We'll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington Read Free Book Online

high, low, and anywhere in-between. I walk down to the river, where in the way of small provincial towns everywhere, old people on benches stare fixedly at me.
Sometimes, I go to the cinema down the street for a matinee of whatever adultery-based comedy Christian Clavier has made most recently (the oleaginous Clavier has by the mid-1990s replaced
Gérard Depardieu as the Actor For Whom a Quota of Film Appearances Seems to Be In Force). More often I stay at home and watch TV.
    Some extraordinarily terrible things happen on French television, I discover: things that shake my faith in the superiority of French culture. Between the dubbed German cop shows and
Love
Boat
repeats, the home-grown material stands out as infinitely worse. I watch a lot of sitcoms of brain-liquefying stupidity, including
Les Filles d’à Côté
,
in which three shrieking harpies attempt to seduce their American neighbour. This would be grotesquely sexist were it not for the existence of a male equivalent,
Salut Les Musclés
,
which is even worse (the Musclés, five single, be-mulletted musicians, share an apartment and high jinks ensue). The worst of all, though, is Patrick Sébastien. Gurning, sinister
humourist Sébastien has a stranglehold on Saturday night television, keeping it stuck in the worst of the seventies through the sheer force of his personality. His shows feature accordion
solos, bare-breasted circus acts, risqué songs stuffed with unfunny double entendres, Sébastien himself in awful prosthetics, and communal rugby chants. Who on earth is watching this
stuff? It’s as if there is a whole other France I can barely imagine out there and it has atrocious taste. The one thing I can rely on is the lunchtime news.
    The lunchtime news on TF1 is presented by a genially avuncular man called Jean Pierre Pernaut, and it is more like a Gallic version of
That’s Life
– all heartwarming animal
rescues and oddly shaped tubers – than a serious news programme. The emphasis is on France’s regions, their produce, particularities and
patrimoine
(heritage), and this is
deliberate. Pernaut was once quoted in the weekly magazine
Télérama
saying, ‘The one o’clock news is a French news programme intended principally for French
people. If you want to know about Venezuela, watch Venezuelan TV. If you want to know about Sudan, watch African channels.’ It is entirely normal for the principal headline on the one
o’clock news to be the weather, followed by anything from cherry-stone spitting competitions or chocolate bunny makers to – the daily financial paper
Les Echos
suggested in
exasperation – ‘a Béarnese sheep bell maker’. It is ‘a giant comforter’
Les Echos
continued while left-wing broadsheet
Libération
evokes ‘a news broadcast in muddy clogs, revering pretty landscapes, forgotten crafts and
la maouche ardéchoise
(a vaguely obscene-looking sausage) the way granny used to make
it’.
    In my delicate state (I am still on antidepressants and high doses of steroids), the giant comforter is perfect and I sink gratefully into its marshmallow-like embrace. In my vacations, I follow
the reassuring rhythms of the TF1 year assiduously, from the September reports on the worrying increase in the weight of school bags, through a winter of flu vaccines and opening ski resorts. At
Easter I watch several days’ worth of reports on trends in Easter chocolate (is fruit more popular this year? Animal motifs? Bright colours?) and the Paris couture shows are genuinely
absorbing. The more parochial esoterica I absorb, the closer I feel to Frenchness. I want to get all the cultural references effortlessly when we go out and Olivier’s friends are chatting,
and this is how I insinuate myself into the interstices of French low culture:
Voici
, the TF1 news and soap operas. I’m assiduously attentive too when Olivier tries to bolster my
cinematic education with a selection of classic comedies. We watch Louis de Funès’s