For the 20th anniversary of the series, arrested in 2004, M6 broadcasts an unprecedented documentary on its origins, its highlights, its behind the scenes. Jean-Claude (Yvan Le Bolloc’h) and Hervé (Bruno Solo) resume their habits with a coffee machine …
by Margaux Couillard
This is the story of an inseparable comic duo, a French coffee break and a project that slept seven years before finding a taker. The popular Camera Camera series is today in the French audiovisual heritage. It has been the subject of multiple adaptations abroad and its faithful spectators are still so attached to it.
The cardboard made by the last evening of Plus belle la vie on France 3, November 18 (after eighteen seasons and 4,665 episodes), did not escape M6, which offers an unprecedented evening in the Honor of his transgenerational fiction. The chain broadcasts this evening, in two sessions, a form of epilogue to its series: a fiction, coffee camera: 20 years already, followed by a documentary, Camera Café, 20 years later (Calt Production), with anecdotes, Culse sequences and testimonies on this first short and daily format of the chain. The opportunity to discover what his interpreters have become, several years after a deliberate – at the top in 2004.
We come back to the genesis of fusional friendship which united the two protagonists, Yvan Le Bolloc’h (the Commercial Jean-Claude Convenant) and Bruno Solo (the director of purchasing and union delegate Hervé Dumont), who imagined this Project for the pleasure of playing together, accompanied by the screenwriter Alain Kappauf. Chaining refusals for seven years – will people want to see themselves at work once returned home? -, it is finally the M6 channel, looking for a national program of seven minutes, which declares itself.
humor and excessive character traits of its characters
Camera Café arrives on the small screen on September 3, 2001 and quickly turned into success. Bringing together between four and five million daily viewers, she also manages to touch the children, then overrepresented in her audience. The humor and excessive character traits of its characters, a familiar and relaxing lightness conquer the public. “With this series, we have created a second family,” said Yvan Le Bolloc’h. And if the filming of the seven hundred episodes are punctuated by endless giggles, it is also (and above all!) Due to the requirement in the writing of the thirty authors who feed the effectiveness of this duo.
But Camera Café does not only turn around the two main players. The documentary also pays tribute to the other characters, who helped to offer it its thickness. We rediscover Jeanne (Jeanne Savary), the Naïve Secretary of Management, Sylvain (Alexandre Pesle), the chartered accountant and a scapegoat of his colleagues, Philippe (Alain Bouzigues), the exuberant IT manager. The performers reveal their anecdotes on the series. Philippe Cura, who plays the boss’s driver there, explains that he won the role by pretending to be a courier: “Hello, I have a package from Bruno Solo”, he said to producers, to whom he gave “VHS cassette. Three weeks later, I was called”.
For this evening imprint of nostalgia, the three thieves intended to surf more than ever on the air of the times, “with the caustic and humorous tone which has always been [their] trademark,” says Bruno Solo. “Twenty years later, if the world of work has undergone major upheavals -teleworking, uberization -, it is nonetheless crossed by the fear of unemployment and downgrading, just like Hervé and Jean -Claude”, underlines Yvan the Bolloc’h, whose character has “become Has Been in his company 2.0”, a provincial SME that threatens to dismiss him. In 2023 as in 2003, the coffee machine remains more than ever the place of Catharsis in business.