Category: France

We’ll Weather the Weather, Whatever the Weather

Over at the BBC, they do things differently. The weather forecast, that is.  It’s a big operation, the weather: 24 broadcasters– Daniel Corbett, Helen Willetts et al, and between them, they cover all the bulletins broadcast on BBC radio and television – even World service. On the radio, it’s the word picture you might expect, while on TV, the graphics are ever more sophisticated

Here in France, it’s different.  Switch on France Inter for the weather forecast, and what you’ll get is the slightly southern, slightly nasal, but warm and measured tones of Joël Collado.  Forecast after forecast.  Day after day. Year after year  He is allowed days off: he’s even allowed holidays sometimes, and when those occur, we’ll have Jacques Kessler or sometimes Jean-Michel Golynski. Just those three.

It’s quite comforting really.  The French obviously think so. Watch a French film or television drama, and Collado’s reassuring, slightly soothing voice may well be murmuring in the background of those early establishing shots.  The good old British forecast wouldn’t send out such a message of timeless normality, I don’t think.  A young French social care assistant wrote what almost amounted to a declaration of love to Joël Collado on her blog Pause Café, (‘You’re my ray of sunshine, even when you’re forecasting rain and cold’). Facebook apparently has The Joël Collado and Jacques Kessler Appreciation Society – which I’ve not been able to read, as I think I am the next-to-last person in this web-aware world not to have a Facebook account. The last is Malcolm

Those three radio forecasters though, don’t present on TV. There are other teams for that job, depending on the station. We’re always amused that female presenters, who in this house go under the generic name Pixie-frou-frou, seem to have been hired specifically for the shortness of their skirts and the archness of their radiant smiles.

Then there are the papers, and the internet.  Our local paper, La Dépêche du Midi, is famously wrong much of the time, and I gave up on the internet when the site I was reading assured me that at that very moment, it was snowing in Laroque d’Olmes.  It wasn’t.  It was sunny.  I saw not one snowflake all that day.  As in England, so in France, those who forecast the weather are only talked about when they are wrong

Election Fever: a View from France

I’ve been quite interested in the run-up to the UK election.  That may come as a surprise to those of you who know me as a not-very-party-political-animal, and as even more of a surprise to UK residents who seem to have been engulfed in non-stop election fever since early March.

For us, access to the election news has been via French radio and television.  We don’t buy the papers very often, but I generally hear a couple of news bulletins a day from France Inter (roughly Radio 4 equivalent), and we often watch the main evening news on France 2 (BBC1-ish channel).  So this scarcely constitutes an academic study of the British elections seen through French eyes.

It’s been quite a surprise to me that for the last couple of weeks, there’s usually been something about the British elections in every main bulletin.  France 2 has had a series of mini-election specials every night.  These have covered everything from SamCam versus Sarah Brown (Sarah Brown won on points, because they had a library photo of her talking to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.  In that particular encounter though, they clearly thought Carla B-S won on points), to the National Front in Barking, to Boris Johnson talking in sub-O Level French (but at least he did it.  I’m old enough to have memories of Ted Heath’s sabotage of the French language back in the 1970’s). Nick Clegg has the French vote sewn up, on account of his fluent French (and Dutch, German and Spanish) – he’s had several interviews on pro-European matters in the French media

Yesterday’s report on France Inter’s lunch time news covered the fact that the polling stations are open from 7.00 a.m. – 10.00 p.m, to accommodate the fact that we vote on a Thursday, a working day, unlike most of the rest of Europe, which has Sunday as Polling Day.  They incorrectly stated too that churches were among the buildings used as polling stations.  Then they went on to explain our first-past-the-post voting system, which they rightly find bizarre.

And today, how much more bizarre it all seems. The first-past-the-post system seems even more unacceptable now that the Liberal Democrat share of the vote is so little behind that of the Labour Party.  It’s impossible to spin it in a positive way to the French who ask about it.  Like most Europeans, the French are more at ease with the idea of multi-party government, and perhaps bemused at the total impasse in which the leaders find themselves.

I thought I was going to see the election story out to the end on this blog.  I’ve a feeling that could involve a very long wait, though.  Here is the unfinished article