarking that evening on a perilous relativistic exercise. Okay, it’s not jojo to abuse a kid, but he says, you have to put it all in context, those 1970s when we drank LSD like whey. “ It’s difficult to have today’s view of an era that is 40 years old (…). This era was terribly permissive, that’s it! »
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