“The article will be beautiful!” Live on Virgin Radio, columnist Clément Lanoue fears that we have come to attend the show at the wrong time. “There is a journalist from 20 minutes who’s in the studio, we’ve been trying to plug him in a headset for half an hour, ”says Manu Payet to the listeners of the Virgin tonic, the morning show he is orchestrating for the second consecutive season. Laughter erupts from all sides.
Whether the light panel above the door reads “On air” or not, there is a good-natured atmosphere around the table. That’s good, by the time we arrive in the studio, the columnists are reviewing the CM1 program for a quiz scheduled for the show. The host, him, connects the sips of coffee, unlocks his cell phone, holds the theme of his next intervention with the director of the show and interacts with his team who mixes the brushes between the past made up and the more-than -perfect.
We take the same and start again
He admits, Manu Payet thought it would be easier to go back to the studio and get back in the bath. The show is provided on the air “but afterwards, you collapse from fatigue at 10:05 am. “The rest was short-lived for the host who shot in July in the next Asterix, directed by Guillaume Canet, and who organized a few remote meetings with his team before the start of the school year, even if the guideline for the season is to take the same ones and start over.
“I did not arrive in a new show where I turned everything upside down, I stuck on them,” he says about his return to the radio. It has been twelve years since Manu Payet gave his voice behind a microphone and yet, “what surprised me is both how much things seemed to have changed and how much they did. haven’t really changed after all, ”he describes. The automatisms returned, the few technological novelties were taken in hand and the first season was launched. “You have to do radio as it is well known that you have to do radio”, sums up the host.
the Virgin tonic against algorithms
By making his return in September 2020, Manu Payet knew that he would have to face two difficulties: the health crisis, still relevant, and the new consumption habits of French women and men. Regarding Covid-19, the show’s rule was to start the year “as if nothing had to be changed. In fact, the actor realizes over the days that his columnists were more interesting when the microphones were off than when they were open. “I was like ‘what are we saying?’ We watered down, ”he recalls. At this point, the team decides to regain control by letting go a little more.
Saying bad words on the air, improvising sketches, bouncing on the news, so many things that the algorithms to which the public is now accustomed cannot do. “Today, we are no longer facing each other. The fight is to tell listeners to let go of their phone for two seconds and let us do the work ”, observes Manu Payet. For this, spontaneity must be the key word. The day we came, the team called Virginie Ledoyen after having found, by chance, her identity card and the show ended with a long improvisation in the world of cowboys worthy of a one man show.
We found Virginie Ledoyen’s identity card thanks to the Facebook page “Coup de Pouce Montrouge”! 😄#VirginTonic pic.twitter.com/VnAsoqEZhP
– Virgin Tonic (@VirginTonicOff) September 1, 2021
“What I love is showing behind the scenes, doing on-air meetings, it’s breaking down walls,” enumerates the man on the stage. You have to recreate what people were doing outside their home and invent the urge, perhaps even the reflex, to put the radio in your home. “A habit that listeners have lost since the start of the health crisis and the breakthrough of telework for some of them.
“Those who got up very early this morning”
So that those who wake up in the morning get into the habit of tapping into Virgin Radio at breakfast time, Manu Payet believes in his band that fans of the show consider their friends. Like a TV series, the public must find their favorite characters from Monday to Friday. “Every morning it’s an episode. Almost like an episode of Friends, less well written since anyway it is not written, he emphasizes. The title this morning would be “The One Where They Called Virginie Ledoyen” or “The One Where He Made the Cowboy”. “
As in a sitcom episode, the “glitters” (the members of the team) replay at the start of the program the best moments of the last hour of the day before in order to benefit those who were not behind. the radio from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. One way to keep its audience ever more loyal.