Les Trash

Television and modern Quebec came of age together. When television arrived on the scene in 1952, Quebec society was on the cusp of major cultural change. At that time, the province’s artists and intellectuals were frustrated by the repressive Duplessis government and the Catholic Church. This emerging elite needed an outlet, and they found it in television. At Radio-Canada these young creators were protected and they used television to communicate their belief that Quebec had to enter the modern world.

In 1956 journalist Gérard Pelletier, who later became an adviser to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, attempted to articulate in an article in Cité Libre what the arrival of television meant to his culture. “In a span of four years, 600,000 televisions appeared in as many living rooms. More than one million people turned their eyes to the screen and told their writers, artists, intellectuals, educators, scientists, and politicians: ‘Talk, move, we are watching and listening to you.’ ” According to Pelletier, this collective drive for self-expression was urgent and with- out precedent. Pelletier wrote, “In three centuries of history, it’s the first time that two words resound here, urgently: ‘Express yourselves.’ ” And express themselves they did. By 1958 Montreal was the third largest television production centre in North America, behind New York and Los Angeles.

Many historians contend that television played a role in the Quiet Revolution by strengthening Quebecers’ sense of collective identity (through television dramas or téléromans) and opening their minds to the world through current affairs shows such as René Lévesque’s Point de mire, first broadcast in 1956. When a producers’ strike at Montreal’s Radio-Canada station from December 1958 to 1959 became a hothouse for nationalism, Lévesque and an entire generation of Quebec creators realized that the Diefenbaker government didn’t know anything about Radio- Canada and didn’t really care.

Nearly fifty years later, téléromans have become the province’s popular literature, establishing enduring archetypes and reference points in Quebec’s collective psyche. So important are they to Quebec culture that in 1996 the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City hosted a fourteen-month exhibit depicting their history. Montreal’s Frenchlanguage broadsheet La Presse has two television critics and during the winter — high season for television — the tabloid Le Journal de Montréal often devotes a half-dozen pages every day to TV. There are also numerous gossip tabloids, magazines, and talk shows dedicated to the industry.

For an outsider, the Quebec television scene is impressive in its scale and vigour. But it is also self-referential and, like every television industry, produces its share of trash. The same baker’s dozen of vedettes also appear to act in everything. If one misses their performance in the latest téléroman, they can usually be found on another channel peddling the details of their intimate and professional lives on banal talk or variety shows, of which there is no shortage.

Would Gérard Pelletier be disappointed to discover what has become of the medium he believed held so much promise for his culture? He’d likely be baffled by the industry’s glitzy largesse but nonetheless impressed. Mindnumbing junk aside, television drama in Quebec has evolved into a respected and meaningful form of creative expression. There is even a name for it: télévision d’auteur, which reflects the fact that in Quebec, television dramas are viewed as part of oeuvres. The intelligentsia not only watch but care about what’s on television in Quebec, and the stir caused by Les Bougon is a case in point.

In the weeks just before and after Les Bougon premiered, the French and English press ran more than fifty articles about the series. The first to weigh in were welfare-rights groups, who were given a private screening of the show before it aired on prime time. The reviews from that corner were mixed, but surprisingly few expressed fears that Les Bougon was perpetuating negative stereotypes about the poor. Thousands of people visited Radio-Canada’s Bougon website, hundreds discussed the series online, and a few wrote letters to the editor. In L’actualité magazine, an academic compared Avard to Václav Havel. Another scholar opined in La Presse, “We are in the midst of a collective reflection about our society, about the Quiet Revolution and the Quebec model.” A wellrespected sociologist told a La Presse journalist, “It’s the end of the individualistic society of the 1980s; we live in a time where we are trying to rebuild our social relationships.”

The word bougon is now a part of Quebec’s vernacular. Initially, it meant a grumpy complainer but after the show aired it morphed into a more sophisticated political meaning, denoting a fraudster who cheats the system. Just as Avard hoped, the ingenious family became heroes for ordinary Quebecers, their popularity helped along by the release of Sheila Fraser’s report on the sponsorship scandal. A picture of the Bougon family, their faces replaced by politicians such as Bernard Landry, Paul Martin, Jean Charest, and Jean Chrétien, was soon posted above photocopiers and water coolers everywhere. The caption: “The real Bougon.”

But not everyone was impressed by Avard’s contribution. “The first episode shocked me, the second bored me, and I was revolted by the third. I’m stopping there,” wrote veteran Quebec City political commentator Michel Vastel. Paul Warren, a cinema professor at Laval University, charged that Avard is “artistically irresponsible.” Les Bougon isn’t true social satire because we identify too much with the characters, Warren wrote in Le Soleil, a Quebec City daily. Good social satire establishes distance, and therefore causes people to reflect. This show filled him with despair.

The criticism from other corners was even stronger. Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, a Governor General’s Literary Awardwinning novelist, essayist, and prolific television writer, believes Les Bougon is simply another sign that the quality of Quebec television is declining. In an article published in La Presse entitled “Adieu téléroman! Adieu télévision! ” Beaulieu lamented that “television isn’t what it once was.” According to Beaulieu, for many years, television writers equalled the great feuilletonnistes (serial novelists) of the nineteenth century — writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo, and talented Quebec writers helped to create a national, popular culture. For him, Les Bougon demonstrates that Radio-Canada no longer cares about culture, only ratings and entertainment. The show’s popularity is a sign that Quebecers have lost their way, and no longer know “what beauty, brotherhood, and solidarity mean.”