Denise Fabre is without a doubt one of the most famous announcers on the small screen. The former star of the ORTF and TF1 is particularly known for his contagious good humor and especially for his uncontrollable laughter live. However, one of his giggles on the air earned him a sanction. On August 14, 1979, during the TF1 television news, she was in a duplex in Gruyère, a town located in Switzerland. During one of her interventions, the host was suddenly taken with a fit of laughter. “I’m never going to get there,” she commented on the air (see the famous sequence below).
In an interview with France Info in 2014, Denise Fabre went behind the scenes of this laughter. “One evening, there was a drunken party and one of the sports journalists had started to pull down his pants, you can see his underpants. I’m coming and I had to announce mass in Gruyère. Everyone was dying of laughter, me also, they left us in the picture and once the diary was finished I had a three-week layoff,” she explained. At the time, the giggles of the host were not necessarily appreciated by the public. Some did not hesitate to write to the production to complain.
On May 22, 2021, in a report devoted to the announcer, broadcast in the 20 hours of France 2, the wife of Francis Vandenhende confided that she received memos to justify her giggles on the air. “How do you explain a giggle? It’s not possible,” she defended herself.
