On October 6, 2022, Philippe Bouvard released his autobiography Le petit monde de Don Bouvardo at L’Archipel editions. A book in which the 93-year-old journalist returned without taboo to his entire great career, sometimes strewn with pitfalls. The one who was at the head of the program Les Grosses Têtes on RTL from 1977 to 2000, remembered his ousting from the channel.
“My personal participation had already been interrupted in the year 2000, when a new director of RTL, realizing that I had just reached seventy years of age, put me into retirement abruptly”, he explained in his work. It was another competing channel that reached out to him, offering him “a fee equal to that of RTL”. An arrival on Laurent Ruquier’s show, On va s’gêner, which would not have been the most pleasant, as he revealed in the rest of his autobiography.
“The latter, who should have welcomed me with open arms, was very unpleasant, going so far as to order the technicians in charge of the assembly to cut all my interventions”, he specified.
A fter being thanked for the Big Heads, it was the host Christophe Dechavanne who took over the controls of Philippe Bouvard’s favorite show. In his autobiography Le petit monde de Don Bouvardo, the journalist remembered this episode, saying that Christophe Dechavanne had consulted him before accepting the job. “As I liked him, I did not hide my feelings from him. Namely that he was an excellent host, but that he did not have any of the cultural references essential to the conduct of a program where one made scholarly assault”.
A warning that gave him “completely right” as he assured since “Les Grosses têtes lost 30% of their listeners. Nothing helped. Neither Dechavanne’s efforts, nor the recruitment of new stars, nor a big ad campaign,” he wrote.
