Fanny Ardant's (almost) radio silence

Asking open-ended questions is surely a golden rule of broadcast journalism.

In fact it's pretty much a guaranteed way of getting anyone to open up and talk no matter what the situation might be.

Fanny Ardant (screenshot from "Nos retrouvailles")

Open-ended questions will (essentially) give the person - in the case which follows, the one being interviewed - the chance to answer with more than just a simple "yes" or "no".

Sadly in France, all too often, a radio or television journalist will pose a mammoth question which, you just know, is going to elicit a response that'll probably end up being shorter.

It's a style which seems to be the accepted norm rather than the exception.

Maybe it's journalists wanting to show just how much they understand the subject under discussion.

Or perhaps they have inflated egos and are all-too-engrossed in themselves and their "take" on the matter, to the detriment of the person they're supposed to be interviewing.

Of course, it's a generalisation. Some can simply pose a pertinent question and the wait for the answer.

There are some very good interviewers with years of experience and capable of teasing a response - even from the most recalcitrant guest.

One such example is Jean-Marc Morandini, who hosts (among other things) a daily one-hour show on Europe 1 radio and a similar programme on one of the country's TNT channels, Direct 8, in the evenings.

All right, they're not exactly mind-stretching or highbrow. Morandini specialises in celebrity gossip and the media, and has a blog (which he's constantly promoting) that's not for anyone wanting a scholarly approach to news.

But even with his years of experience, Morandini sometimes finds himself up against a tough nut to crack, as was the case on Wednesday morning during an interview with one of France's finest actresses, Fanny Ardant.



She had been invited on to the show to talk about her role in the made-for-television film "Nos retrouvailles" scheduled to be screened on France 2 television in the evening and for which she had received some glowing critics (even if the film itself was less lauded).

But as you can hear from the interview, Ardant was being less than co-operative - and a ropey telephone line probably didn't help much.

You can clearly hear Morandini struggling to keep the flow going, although somehow he made it with a laugh of relief to the end of two-and-a-half minutes which includes pauses that were not so much pregnant as they were laboured (ouch).

It's all in French of course.

It raises a smile, but equally the listener is as grateful as the presenter when it's wrapped up.

l'incroyable interview de Fanny Ardant sur Europe 1 Vidéo jeanmarcmorandini sélectionnée dans Replay TV

The death of Jocelyn Quivrin and the rise of the "new monsters"

The omnipresent mobile 'phone complete with camera capability can capture moments that many, and not just those in the media spotlight, might wish to forget.

A quick "click" and the damage is done with videos and pictures making their way to a wider audience via the Net as everyone and anyone becomes a "photojournalist".

But sometimes there has to be a limit, as would hopefully appear to be the case in the recent death of the French actor, Jocelyn Quivrin.

Just over a week ago Quivrin was killed in a road accident as he apparently lost control of his car at the entrance to a tunnel on a motorway in a western suburb of Paris.

Quivrin, who most recently appeared in the French film LOL (Laughing out loud) alongside Sophie Marceau, was just 30 years old.

Initial media reports suggested that he had been driving his Ariel Atom, a high performance sports car, well in excess of the speed limit especially as the vehicle's speedometer had been blocked on impact at 230 kilometres per hour (143 mph).

Police however were more circumspect and their caution seemed to be warranted according to a report in the daily newspaper Le Parisien, which said that experts' analysis indicated that he had been travelling at 97 kilometres an hour before the accident happened.

But the exact circumstances around Quivrin's death remain unclear even though police have called for eye witnesses, and this is perhaps where the tale takes a more than slightly macabre turn with the presence of a mobile 'phone.

Because someone on the scene shortly after the accident occurred and before the emergency services arrived decided to use their 'phone to take some images of what had happened and then try to sell them to the highest bidder.

Thankfully though the French media didn't take the bait. In fact among those offered the film there was outright condemnation.

"Pure voyeurism," headlined the French news website, Le Post, which also informed readers that a deputy editor-in-chief of a weekly magazine had turned down the pictures saying they had "been taken minutes after the accident, but there's no question of our buying them and to be quite honest it's appalling."

And from Jean-Claude Elfassi, one of this country's most notorious paparazzi and therefore no stranger to controversy himself, came equally strong language and the description of such behaviour as that of 'the new monsters".

"This person is sadly like so many others," he wrote.

"He tried to negotiate (payment) for these pictures with my friend, Guillaume Clavières, the head of photography for Paris Match, a magazine that has published some of the biggest scoops of the century," he continued.

"But Guillaume didn't want to sell his soul to the devil, and I can understand that."

While the pictures haven't yet surfaced in the pages of a magazine, maybe it's only a matter of time before an editor somewhere decides that it's worth paying a euro or two in an effort to boost circulation figures.

Let's hope not.

The tale of the family that never went missing

The mystery of a mother and her two children who "disappeared" last week has been solved.

They have turned up in the south of France where they had apparently been on holiday "taking a break" from the rest of the world.

The 45-year-old mother and her two children, aged, 14 and 15, were first reported missing last weekend.

They had been on holiday in the mountains in a village near le Grand-Bornand in the Haute-Savoie in southeastern France.

The alert was first raised by the estranged husband and father of the two teenagers on Saturday, reportedly concerned that he had heard nothing from his family.

When police went to investigate the apartment in which the three of them had been staying, they found it empty and the car missing.

An official inquiry was launched and the story quickly became the focus of media attention with speculation throwing up possibilities of a suicide, an accident or an attempt by the mother to flee the country with the children: speculation perhaps fuelled to a large extent by the authorities saying that no line of inquiry had been ruled out and that the mother "was known to be someone with depressive tendencies."

And so the story quickly gathered momentum of its own, with no sign of life and no clue as to their whereabouts.

Until Monday that is, when an employee at a camping site over 100 kilometres away in the south of France confirmed having seen the three "missing" family members, and records of cash withdrawals in the area surfaced.

On Thursday came the official confirmation that the investigation had been closed and an interview with the mother on national radio where she gave her version of events and expressed her astonishment at how much had seemingly been made of so little.

The 45-year-old said she was surprised that she and her two teenage children had been at the centre of a nationwide search as all they had been trying to do was to take a break "without listening to the news and without being able to be contacted".

"We weren't aware of anything and one day in the car I thought that perhaps we should listen to the news on the radio as it had been quite a while since we had tuned in," she said.

"I was very surprised that there was a report on me and I was a little bewildered. I immediately called my brother."

Her main concern, she insisted, had been to give her children a proper break and she didn't really understand why her family, and in particular her estranged husband, had overreacted.

"I was a little fed up having to ask him constantly to get in touch with his two children, and so I just decided to cut ourselves off from anyone being able to get in touch," she said.

"They (the children) wanted to see the sea and I wanted him to make an effort to try to get in touch with them, but I never wanted the whole thing to take on the proportions it has."

So a happy ending to a story, which in the words of the national daily, Le Figaro, in reality turned out to be "Much ado about nothing"...and perhaps a reminder to us all not to jump to conclusions until the story has been told.