Word: gicquel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...totally missed the connection between Roger Gicquel and Walter Cronkite in your uncritical portrait of the French TV anchorman [Sept. 25]. I never noticed any pompous morbidity or any Christ complex in Cronkite. The old man is a charmer because there are wisdom and warmth in his restraint. Besides, he has a quiet sense of humor that his younger imitator lacks. As a Frenchman I feel I deserve better than Roger Gicquel...
...Estaing made that scheme possible by splitting the monopoly into three parts. Officials of Télévision Française I, one of the new state-owned but competing channels, were given only two months to find a suitable anchor, so they took a long shot: Roger Gicquel, a relatively obscure former airline steward, failed actor and radio-station executive who had never been in front of a TV camera...
...first six months on the job, Gicquel recalls, he was only an actor playing the role of anchorman. "I must have seemed a bit awkward," he admits, "like I was wearing my Sunday suit." But, "little by little, I began to understand that it was necessary only to be like I really was." Much of Gicquel's appeal seems to lie in a kind of Gallic avuncular gloom, and an ability to register an appropriate flicker of sorrow, anger, levity or weariness in reaction to whatever news he is reading-the same reactions that viewers presumably are having...
Whatever the source of his chagrin, Gicquel was soon out-Cronkiting Cronkite. The somber, chain-smoking Frenchman has brought an unprecedented measure of subtle and sometimes anti-government editorializing to French TV news-to the chagrin of about 75 viewers each week who write him to protest. He delivers himself of stronger opinions off-camera. Last year he produced a serious book about the impact of TV on French society. Called Violence and Fear, it has become a bestseller...
| 1 |