Les duos impossible

“Emotion guarantée,” Jean-Pierre Foucault oozed into the TF1 camera.

French television has long drowned in variety shows, which I appreciate because I can listen passively and hear some good French music. Thus I’ve watched song/talk (usually with the performers having their backs to the audience), X ans déjà – X years already – a tribute to a dead performer x number of years after they died, Stars à la Domicile, where a well know star appears at someone’s home to their consternation and happiness. Of course, there is the regular garden type variety shows.

However, Foucault’s new show Les Duos de l'impossible, borders of the bizarre. Current stars are teamed up with dead singers for duets. Special edits are made so often it looks as if filmed at the same time. In one number the dead star rests “his hand” on the shoulder of the live one.

I watched Julian Dassin http://www.joe-dassin.net/ sing a duet with his son who was only five when his father died. Dassin was an American whose parents fled America during the McCarthy years. He became an anthropolgist and then singer. As I type this his song is playing on the radio although he died decades ago.

I love listening to Brassens, Piaf, Brel, Trenet, C.Jerome -- all gone, disappeared as the French say. I love listening to Lara Fabian www.lara-fabian.fr, Tina Arena www.tinaarena.com/home.htm an Australian who has finally mastered French, Richard Cocciante www.richard-cocciante.com/ writer of Notre Dame de Paris and Dave www.stars-oubliees.com/les_chanteurs/dave/rubrique186.html but the way the duet show is done carried bizarre to new levels as Foucault asked why people agreed to do this, and they babbled about the honour.

When a very young Brel sang If You Only Have Love, I couldn’t stop laughing, not at the performance but at an old memory.

The year was 1972. I was about to commit one of the stupidest acts of my life by marrying a second time. I had fallen in love with If You Only Have Love when I saw Mort Shuman’s Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

I asked my roommate to learn the song for the wedding and told it was the last song of the disk. She agreed. Periodically she questioned my decision, reminding me my mother would be there and saying my mother might faint. I knew she didn’t like my intended (how right she was), but I reassured her.

There were two disks. She learned the song with lyrics not about the power of love but about a broken romance where the lyrics talked about “the hotel where we played games” and the last line was “But, you see I’ve forgotten your name.” Considering the results, her selection was far more appropriate. That was a duet impossible.