in 1975, “The Files of the screen” approach for the first time the subject on television

Jan-Paul Pouliquen pulled the sheet up to his nose. Only his eyes protrude, pointed towards the television set, at the end of his bed. Morton Gould’s somewhat frightening timpani, which serve as the theme song for the famous show “Les Dossiers de l’screen”, have just given way to the jovial voice of Alain Jérôme. The journalist presents every Tuesday evening the Antenne 2 society magazine which, on January 21, 1975, offers a film taken from the book Special friendships (1943), by Roger Peyrefitte, a love story between college students in a Catholic boarding school. The following debate is entitled: “Homosexuals”. It’s strange, as a title, very vague, but for this premiere, public television walking on eggshells: the show has already been canceled twice. “Without further ado, I would like to give the floor to our SVP switchboard and to the viewers, who have been very numerous to call us”, launches Alain Jérôme as soon as the film is finished.

Mr. Pouliquen – the future father of the PACS, this civil union contract voted under the left, in 1999 – was then a civil servant at the Paris City Hall. He is 20 years old and lives in a studio in the 15^e borough. He does not want to lose a crumb of the upcoming debate, but fears that the young woman he has just married realizes the interest that the show inspires in him. So he pulled the sheet up high enough so that his face did not betray his confusion, but allowed him to look at the quartet of moral authorities called upon for the occasion: a priest, an endocrinologist, a neuropsychiatrist, a deputy. The Church. Medicine. The law. To make people feel guilty, to heal, to punish?

Read also our archive (1975): Article reserved for our subscribers An exceptional “file”

In front of them, three writers. The first is Roger Peyrefitte. The second is Yves Navarre, a young novelist with a very “seventies” mustache, who remains huddled in his chair. Anxious, as often? Or just intimidated? The third, Jean-Louis Bory, is more flamboyant. Prix ​​Goncourt 1945 for My village on German timewhich he wrote at the age of 26, he has just published with Julliard My half orange, intimate confession in which he evokes his homosexuality. He is above all the backfiring critic of the program “Le Masque et la Plume”, on France Inter. Who imagines, that evening, that Bory will commit suicide four years later and that Yves Navarre will do the same at the age of 53?

“Children’s Night”

“Armand Jammot, the producer of “Dossiers”, was very attached to this program, and it was he who fought to impose it”, says today Alain Jérôme, 85 years old. Jammot, who died in 1998, first went to submit his idea to the penultimate boss of the ORTF, Arthur Conte, who had flatly refused: “No, no, we can’t. “Les Dossiers” is broadcast on Tuesdays, because it is children’s night. I have an 11 year old son. What am I going to tell him if he wants to watch? » Stubborn, Jammot is patient, and when Marcel Jullian, the man who invented modern television, founded Antenne 2, at the end of 1974, he obtained the green light.

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