Profile of Bernard Pivot on Famous Like Me

Bernard Pivot (born 5 May 1935) is a journalist, interviewer and host of French cultural television programmes. He is a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Pivot was born in Lyon, France, the son of grocers. During World War II his father, Charles Pivot, was taken prisoner and his mother moved to the family home to the village of Quincié-en-Beaujolais, where Bernard Pivot started school.

In 1945 his father was released, and the reunited family returned to Lyon. At age 10, Pivot went to a Catholic boarding school and discovered a consuming passion for sport, a passion which helped teachers to overlook his general mediocrity in all traditional school subjects except French language and history.

After starting studies in law in Lyon, Pivot entered the CFJ (Centre de formation des journalistes) in Paris, where he met his future wife, Monique. He graduated second in his class.

After a training period at "Le progrès" in Lyon, he studied economic journalism for a full year, then joined the Figaro littéraire in 1958.

In 1970, he hosted a daily humorous radio programme which often raised political issues, which was not appreciated by Georges Pompidou.

In 1971 the Figaro littéraire closed and Pivot joined Le Figaro. He left however in 1974 after a disagreement with Jean d'Ormesson. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber invited him to start a new project, which led to the creation of a new magazine, Lire, a year later.

Meanwhile, in April 1973 he had started hosting a programme called Ouvrez les Guillemets on the France's first TV network. In 1974, the ORTF was dissolved and Pivot started his famous Apostrophes programme. Apostrophes was first broadcast on Antenne 2 on January 10, 1975, and ran until 1990. Pivot then created the equally famous Bouillon de culture, whose scope he tried to broaden beyond books. He eventually came back to books, however.

Spelling championships

In 1985, with linguist Micheline Sommant, Pivot created the Championnats d'orthographe (spelling championships) which in 1992 became Championnats mondiaux d'orthographe (world spelling championships) then in 1993 the Dicos d'or (golden dictionaries).

These yearly contests are held in three phases:

• During the spring, selection tests are organised with the press, in particular with "Lire", and in a few local communities (e.g. schools). These are multiple-choice questionnaires.
• During the fall, the selected candidates meet region by region at the semi-finals. They get again multiple-choice questionnaires, and a dictation.
• Then, during winter, the finals are held at a single place.

There are four categories: school juniors, juniors, professional seniors and amateur seniors.

Participation is free of charge, except for the cost of the magazines that publish the selection tests.

Bernard Pivot and James Lipton

One day, when flicking through the TV channels, James Lipton happened upon a programme on cable TV that showed French people discussing around a bottle of wine. "They're having a good time", he thought. He half watched it, and eventually realized that the conversation was quite lively, that he was hearing quite interesting things about a lot of unexpected subjects, that the programme relied on solid content, unlike the programmes he had seen up to that time where artists appeared on TV only to promote their latest work in clichéed terms.

He was inspired.

"That's what TV should be like", he thought, and with that in mind he created Inside the Actors Studio, which made him famous. At the end of every episode, he asks his guests to answer a series of questions. For the first few episodes, he asked guests to answer a series of questions that he presented as the questionnaire of "the great Bernard Pivot, of Apostrophes and Bouillon de culture" (a ritual expression he deliberately reused each time.) Pivot, indeed, had devised a Proustian questionnaire which he used at the end of his shows.

Pivot eventually heard about Lipton's questionnaire, and was surprised when he saw an episode: here was a humble Frenchman's programme inspiring an American show, and in such a way that the original programme was mentioned and honoured, instead of having its core ideas being just stolen.

In later episodes of Inside the Actors Studio, Lipton continued to credit Pivot for the questionnaire, even after changing or eliminating several of Pivot's questions (e.g. no longer asking, "What is your favorite drug?" or "Who would you like to see on a new banknote?" or "If you were reincarnated as some other plant or animal, what would it be?").

At that time, the final episode of Bouillon de Culture was in preparation. Pivot wrote to Lipton—they had never met before—in French, starting his letter "Cher amirateur" (untranslatable play on words: a cross between "dear admirer" and "dear friend"), and invited Lipton to appear on the episode. Lipton enthusiastically accepted. "Me, in Pivot's show? My heart is going to stop right away!", he stated to the French press. Nothing much actually happened between the two men during the show, as each of them seemed to be too impressed by the other to be at ease. But the show looked like a "passing of the flame" between the two men as well as a historical and symbolical cultural encounter.

Lipton is currently attempting to have the extant Apostrophes and Bouillon de Culture programmes dubbed into English for broadcast in the United States (rather than subtitled, in light of the American aversion to this form of translation). Since the notoriety of Inside the Actors Studio already brought Pivot to the public's attention, even though most of them never saw him, and thanks to the quality of some of Pivot's shows, Lipton believes that they would be successful, perhaps even creating new fans.

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