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You will feel *seriously* hard done by if you don’t get the same send-off France’s longest-serving TV news anchor Jean-Pierre Pernaut just had after 33 years presenting the main lunchtime bulletin on TF1.
An extraordinary thread:
You will feel *seriously* hard done by if you don’t get the same send-off France’s longest-serving TV news anchor Jean-Pierre Pernaut just had after 33 years presenting the main lunchtime bulletin on TF1.
An extraordinary thread:
Of course there were the obligatory clips of his first ever programme
Jean-Pierre was also a massive champion of regional news so there was a report dedicated to...people’s accents
But then the fun really started: a camera crew was sent to the home of an archetypal French rural family - just to watch the lunchtime news with them so they could say how great Jean-Pierre was
His family turned up for a visit on set
There was then an entire segment on Jean-Pierre’s on-screen wardrobe, because thousands of people had apparently asked over the years why he only ever wore blue suits
The finalists of the Miss France contest (still a big deal in France) were wheeled out to give him a round of applause
We heard from a souvenir shop owner who’d made a Jean-Pierre SNOW GLOBE
The weather presenter (who’s a bit of a TV legend herself) hosted a special forecast focusing entirely on Jean-Pierre’s hometown near Amiens
Jean-Pierre cried a bit
Then we were shown a very long montage of hundreds and hundreds of people thanking him for his service
France basically stopped to witness this moment - rival TV channels have been covering his departure, there’s been an outpouring of love on social media and as this guy points out, people fired up their laptops and phones on trains just to watch the final programme https://twitter.com/matthdes/status/1339918836196323329
Some of this was probably over-the-top but a) French TV producers don’t do things by halves and b) Jean-Pierre Pernaut really is loved, particularly outside the big cities where people feel he’s always championed them. The end of an era in French television
FIN https://twitter.com/christophPallee/status/1339917347990237187
FIN https://twitter.com/christophPallee/status/1339917347990237187
NOT QUITE FIN! @johnshea63 has rightly pointed out I posted the same clip twice, so at his request, here are some of Jean-Pierre’s biggest fans hanging on his every word round the kitchen table
