A LITTLE LEXICON FOR LOVERS OF TELEVISION

“A little lexicon for lovers is an opportunity to say that journalism also has its element of naivety, utopia and idealism – in other words, a lot of feeling. In this profession, the twenty-five year-olds want to change the world; the forty-five year-olds try to limit the damage; and after that they are thinking about other things, unless, in the mailbag the morning after a programme, they read: “Thank you for giving me food for thought, not off-the-peg thinking.”
The premise is for those that love it, and passionately. It is hinges on familiarity with the subject: from news writing to Nicolas Sarkozy’s suppression of television advertising; from full-length reportage to news summaries; from journalism as a means of making a living to the television viewer who has become a consumer with a “product” running on a loop; from the pleasure of interviewing a fine author whose work deserves a following to the flurry of pleasure in a scoop; from wanting to make people think to creating illusions; from the widest audiences to the housewife under fifty; from smartphones and the internet – which will make special correspondents of us all – to globalised and westernised communications; from information to the “human brain time available” sold to a fizzy drink.”
Philippe Lefait

Having been a radio and television journalist since 1980, Philippe Lefait has worked as a special correspondent of foreign politics and as a news presenter. He currently directs the cultural magazine programme on France 2, “Des mots de minuit”, screened at half past midnight on Wednesdays.

After the volume about theatre by Philippe Torreton, les Editions Stock are continuing their collection of Little Lexicons for Lovers of… with their latest choice of television, while keeping the scalpel of subjectivity well to the fore. Television in all its aspects, stripped bare by one of its contributors: some of it you love, some of it you loathe and a smattering of anecdotes that have gone the distance.