The emotion was palpable in the room when the curtain rose on the three guys, who were about to live their last two hours of radio together (at least, in the format The evening). Who better to conclude this adventure with them than the three ladies of heart who have contributed to restoring pep to a formula that was running out a bit at the start of the pandemic?
Anne-Marie Cadieux, Élise Guilbault and Nathalie Petrowski once again ensured the female counterpart of the boy club of ICI Première with humor and elegance, accepting the sometimes devastating points of Jean-Sébastien and Jean-Philippe with a smile, very aware of the codes of their humor often disguised as cowering.
A few favorites of the trio over the past few years paraded on stage throughout the evening, from Louis-José Houde to Rosalie Vaillancourt via David Goudreault, who delivered a poignant testimony of love in the form of a farewell to the three acolytes on the guitar chords of Louis-Jean Cormier.
The musical component of the evening was also smoothly executed, by the latter, but also by the group Vulgaires Machins and Elliot Maginot, who offered on the piano a medley of the best jingles of the show, The recipe of our stars to You are at home with us. A golden gift for Jean-Sébastien whose voice, sometimes approximate, but unique, marked with a hot iron the ten years of the show, until the last segment ofHello Bobo Sunday evening, where the sympathetic talker could not help but shed a tear.
The evening is dead, alive The evening
How to sum up in a few lines the impact of The evening is (still) young on ICI Première? The spectrum is wide between people who have never found their account there and others who followed the show with an almost religious fervor, like the 7,000 members of the Facebook group The evening is (still) young: the pool.
But for those who accepted the show’s bold proposal, facing the barrier ofinside jokes of the trio which may seem at first glance a bit off-putting, The evening will remain in their minds as a true love letter to the radio. She transformed the captive audience normally associated with the medium into a community actively contributing to the show’s universe.
A surfer member of the Pool group of the evening has also found the right words to describe the feeling that inhabited several fans of the show at the end of the course:
I know why I’m in pain. The evening it’s like my teenage friends. We laughed without speaking, we understood each other; we had our inside, he wrote. I lost that feeling in my twenties and found it again in my thirties and my forties which crumbles.
In ten years, Jean-Philippe Wauthier, Jean-Sébastien Girard and Olivier Niquet have been able to amuse the public and change the historically very serious image of Radio-Canada’s first channel. Against all odds, from the acrimonious departure of Fred Savard to the few periods of exhaustion that made themselves felt on the air, they knew how to keep the spirit of frank camaraderie that made them successful.
The void that The evening will leave on the airwaves will be felt for a long time. In the first phase of mourning, the public is probably not already imagining who could one day replace this group of friends who had found the perfect formula.
But the question arises: The evening will it have been a shooting star in the Quebec radio landscape, or will it have opened a breach through which a new generation of passionate people with outspoken words can sneak in?
Reference-ici.radio-canada.ca