Bernard Pivot is as French as the wine he bottles on his Beaujolais estate and the St Etienne football team he wrote one of his seven books about. It is not surprising that the 62-year-old journalist never learned a foreign language; he was too busy being Mr French Culture. For the million French television viewers who tune in to his Bouillon De Culture talk show every Friday night, Pivot is literature personified.
On April 2nd, Pivot will celebrate the 25th anniversary of his first literary television programme, Ouvrez Les Guillements (Open The Quotation Marks). Over the past quarter century a whole nation - and more recently viewers in Switzerland, Belgium, Quebec and francophone Africa - have become familiar with the shaggy-haired, avuncular figure with the bushy eyebrows who lowers his bi-focals when he asks questions.
The backdrop for Bouillon De Culture is a map of France composed of book stacks. It is a fitting emblem in a country that takes singular pride in its literary tradition, where every citizen fancies him or herself a potential author. One of the writers on Pivot's 1,000th broadcast on January 30th was a homeless tramp. A few years ago, a newspaper vendor won France's highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for a novel about his own family during the first World War. It's not uncommon for Paris taxi drivers to torment captive passengers with discourses on philosophical treatises. And no French statesman feels his legacy is ensured unless, like De Gaulle and Mitterrand, he leaves volumes of memoirs. The former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing wrote a steamy novel about a huntsman who seduces a female hitch-hiker. Books by cabinet ministers and members of parliament are legion.
All of which goes half way to explaining the extraordinary success of Bernard Pivot's talk shows. The other half of the explanation is the man himself - articulate but simple, enthusiastic, curious and hard-working. He receives 40 books in the post every day. "I still open the packages, somewhat blase, a little bored. And then I end up poring over a book, sitting on the carpet and reading for five, 10 minutes, and a half hour later I'm still reading, when I had other things to do." After anchoring the "Apostrophes" programme from 1975 until 1990, Pivot said he became saturated from reading seven days a week, between eight and 15 hours a day, with his cat, Rominet, at his side. After a six-month break, he started Bouillon De Culture in January 1991. In addition to books, "Bouillon" sometimes covers theatre, cinema and exhibitions.
Great French writers such as Raymond Aron, Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar have been interviewed by Pivot. But many of his guests are not professional writers; they have ranged from Francois Mitterrand to Brigitte Bardot to the Dalai Lama, Boris Yeltsin, Catherine Deneuve and Woody Allen. On his 1,000th broadcast, the English writer Julian Barnes (speaking fluent French - both of his parents were French teachers) joined a French orchestra conductor, the above-mentioned homeless man and an Algerian immigrant whose success story has become an inspiration to French slum dwellers.
Thousands of viewers have written to thank Bernard Pivot for introducing them to the joy of reading. He sees his role as that of a "creator of desires". "When my curiosity has been fully satisfied, I try to pass on the pleasure I've felt to the public," he said. "I try to create desires among the viewers by telling them: go see this film, go read this book!"
Since 1985, Pivot's Dicos D'Or a televised version of that old French school exercise, the dictee, has become an annual French cultural event. Viewers all over the country try their hand at transcribing the devilishly difficult text read by Pivot. The national champion is chosen from among the 180 or so eggheads who make it to Pivot's finale in person. He finds exotic places for this linguistic High Mass: the Opera-Comique, the National Assembly, the Palace of Versailles, the grand amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. This year, the Dicos D'Or was held in the presidential box at the new Stade de France, three weeks before it was officially inaugurated.
He liked the setting, but Bernard Pivot railed against the dull name chosen for the World Cup stadium; he had voted for Le Grand Bleu - the Big Blue One.
But if literature runs as thick as Beaujolais in Pivot's blood, so does that other great French tradition: complaining. Rather than bask in the glory of being France's best-loved bookworm, Bernard Pivot celebrated his 1,000th broadcast by writing a 173-page pamphlet, Complaint To The Housewife Under The Age of 50. In a courteous but biting tone, he addresses the fictional housewife - the viewer targeted by television advertisers - begging her to rebel against the tyranny of the Audimat, as the French television ratings system is called.
The very existence of the proverbial housewife is insulting, Pivot said. "What has always struck me is that women in positions of power don't oppose this stereotype of `housewives under the age of 50'. Whatever their occupation - and 75 per cent of French women work - whatever their intelligence, they are treated as if they were simply fillers of supermarket trolleys and refrigerators."
An act of literary sacrilege prompted Mr Pivot's outburst: popular as it is, his programme was moved under commercial pressure from its 9.30 p.m. Friday time slot to 10.45 p.m. Viewers stop him in the street and complain that the show is now on too late.
"By putting cultural programmes on later and later in the evening, we are giving up our mission," Pivot said. "The result is that the cultural gap is growing again . . . The ratings have become the alpha and omega of television. Politicians have defaulted on their responsibilities. Instead of assuming the cost of public television, they have thrown us into the arms of the advertisers."
The most successful French television channel, TF1, was privatised under the late President Mitterrand. France 2, which broadcasts Pivot's programme, is half government-financed, and half financed by advertising. "Our role is that of a public channel," Pivot said. "It is to proselytise, to convert neophytes to culture."
His complaint symbolises the wider debate in France over the role of the state. Just as Pivot wants literary talk-shows to be given priority over American sit-coms - with the government pitching in for lost advertising revenue - millions of French people expect the government to shield them from the cut-throat ways of global markets. The success of Bouillon De Culture is part of what makes France French; so is the country's cushy social benefits system. And if reality becomes too cruel - or television too crude - Pivot recommends a good book. Nothing on television, he says "can come anywhere near the slow, all-enveloping submersion of one's consciousness in the flow of words".
Bouillon De Culture can be seen in Ireland twice weekly on TV5.
`Our role is that of a public channel. It is to proselytise, to convert neophytes to culture'