Paris Première offers a birthday banquet for televores. This Saturday, the channel will broadcast, exceptionally unencrypted, at 9 p.m., “214, rue de Rivoli: Dinner” (see box). A special broadcast, at the new address of Thierry Ardisson, to mark the 20th anniversary of “93, Faubourg Saint-Honoré”. Over the course of four seasons and a hundred dinners hosted at his home, the man in black received dozens of personalities from the worlds of culture, politics and the media. A cult program, whose story will be recounted at 10:35 p.m., always unencrypted, in a documentary in the form of a best-of. The backstage of this show was often much more luxurious than the dishes served to the guests. The proof with these confidences from Thierry Ardisson and producer Stéphane Simon, gleaned during a press lunch at Bazurto, Juan Arbelaez’s restaurant in the sixth arrondissement…
Prepare the recipe: a Parisian dinner, with a few pinches of “Loft Story”
Thierry Ardisson: One day, the management of Paris Première told me: “We are going to stop “Rive Droite/Rive Gauche”. Would you agree to do a weekly? » Me, a weekly, I already had one with “Everybody talks about it”, on France 2. But they insisted on it. With Stéphane Simon, we proposed an idea – a dinner – and a price. And they said yes.
Stéphane Simon: Between the beginning and the end of “Rive Droite/Rive Gauche”, which lasted five years, there was a very important event in the history of television, it was the Loft [« Loft Story », émission de téléréalité lancée en 2001] which completely changed the codes. Suddenly we were filming Mr. and Mrs. Everybody locked up doing stupid things. Where we had a new idea was to have a real evening at Thierry’s where we would talk like we would in real life.
Thierry Ardisson: Today, I can tell the truth: before that, I had never had dinner at home, because it annoys me. I hate cooking smells. For Paris Première, I had, for four seasons, twenty-five dinners per year at my home. I had never done it before and I didn’t do it again after. I prefer to invite my friends to a restaurant.
Set the table : “I lived four years with rails on the ceiling”
Thierry Ardisson: At the time, my apartment was entirely white, with white moldings. Frédéric Cerato, who did all my sets, wanted to redecorate it by transforming it into the apartment that people thought I had. He had painted everything in Rothmans red, the brand of cigarettes that I smoke, added portraits of Beatles and holy virgins, it was a completely imagined decor. Everything is false, it’s the magic of TV and cinema to make people believe something that didn’t exist.
Stéphane Simon: The first time, we said we would do everything in the living room. Thierry thought it would be nice to have some time in the kitchen. It was a very small room with straw chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable, but it had a nice, casual feel to it.
Thierry Ardisson: There were connections and wires everywhere. I lived with ceiling rails for four years. We even put microphones in the elevator and in the toilets. Once, Beigbeder went there and we heard sniiiiiiiiiiiff (laughs).
Invite the chefs: “I didn’t know who Frechon, Alléno and Piège were”
Stéphane Simon: What was on the plate mattered a lot. Most of the personalities who work on TV go to the studios of Plaine Saint-Denis, find themselves in a dressing room with pale light, eat chips and Bounty, it’s not very pleasant.
Thierry Ardisson: I didn’t know who Eric Frechon, Yannick Alléno, Jean-François Piège were. They came to my house, they were busy in the kitchen, but I didn’t care at all. Afterwards, when I went to their restaurants, I realized that they were very expensive.
Stéphane Simon: The ambition of the dinners was to have a good time. When we are in this state of mind, when we pay homage to French cuisine and when we have good wine to accompany us, tongues loosen. We find things that we can’t find elsewhere. It slipped into confidences, intuitions…
Seating plan: “In the headset, Stéphane sometimes said to me “It’s going down a little””
Thierry Ardisson: A dinner at my place is necessarily relaxed. I’ve always made lots of cards, but this was improvised: “What are you doing at the moment?” » The promo went like a letter in the mail. I didn’t really prepare, it was the show where I relied the most on my general knowledge. I had Stéphane in the headset. He was in the OB van with hot beer and sushi, he sometimes told me “there, things are going down a little”. Gérard Darmon was the best customer of the dinner. Franz-Olivier Giesbert always has something to say. If the conversation falls off a bit, he talks about Chirac, Bardot, he’s the guy you have to have.
Stéphane Simon: Bernard Tapie has never gone this far in confessions. When he talks about how he organized an orgy with his players just before a Coupe de France match, it’s extraordinary.
Thierry Ardisson: We also had Sophie Davant talking about fountain women… The conversations were led by everyone. The only thing that could have stopped them was the robot cameras on rails because normally, as soon as dinner is gone, you forget they’re there.
Shouldn’t you have invited them?
Thierry Ardisson: I am in favor of giving everyone a voice, that’s my side. 1968, that year I was 19 years old. I received Zemmour. At the beginning, he was a journalist, he worked at Paris dailyAt Figaroat RTL, he did not have the sulphurous side that he has today.
Stéphane Simon: Today, certain sequences from “93, Faubourg Saint-Honoré” take on a particular resonance but, during the dinners, there were plenty of very avant-garde moments [sic] in relation to society.
Thierry Ardisson: When Tristane Banon told what happened to him with Dominique Strauss-Kahn [en 2011, plusieurs années après le tournage de l’émission, la romancière a porté plainte contre l’homme politique pour tentative de viol. Les faits remontant à 2003, le délai de prescription était dépassé. La plainte a été classée sans suite, le parquet a cependant considéré que le fait que DSK ait avoué avoir tenté d’embrasser l’autrice pouvait être « qualifiable d’agression sexuelle »], we weren’t in tears saying “It’s terrible what happened to you”. We were a bit mocking, me and the others. Our judgment focused more on Strauss-Kahn. Jean-Michel Apathy was outraged that people were saying bad things about DSK. We stopped filming, he wanted to leave. I told him not to worry, that we would beep his name. And then we beeped at the Ardisson [c’est-à-dire de manière que le nom de Dominique Strauss-Kahn soit intelligible si l’on se concentre bien].
Stéphane Simon: Tristane, history has done her justice, and she is talking about the facts again today. When you do the best-of of a show, you have to consider what was done at the time while looking with today’s eyes. Reviewing the passage with Pierre Palmade is uncomfortable. We chose not to put it back. [L’humoriste et comédien n’apparaît que brièvement].
Thierry Ardisson: Pierre Palmade, we cut him, and I’m happy about it, because he killed someone. We go as far as having fun, we talk about everything with everyone because we are free spirits, but there is a moment when you say: “Be careful, the guy killed someone because ‘he took too many drugs’. By mutual agreement with Catherine [Schöfer, directrice générale de Paris Première] and Stéphane, we therefore decided not to keep the sequence.
Choose the date carefully: “If you don’t bust your ass a little, I’m going to bed!” »
Stéphane Simon: We had the bad idea of postponing a dinner and having it on a Sunday evening. However, on this day, we are in a particular state where we want to be at home. There was Guillaume Canet, Kad Merad…
Thierry Ardisson: The stupidity was that the casting was homogenous. At one point, I told them: “If you don’t bust your ass a little, I’m going to bed!” »
Stéphane Simon: And that made the situation worse. They didn’t know what to say anymore. Fortunately, the magical Jean-Louis Aubert started playing guitar. Guillaume Canet imitated him, played in turn, it became a bit nice at the end. But it was the dinner for which filming lasted the shortest.
Clear the table and floor: “There were smells of grease”
Thierry Ardisson: After filming, I went to Mathi’s to drink while Stéphane and his team put the apartment in order. When I came home at 3 a.m., it was clean, but there was a smell of grease lingering in my house. After three seasons, Patrick de Carolis [alors président de France Télévisions] said to me: “You stop making dinner on Paris Première”. I said, “Fuck you.” He kicked me out and stopped “Everybody Talks About It” which wasn’t just any show. Today, and this is one of the reasons why I stopped doing talk shows, the guests no longer want to say anything on TV, they are afraid of social networks. Dubosc is one of the last ones I received on C8 [dans « Salut les Terriens ! »]. His press secretary asked me not to talk to him about the yellow vests. So when I interviewed him, I asked him: “What is this story about yellow vests? “. The press officer came back to see me at the end: “You understand correctly Thierry, you will never have Franck Dubosc again”. I said I wasn’t going to kill myself though.