“I still love TV,” assures AFP Patrick Sabatier, star host of the 80s who, at almost 75 years old, tells the behind-the-scenes stories of his shows in an autobiography and is making his acting debut on France 3. “There is always something to have a good evening on French television,” he judges, citing the shows “Rendez-vous en terre stranger”, “Un Dimanche à la campagne” or “Echappées belles”.
He tells his story in the autobiography “Remember, it was a Wednesday” (editions du Rocher), which comes out on Wednesday. Then he will play a police officer in “Meurtres à Epinal”, a TV film broadcast on October 17 on France 3, before an upcoming program on the “Années Sabatier”.
From “Wanted Notice”, where stars reunited with their childhood friends, to “Game of Truth”, where celebrities answered questions from the public live, Sabatier imagined and presented on TF1 some of the most watched programs of the 1980s.
“The ideas I had, most of the time, were in the street, imagining people’s lives,” he explains, emphasizing that the chain owners followed “their impulse”.
Shows that cost
“When I proposed a program to Etienne Mougeotte (emblematic director of TF1, Editor’s note), he had this extraordinary sentence: + ‘Do you think it will be good?’ I replied: Obviously, since I’m offering it to you. And then he said: ‘Okay, take responsibility’. Today, perhaps there are more people who give their opinion,” he says.
For his friend Marc-Olivier Fogiel, who prefaces his book, he is one of the “inventors” of “modern television”. “His shows were simple concepts that fit in one sentence but were super effective and very unifying,” the RTL journalist told AFP, who started alongside him and described him as “very demanding at work, very passionate, quite obsessive in the way he worked.”
“I never had stage fright but I had a lot of anxiety,” explains Patrick Sabatier, far from his image of an ideal son-in-law with a dazzling smile. “You don’t do this job without taking some painkillers, because it’s a fragile job, where you get hit, where you’re afraid of not being up to the task.”
Like Jean-Pierre Foucault, he remains the emblem of television in the 80s where money flowed freely, which led to him being caricatured by the Guignols of Canal+, with a famous line (“Kestananafout”? You take the money and that’s all”).
“I have always done programs that cost money. It’s like in a restaurant: when you want good food, a beautiful setting, it has a cost,” he believes in hindsight.
Dead ends
His book ignores a moment that marked memories, “The Game of Truth” by Chantal Goya in 1985. The children’s singer had lost her composure during a question from a viewer and her career had come to a halt. Years later, she still had a grudge against the show. Why did you choose not to talk about it? “Because it’s a book of good memories,” evades Sabatier.
Likewise, he does not mention his crossing of the desert after the participation of a false mage in one of his shows in 1990, nor his conviction for tax fraud in 1993: “If one day I make a book of bad memories, I will talk about it.”
At the height of his popularity, Patrick Sabatier was a huge star but claims to have never experienced it that way. “The only time it bothered me a little, I was newly married,” he remembers. We were with my wife on the island of Porquerolles; As it was late in the evening and there was no one on the beach, we swam naked. And when I got back on the beach, I suddenly heard ‘Mom, mom, it’s Patrick Sabatier!’.
