Msame death since March 2 2022, Jean-Pierre Pernaut continues to be talked about. Recently, it was TF1 news presenter Jacques Legros who, in a book entitled Behind the screen: 40 years at the heart of the media (editions du Rocher, 216 pages, 17.90 euros), scratched his legendary colleague, described as temperamental, unable to pass the hand. This not very classy settling of scores towards a deceased who cannot defend himself testifies, in hollow, to the extreme influence that “JPP” continues to exert on the television matrix, and beyond.
On the TF1 website, the “At the heart of the regions” page, like a small mausoleum in images, maintains the provincial-centric flame that this graduate of the Graduate School of Journalism of Lille has made shine for thirty-three years at the head of the 1 p.m. news, with a particular tenderness for the santons of Provence. By themselves, the titles of the reports are enough to summon the tutelary figure of the one who was once the “favorite TV personality of the French”: ” In a hot air balloon above the lavender fields of Valensole », « Pickles: it’s harvest time », « One region, one instrument: the Auvergne accordion », « White areas: even the landline does not work for these Ardéchois “, etc.
The presenter celebrated in an almost hallucinated way a vision of France which yesterday still seemed rancid, but which today represents the pinnacle of the desirable
Another materialization of this post-mortem aura: on September 24, the open-air hall of the Abbeville market was baptized “Halle Jean-Pierre-Pernaut”, in homage to the former man-trunk, native of the Somme. For a long time, in authorized circles, it was fashionable to make fun of this guy in the name of anisette, to see in his exaltation of the terroir, small business and traditions nothing more than cathodic Poujadism. In 2006, Isabelle Roberts and Raphaël Garrigos, then journalists at Freedcastigated in La Bonne Soupe: how the 1 p.m. of TF1 contaminated the info (The Arenas) this “journalism in clogs”her “litany of dying small trades”her “wallet lament”.
Anxiolytic Info
It is certain that the star presenter has never been the voice of the railway workers’ strike or of Berlin electro. But, by taking an interest in the problems of purchasing power, in the know-how that is being lost, in the desertification of the countryside, he put his finger, with an obstinate vista, on one of the blind spots of modernity: this confusion between progressivism (social, human) and the ideology of progress (at a forced march, laminating everything in its path). In his own way, Jean-Pierre Pernaut was avant-garde, prefiguring this moment when the spirit of the times would turn around like a Breton pancake, anticipating the wave of bac +5 dreaming of being artisan bakers and Parisians migrating to medium-sized cities, announcing a radical change of software where conservation (of places, gestures, memories) would finally no longer be seen as conservatism.
You have 20.85% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.