It would be wrong to only think of television in terms of images, it is first and foremost a piece of furniture. Every noon for thirty-three years, when it was time to light it, Jean-Pierre Pernaut was the reassuring, comfortable meeting place. On Wednesday, the journalist died at the age of 71 from lung cancer. For a third of a century, the square-jawed Amiens has sanctified the 1 p.m. of TF1 in the magazine of France’s bell towers, equivalent to a Sunday morning peasant market or a frank postcard that one takes out of the drawer by access of nostalgia, it depends. With the success that we know, for one of the most watched TV programs in Europe.
The calculation was initially purely commercial: after the acquisition in 1987 of TF1 just privatized, the Bouygues group replaced the turbulent Yves Mourousi by the solid Pernaut with already bushy eyebrows, still joker of the 8 p.m. The question: who watches 1 p.m.? Answer: certainly not active Parisians who have lunch at their place of work. But all those who return home between noon and two, in addition to retirees, all those fans of daytime TV who first ask for a familiar presence when turning on their furniture. Exit then information too international, too economic, too political. Jean-Pierre Pernaut will be no more than that: the news of the terroirs and rural France, of the micro-sidewalks of markets and of the old trades which are disappearing. He chooses to rely on the network of correspondents “in the regions” (the word province, too Parisianist, is obviously banned) of the first channel. Result: audiences as we had rarely reached, 40% market share that fell at regular times, five million viewers every day between cheese and dessert.
liberal conservative
At 1 p.m., a French consensus, the raison d’être of TF1, a powerful broadcaster of imagination without ever seeming to touch it. That of Jean-Pierre Pernaut has had time to infuse. Proudly conservative liberal, not to a contradiction, the former economic journalist, presenter for two decades of How much does it cost ?, defended both unbridled consumerism and despaired of the disappearance of small local shops. Invariably, Pernaut “cocoricotée” with each tricolor sporting achievement. He, the motorsport enthusiast, grumbled at each SNCF strike, belched with pleasure on sunny days in Quimper and worried about rainy days in Biarritz, in a weather forecast that systematically opened his newspaper.
Finally, he marveled at the annual report on the cathedral of Amiens, he who grew up not far away, in Quevauvillers, son of a pharmacist and a director of a machine tool factory. He was the father of four children, including two with Nathalie Marquay-Pernaut, Miss France 1987, a union that will earn him tons of coverage from the celebrity press.
Beneath its good-humored JT airs, the 1 p.m. of Pernaut, that Release always loved to hate, was fundamentally pessimistic – every topic seemed bound to have at least one complaining Frenchman. Politics without appearing to be. Gradually, the trunk man had turned into a counter columnist, smuggling his popular impressions between two reports from a JT formatted in essence.
The health crisis will even have given him the opportunity for an ephemeral pellet of confined rants. Certainly dreaming of heir to this spokesperson for a certain rural France, Prime Minister Jean Castex saluted his memory on Wednesday: “The France of the territories is losing that familiar voice and that reassuring face that spoke so well of her and knew how to speak to her so well.” Chaining on a lyric “not a hamlet of our country was unknown to him, not a tradition of our lands was foreign to him”.
A life of TF1. A graduate of the Lille School of Journalism, Jean-Pierre Pernaut entered it when the channel was created, in January 1975. His exit from 1 p.m., in December 2020, after having chained health concerns, had been extensively commented on. And his last newspaper had gathered more than 8.1 million viewers, his audience record since August 2007. But Pernaut had continued to work for the Bouygues group and TF1, multiplying on the Internet with an online video platform (JPP TV), a necessarily local magazine (At the heart of the regions) and a Sunday broadcast on LCI (Jean-Pierre & you). In the editorial staff of the first channel, Pernaut was as much the presenter with impromptu outbursts as the journalist willing to transmit and close to his teams, a fervent protector of regional correspondents. “He made it a point of honor to offer a newspaper that responds to the daily concerns of our fellow citizens and invented local information”, the first channel said in a statement. With his death, it is a bit of his identity that TF1 loses.
Updated at 8 p.m. with more context and reactions from TF1, Jean Castex and Nathalie Marquay-Pernaut.