Louise Bernard, with Laura Laplaud
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11:39 a.m., June 27, 2022
TF1 celebrates an anniversary on Monday: that of the “12 Coups de midi”. In 12 years, this daily game, which has become cult, has broadcast more than 4,300 programs, shown spectators 13,000 candidates including 574 “midday masters”, asked 250,000 questions and distributed more than 14 million euros in winnings. To celebrate this anniversary, the TF1 channel unveiled a special program on Sunday, called “Le Combat des maîtres”: two weeks of competition with 56 midday masters. The candidates will compete every day to try to be qualified for two big evenings – in prime time – on July 2 and 9, at the end of which the grand master of the midday masters will be appointed.
After 12 years on the air, viewers do not seem to get tired since the audiences are in good shape. A source of pride for Jean-Luc Reichmann: “We try to be as unifying as possible, apparently people follow, when TF1 tells you ‘you know, you are the man with a billion viewers and more per year’, Personally, it means a lot to me.”
“It’s becoming a crazy story”
“We saw through confinement that we could be extremely unifying, we rose to 7.5 million viewers on a midday show, now, on a daily basis, from time to time we do more than the prime times of TV shows, it becomes a crazy story“, he is surprised.
A program that can also be a benchmark for people finding themselves in solitude, as explained by Jean-Luc Reichmann. “Perhaps it’s people who tell themselves that at noon, they will find something that will bring them together and that will save them this loneliness,” he observes.
A documentary on the history of Jean-Luc Reichmann broadcast
In addition to this “masters of noon” competition, a documentary devoted to the course of the host and his 385-year career from radio to television, will be broadcast in the second part of the evening after the first prime on July 2. In this documentary, it will be question in particular of the mockery which he underwent when he was a child, because of the stain of wine which he has on the nose, an angioma.
“The stain on the board”
“Somewhere, there is a little boy, a little girl who is going to watch this documentary and who is going to say to himself ‘why not me?’ We all have differences in the schoolyards, I was the stain, I was called the stain. My French teacher said to me at the age of 14, in front of 32 students at the Saint-Joseph school, ‘the stain on the board’… That’s why I accepted this documentary, if it can help a child, even a child, I tell myself that I would have been useful”, he says.
His family, including his hearing-impaired sister, Marie-Laure, also testifies for the first time. Jean-Luc Reichmann, an extraordinary destiny airs July 2 at 11:15 p.m.