VShe last few months on C8, in the middle of an endless tunnel of hanounâneries, floated a strange cathodic madeleine: “Only the truth counts (our most beautiful stories)”. Discovering reruns of this old entertainment while turning on your TV is a bit like coming across an antique box of Garbit paella left in the back of your cupboard. “Should I taste it, despite the expiry date having passed? »we wonder, worried about the content.
Initially broadcast on TF1 between 2002 and 2006, and presented by Pascal Bataille and Laurent Fontaine, this emblematic program was based on a simple, but extremely effective device: anonymous people asked the production of the program to invite a person from their choice, in order to make “an important declaration” to him orally. The person invited had no idea who had brought him, and only discovered at the last moment, through interposed screens, the face (and the motivations) of the sponsor. It could be a reunion between old friends, a family reconciliation, a declaration of love to his banker, a simple thank you…
Between the stakeholders of this melodrama stood a curtain concentrating all the suspense of the show: was the guest going to decide (or not) to open it? Behind this scenographic questioning pierced a more fundamental social issue: would the sponsor succeed in his bet or lose face in front of millions of viewers? Watching “Only the truth that counts” twenty years later is to realize that the garish credits have remained anchored in our memories. Realize, too, that the world has changed.
A right to escape
Where the audiovisual industry today produces repeated clashes, it aimed here to promote reconciliation. There where the intimacy of beings is now exposed to everything, where anyone seems accessible in a click, there still remained the idea of a right to escape, symbolized by the curtain. Where the world is cannibalized by false information, it is the “truth” which, in this program which has become almost anachronistic, is being claimed as what really “counts”. There was also this almost Levinassian idea that a look, a face, can suddenly touch the other and lead him to change his choices, to forgive, to give a second chance.
“As for me, personally, I would like you to open this curtain. Because, for forty-two years, I have lived with this anguish of leaving one day and not having known you.says a father who is trying to reconnect with his abandoned daughter, who seems divided in front of the curtain. “If my eyes sometimes turn to the left or turn to the right as you often reproach me for, my heart only sees you, and you alone”, poetizes the handsome Jacques, who tries to win back the bubbly Nikki, whom he met at a tea dance.
You have 23.35% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.