He had made black his color, impertinence his style, and the verb an elegant weapon. Thierry Ardisson died at the age of 76 from liver cancer after several months of fighting disease. With him disappears a singular figure of French television, both iconoclastic, scholar and meticulously staged.
Born on January 6, 1949 in Bourganeuf in Creuse, raised in Montpellier, Thierry Ardisson arrived in Paris in the 1970s with the intuition that communication would be his playground. Training advertising, he designed several slogans who have become cults, before branching towards television where he was quick to print his brand.
In the 80s, Midnight offers him his first steps as an animator. But it’s with Black glasses for white nights and above all Everyone talks about it May his style crystallize: a program-writer, a frontal face-to-face, a chiaroscuro staging where the interview becomes a game of power, seduction and sometimes destabilization. He was not afraid to provoke, but always sought to create a moment of truth, even fleeting, between the guest and him.
He wrote his questions, rose his shows, invented devices where words were as important as silences. His show Hi Terrans!later, it will allow him to extend this television theater, surrounding himself with columnists as incisive as him. Thierry Ardisson liked to reveal, exaggerate, disturb – but always for the sake of rhythm, dramaturgy, television thought as a total spectacle.
A demanding producer, he founded Ardi and tried many formats, from documentary to fiction. Fascinated by death, memory, and illusion, he launched himself in 2022 in interviews with deceased personalities thanks to Deepfake technology, causing fascination and discomfort. This late experiment was faithful to its taste for iconoclasm and for moving boundaries between real and representation.
Despite his provocative image, there was a form of melancholy, often perceptible in him. Assid reader, lover of history and literature, he often questioned death, eternity, the traces that we leave. He often said that on television, “everything is false, except the archives”. He will have left it, not least.
Thierry Ardisson died surrounded by his family. He leaves his wife Audrey Crespo-Mara, his children, and generations of viewers marked by his deep voice, his gaze hidden behind black glasses, and his unique way of embodying television: an art of the moment, the verb, and the staging.
Neïla Driss
