Weaver's Week 2024-08-11

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Toujours plus haut, toujours plus loin, toujours plus fort.

Patrice Laffont

"C'est avec une profonde tristesse que nous apprenons le décès de Patrice Laffont animateur culte de Fort Boyard. Patrice était un membre de la famille ALP, apprécié de tous. Nous présentons nos plus sincères condoléances à sa famille, ses proches et amis."

"It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of Patrice Laffont, cult producer of Fort Boyard. Patrice was a member of the Adventure Line family, appreciated by everybody. We offer our most sincere condolences to his family, relatives, and friends."

Patrice Laffont, 1939-2024. (Adventure Line Productions)

Born in Marseille on 21 August 1939, he had a short career in acting, but will be best known for presenting various game shows. He hosted Des Chiffres et des Lettres from 1972 to 1989, genial good humour and witty repartee set the tone for his English counterpart Richard Whiteley on Countdown. As host of Fort Boyard from its inception in 1990 until 2000, Patrice led teams on the hunt for keys and clues, while asking them to confront their fears.

His other credits include commentary at the Concours Eurovision de la Chanson and the local selection show, Pyramid, Les Bons Génies (the French take on Blankety Blank), Intervilles (an expanded version of It's a Knockout) and a new-currency show Le Juste Euro.

Laurent Romejko and Patrice Laffont in 2013. (France Télévisions)

Tributes were paid by all the stars. Laurent Romejko, his successor on Des Chiffres et des Lettres, called him "Papa Professionel". "He had great public sensitivity. He would say to me, 'I don't need their marketing studies and panels, the public wants this or that'. And I can tell you he was rarely wrong. I learned a lot from him. There was a real complicity between us that's hard to define: he became my friend, even a buddy, a professional dad, a big brother because our age difference often faded. These are rare relationships".

Nathalie Simon, his co-host on Intervilles, remembered his style, "Class and always the right word. You embodied elegance, dear Patrice." Cyril Feraud, the current DCeDL host, said "Thank you for paving the way, for being a pioneer, for giving me the desire to do this job."

Emmanuel Macron, a cheerleader at the Paris sporting spectacle, said, "Patrice Laffont has brought entire families together in front of the television. His benevolence and mischievousness have enchanted generations."

Patrice Laffont (second right) and his Fort Boyard team. (Adventure Line Productions)

To mark the 35th series of Fort Boyard, Patrice had recorded a special episode. The new host, Olivier Minne, said,

"The teams were delighted to see the Fort's creator again, because he had very strong links with most of the technicians. For the occasion, I told him to come early. So we spent three days together with him and Yann Le Gac, who plays Père Fouras. It was fantastic, once again it was a meeting of friendship, affection and love. We had a ball. He and Père Fourras are two children, so I felt like I was the babysitter in the whole thing!"

Guillaume Ramain, the show's artistic producer, said that the entire team had been "a little shocked" to learn of the host's death. When Laffont came to the Fort, he was "in great shape and moved to be back with us". Ramain continued,

"When we talk about a cult host for Fort Boyard, it was him. Patrice Laffont was there every time they celebrated an anniversary. Every time he came back, you could see the twinkle in his eye. He'd tell me about one of his most memorable moments. He always had this brittle, second-degree sense of humour. I remember a very funny moment when he came out of a riddle with Père Fouras. Without spoiling anything, we show him his debrief and he tells us that the test was easy! He was expecting something more physical like bungee jumping!"

Heroes of the fort: Minne and Laffont. (Adventure Line Productions / France Télévisions)

The special episode will go out ahead of schedule next Wednesday, with a full tribute programme to follow in September. Patrice Laffont leaves three children, his wife pre-deceased him.

Battle in the Box

Interstellar for UKTV, shown on UKTVG2 'n' Dave+1 (or whatever they're calling the channel this week), 16 July – 7 August

Take four comedians, split them into two pairs. Put each pair in the ends of a large crate with a glass side and a movable wall in the middle. Give them silly things to do. Film the results, and put it out as a television programme.

When originally piloted in Korea, Battle in the Box was two-and-a-bit days of filming; here, it's something like 20 hours. Or so we're told on screen, for all we know they actually got the whole thing done in a day. Anyway, the entire programme is edited down to 90 minutes and shown over two consecutive nights.

The oranges and blues have equal amounts of box. This will change. (Interstellar)

Casting for the show is absolutely crucial, and the producers went for a fairly conservative set of known faces. The opening pair of shows, for instance, pitched Joe Swash and Seann Walsh against Harriet Kemsley and Lara Ricote. We've probably listed them in descending order of fame to the audience: Joe is a regular on mainstream channels, Seann and Harriet have made appearances, Lara was an "oh, yeah, her, she was good last time" booking.

There are challenges in the show, though they turn out not to directly affect the result very much. Contestants are given some very silly pairs games, tasks to set up themselves. For instance, use a roll of gaffa tape to stick your housemate to the wall: whoever lasts the longest wins. These aren't the most difficult tasks, and about half of them could be re-created at an eight-year-old's birthday party. Maybe this simplicity was a deliberate choice: it didn't do the drama Squid Game any harm.

Stick comedian to wall with sticky tape. (Interstellar)

Whoever wins each challenge gets to push the dividing wall into their opponents' side of the box. The winners also get some luxuries, things to make their stay in the box easier. Like a kettle, food, teabags. Like a sofa, a bed, a rug. They can buy some completely random stuff, fences or a massage or a lava lamp. We didn't see anyone order in alcohol, so nobody gets drunk, which helps to ensure the show can remain light and frothy.

As the filming session continues, little in-jokes begin to form. They can be quite serious, like Joe Swash and his inability to cook sausages properly, causing him to have to rush to the toilet. The jokes can be quite light, a conversation between the two sides of the box, because the dividing wall is not quite soundproof.

There's a hole in the wall. (Interstellar)

The challenges have to be physically small scale: the box is about 3m wide, 3m tall, and could be no more than 3m long. And that cramped space has got to hold two people for hours at a time. Some of the tasks are very small scale – throw a ball ten times without dropping it, for instance. Others require outside equipment, art supplies or physical things.

Ultimately, these challenges are a way to manufacture jeopardy and give some illusion of change. The constant pushing and pulling of the wall allows our comedians to demonstrate how well they cope with a cramped environment, and how magnanimous they are in success. Or, in some cases, how badly they cope with a teeny tiny living space, and how much they gloat when they win.

The team have less space in which to do nothing. (Interstellar)

And it's a way to show how people pass the time when they've got nothing to do. There's a lot of downtime when filming Battle in the Box, something like 19 of the 20 hours have no activity organised by the producers. Sure, contestants can sleep, and there's a night-time block where sleeping is positively encouraged. Most of the time, they're chatting away, quietly discussing life, shooting the breeze. Battle in the Box could be as gently relaxing as those lazy afternoons on the Big Brother livestream.

Battle in the Box also has a host. The disembodied voice of Jimmy Carr, clearly added in post-production. Some other production person interacts with the contestants, sets them their tasks, gives them instructions and nudges. But UKTV think that we want to hear – and see – Jimmy Carr.

This caption will be added in post-production. (Interstellar)

On the one hand, we like that there's a clear "face" of the show, someone for the viewer to identify with. Our battle is with the box, and Carr is its human representation. He's snide and uncompromising, like the glass walls. On the other hand, Jimmy Carr is wasted on this programme. He never talks to the players, never addresses or acknowledges them. His little pieces to camera don't even discuss what has happened in the challenges, they're pieces of snark floating like hot air balloons, sometimes with a nasty surprise in the basket.

As we've seen on Catsdown and I Literally Just Told You, Carr is at his best when he's one person in a bunch of slightly loopy people. Here, when he's the only face on screen, he strikes us as creepy and weird and not the sort of person we want to hang around with.

The orange team have a bed, a rug, a lava lamp, a cuddly toy... (Interstellar)

UKTV have chosen to shove this programme out in the heat of summer. They've done this not just because all the other channels are busy showing sport / repeats / the test card and some music. No, they're showing Battle in the Box now to promote their relaunched UKTV Player – which they're now calling "[grunt]". Marketing people, eh...

Turning back to the production, we can understand why they've gone for a 20-hour recording, rather than the 54-hour original. The format they've got edits to 90 minutes plus adverts – it's a reasonable evening's viewing, not too intimidating for the casual viewer. Start one show, like it, watch the other, done. The viewer's achieved something. The original length would need at least four episodes, three hours of show, which feels like a lot of time to binge.

An eight-year-old would love to play cars through the neighbour's house. (Interstellar)

Don't think there are many fans of the format: not many people are going to watch Battle in the Box because they enjoy comedians being given silly and slightly childish things to do in a very confined space. Rather, the show's going to be watched by fans of Katherine Ryan, and by fans of Joe Swash, and by fans of Jimmy Carr.

This column liked Battle in the Box on an intellectual level. This column found it very hard to like Battle in the Box on an emotional level. There was both too much sitting around chatting, and not enough sitting around chatting. Were we meant to concentrate on the challenges, or on the experience? Battle in the Box tried to straddle both horses, and ended up riding neither.

Boom! It's a fib! (Interstellar)

The finale suggested the show wasn't about the winning, but the taking part, and the fun we had along the way. For this last challenge, players get six boxes: three are truths, three are lies. Find three truths and escape, find three lies and get locked in, and only one team can escape. Whoever's got the larger box goes first, and it's played for more tension than it properly deserves.

Viewer reaction has been slim: 264,000 viewers for the opening episode, 180,000 for the next night, 155 and 142k the following week. For a relatively high-profile and high-budget commission, that's not great. The comments thread on a long-standing tv forum reached the grand total of three (3) posts, which suggests a complete layer of indifference.

The blues won the game and get to carry out their treasures. (Interstellar)

It's not hard to understand why. Battle in the Box is relatively low-energy television, and it's played for the lowest possible stakes – winners get to be released on screen, and can carry out some of the trinkets they've earned. The prize fund might reach the equivalent of a 50-blank prize. Other than that, comedians get themselves on telly for a couple of hours, doubtless repeated quite a lot over the next few years.

Overall, the show is entertaining enough to pass a couple of hours; it's lean-back television, doesn't demand full attention. They've chosen to make the show "entertainingly daft", which is certainly better in the long run than "cruel" or "spiteful". This column reckons Jimmy Carr drags the show down, but we appreciate that there is a Jimmy Carr fan club and we're sure they love it. We don't regret watching the episodes we did, and we're going to let the others waft over us as and when we find them.

Poor, unfortunate oranges. You're trapped! (Interstellar)

In other news

The Strictly Come Dancing Klaxon has sounded. Moving and grooving beneath the glitterball this autumn are all, some, or fewer of the following:

Tom Dean, self-promoting swimmer who cannot keep an embargo
Chris McCausland, comedian
JB Gill, singer with The JLS
Wynne Evans, opera singer
Toyah Willcox, singer and sub-editor's nightmare
Dr. Punam Krishan, medic from Morning Live
Reg Snipton, fabricator of picnic tables
Pete Wicks, panellist from Josh Must Win
Tasha Ghouri, member of the public
Shayne Ward, singer
SPOILER! Tom Dean, oh.
Brandt, the physical cartoonist
Jamie Borthwick, Jay Brown in The East Enders
Sarah Hadland, from the sitcom Miranda
Montell Douglas, Fire from Gladiators

More names as they're, er, named.

Best of the web How did they make the closing credits for Bob's Full House? No, not the ones shown on the Monkhouse Master Card, but the ones appearing to spin in on a panel. Mr. Babbage's Lockup explains further.

He bids Two new episodes of Iubet are coming to the ITV network. Host's duties will be split between Stephen Mulhern and Holly Willoughby. It's the show where celebrities and the studio audience try to predict if challengers can complete unlikely stunts, like naming every Stephen Mulhern show in under five minutes, or talking to the host in classical Latin. Where will this go? Either a lead-in to two eps of Ant and Dec Pollute the Polity, or a "tentpole" "commission" for the two weeks between Christmas and the FA Cup.

As the sports stuff goes back in its box, many old friends return. BBC2's Quizzy Monday block welcomes Mastermind, Only Connect (2), and University Challenge. BBC1's Celebrity Masterchef is back (Tue, Thu, Fri) with a midweek treat Celebrity Race Across the World (Wed; repeated BBC2 Sat).

Over on the Watch channel, Masterchef Australia starts another marathon series, and continues each weeknight. E4 has Second-Hand Showdown, more about the fashion than the contest.

BBC4 has Archive Quizzy Mondays, with Going for a Song and Call My Bluff from when Paxman was in short trousers. BBC2's lunchtime archive dips back to Head Hunters and Celebrity Catchpoint. Sign language translations for the recent series of Bridge of Lies.

Next Saturday brings us The Hit List (BBC1). BBC2 has a tribute to reigning Popstars: The Rivals champions in Girls Aloud Night. BBC4 remembers Michael Parkinson, a year after his death, and has more Blankety Blank than is good for you.

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