September 2011
According to one source "Diffusée entre 1997 et 2003, Voilà (Just Shoot me) a longtemps fait partie des meilleures audiences de la chaine américaine NBC, elle a même été durant sa cinquième saison la troisième série la plus regardée par les 18-49 ans." So I'm not even going to try to upload this clip to YouTube, where it will immediately be blocked throughout the world, and probably the farther galaxies as well
But it's funny and it makes a splendid listening exercise
September, and it's la rentrée, which means that there are once more some programmes to watch on French TV. A welcome return is E=M6, which in this episode tells us about the difference between men and women. Popular science, unassuming, but really not bad at all.
Here is a tiny little video, less than two minutes, taken from TF1's evening news, about a shipyard welcoming tourists during the summer months. It's also a very good example of the listening difficulties we can encounter in even the easiest piece. The voice-over, most of the time, is clear enough.. but the comments of the tourists give the ear something to work on
Les enquêtes de Murdoch is a police series which is perhaps more interesting to the English than the French, because it is set in 19th century Canada, where Inspector Murdoch applies remarkably modern techniques to the elucidation of murders. In this episode the detectives are faced with Jack the Ripper-type murders, when a rather unbalanced Scotland Yard official arrives on the scene. No prizes for guessing whodunnit. The language is very formal, and the dubbing makes for a rather peaceful listening exercise
As impressive as it gets... Viktor Vincent 'Mentaliste' works out the PIN code of the credit card of a hapless Parisian florist. This is from an occasional half hour series early Saturday evenings, on France Télévisions. It's a very good example of two types of listening difficulty - speed and clarity. In fact, if someone speaks clearly, speed is not a real difficulty. I found the speech of the florist at the end much harder to pick up. Oh... and if you can pick up the name of the flowers at the end... let me know
I regularly joke about France Télévision's attempt to produce a sitcom series, Fais pas çi. They announce its return every so often, put a few episodes on, then take it off again. It's not bad... but it's not very good, either. Don't take my word for it, judge for yourself. It's a hard listening exercise this one
TF1 screened something called La plus mystérieuse histoire... This was the winner, a story of mysterious knockings from an intelligent entity in a house ... all of this recorded and attested to by the captain of the local police. Good one. Because the policeman is a local lad, his voice is not always that easy to follow
Stéphane Bern, the pantingly enthusiastic French admirer of the royal families of Europe, does a series called Secrets d'Histoire, where he speaks admiringly of his favourite subject. Here he did our dear old Queen Victoria, showing that she was a jolly old soul and not at all sour-faced as history depicts her. He also demonstrated that she and Prince Albert were eccentric to the point of madness in their attitude to Scotland, which they turned into a sort of royal Scottish Disneyland.
This weekend, 18-19 September 2011, is in France Les journées du patrimoine, where the French can tour around the Elysée Palace, the Bank of France and other incredibly luxurious buildings for whose upkeep they pay but do not normally get to see. I recorded Un été à Versailles thinking it would make a nice relaxing level-1 exercise of the Des racines et des ailes type. Well, it starts like that, but we quickly are introduced to the problems of managing 28 000 visitors per day, with a queue one and a half kilometres long. Arrives a harassed guide called Dominique who has the job of interesting a public who think that Marie Antoinette was married to Louis XIV, and the listening exercise rapidly gets quite a lot harder...
I don't often see the breakfast show TéléMatin, because it runs from 5.30 am to 8 am GMT, and enthusiasm has its limits. However, every so often I like to record a contribution from one of their chroniqueurs. Here is Frédérick Gersal, whose style is excitable. I was a little surprised by his choice - the Munich Olympic Games Massacre when Palestinian terrorists of the group Black September made an unwelcome appearance at the Games. It is today 21st September 2011, and Palestine is trying to get the UN to agree to the foundation of a Palestinian state. French TV is usually discreet about things like that. However, deciphering the unfinished sentences of M. Gersal is the interest here, not world politics.
Very often I find that an extract which should be very easy turns out to have some unexpected difficulties. Here is Angelique et le Roy, the film starring Michèle Mercier, and one of a whole series featuring this aristocratic heroine. Historical dramas are normally easy to follow - formal dialogue and a moderate pace of dialogue. What makes this interesting is that the writers have laid on the mock-18th century vocabulary with a very heavy trowel. It makes it just a little tricky from time to time. Incidentally, speaking of vocabulary Majesté is always feminine. The King is Sa Majesté
Laurent Delahousse has been standing in for David Pujadas on France 2's evening news recently, and he's given us some interesting items. Here were two little stories, once after the other, to which I gave the filename DeuxTraditions, because they seemed to me to evoke first an unhappy British tradition, and then a French one. Both of them are regarded as shocking by the politically correct today, but each relate, I think, to deeply rooted traditions in our different countries.
The first story was from Britain, and was about boys aged less than ten being encouraged to fight in a cage, before adult spectators, in what they call 'free fight'. The second dealt with the fact that French men find it difficult to accept orders from women managers. The first did not shock me unduly, because I am English, and of a generation that watched boxing before it was tamed down into a 'safe' sport. The second, on male chauvinists, I found quite horrifying. I have a French friend of my age who had exactly the opposite reaction...
Like everybody else these days I have too many channels, many of which don't appear in the TV guide. One that appeared recently is called simply 'Test 4'. I imagine it's going to become one of the Orange cinema channels. Anyway, I recorded a half hour on spec, and chanced on something called Cinéstyle. Excellent... the idea is to talk about the costume design of well-known films. This was on Charlie Chaplin, and I have to say it made for six minutes of real pleasure.
If I don't do a Comment c'est fait regularly I get withdrawal symptoms. So here's one on milk production. Happy cows looked after by computers. I think Charlie Chaplin would have appreciated this bovine version of Modern Times
