Bernard Pivot
Bernard Pivot (born
5 May 1935) is a
journalist, interviewer and host of French cultural
television programmes. He is a member of the
Académie Goncourt.
Pivot was born in
Lyon, the son of grocers. During
World War II his father, Charles Pivot, was taken prisoner and his mother moved to the family home to the village of
Quincié-en-Beaujolais, where Bernard Pivot started school.
In
1945 his father was released, and the reunited family returned to Lyon. At age 10, Pivot went to a
Catholic boarding school and discovered a consuming passion for sport, a passion which helped teachers to overlook his general mediocrity in all traditional school subjects except
French language and
history.
After starting studies in
law in Lyon, Pivot entered the CFJ (
Centre de formation des journalistes) in
Paris, where he met his future wife, Monique. He graduated second in his class.
After an internship at "Le progrès" in Lyon, he studied
economic journalism for a full year, then joined the
Figaro littéraire in
1958.
In
1970 he hosted a daily humorous radio programme that often raised political issues, which was not appreciated by
Georges Pompidou.
In
1971 the
Figaro littéraire closed and Pivot joined
Le Figaro. He left, however, in
1974 after a disagreement with
Jean d'Ormesson.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber invited him to start a new project, which led to the creation of a new magazine,
Lire, a year later.
Meanwhile, in April
1973 he had started hosting a
programme called
Ouvrez les Guillemets on France's first TV network. In
1974, the
ORTF was dissolved and Pivot started his
Apostrophes programme.
Apostrophes was first broadcast on
Antenne 2 on
January 10,
1975, and ran until
1990. Pivot then created
Bouillon de culture, whose scope he tried to broaden beyond books. He eventually came back to books, however.
In
1985, with linguist
Micheline Sommant, Pivot created the
Championnats d'orthographe (
spelling championships) which in
1992 became
Championnats mondiaux d'orthographe (
world spelling championships) then in
1993 the
Dicos d'or (
golden dictionaries).
These yearly contests are held in three phases:
* During the spring, selection tests are organised with the press, in particular with
Lire, and in a few local communities (e.g. schools). These are multiple-choice questionnaires.
* During the fall, the selected candidates meet region by region at the semi-finals. They get again multiple-choice questionnaires, and a dictation.
* Then, during winter, the finals are held at a single place.
There are four categories: school juniors, juniors, professional seniors and amateur seniors.
Participation is free of charge, except for the cost of the magazines that publish the selection tests.
One day, when flicking through the TV channels,
James Lipton happened upon a programme on
cable TV that showed French people discussing around a bottle of wine. "They're having a good time", he thought. He half watched it, and eventually realized that the conversation was quite lively, that he was hearing quite interesting things about a lot of unexpected subjects, that the programme relied on solid content, unlike the programmes he had seen up to that time where artists appeared on TV only to promote their latest work in clichéed terms.
He was inspired.
"That's what TV should be like", he thought, and with that in mind he created
Inside the Actors Studio, which made him famous. At the end of every episode, he asks his guests to answer a series of questions. For the first few episodes, he asked guests to answer a series of questions that he presented as the questionnaire of "the great Bernard Pivot, of
Apostrophes and
Bouillon de culture" (a ritual expression he deliberately reused each time.) Pivot, indeed, had devised a
Proustian questionnaire which he used at the end of his shows.
Pivot eventually heard about Lipton's questionnaire, and was surprised when he saw an episode: here was a humble Frenchman's programme inspiring an American show, and in such a way that the original programme was mentioned and honoured, instead of having its core ideas being just stolen.
In later episodes of
Inside the Actors Studio, Lipton continued to credit Pivot for the questionnaire, even after changing or eliminating several of Pivot's questions (e.g. no longer asking, "What is your favourite drug?" or "Who would you like to see on a new banknote?" or "If you were reincarnated as some other plant or animal, what would it be?").
At that time, the final episode of
Bouillon de Culture was in preparation. Pivot wrote to Lipton—they had never met before—in French, starting his letter "Cher
amirateur" (untranslatable play on words: a cross between "dear admirer" and "dear friend"), and invited Lipton to appear on the episode. Lipton enthusiastically accepted. "Me, in Pivot's show? My heart is going to stop right away!", he stated to the French press. Nothing much actually happened between the two men during the show, as each of them seemed to be too impressed by the other to be at ease. But the show looked like a "passing of the flame" between the two men as well as a historical and symbolical cultural encounter.
Lipton is currently attempting to have the extant
Apostrophes and
Bouillon de Culture programmes
dubbed into
English for broadcast in the
United States (rather than
subtitled, in light of the American aversion to this form of
translation). Since the notoriety of
Inside the Actors Studio already brought Pivot to the public's attention, even though most of them never saw him, and thanks to the quality of some of Pivot's shows, Lipton believes that they would be successful, perhaps even creating new fans.
