He was the greatest storyteller in the history of radio and television. Pierre Bellemare, who has long officiated on Europe 1, died at the age of 88, Saturday in Paris.
Pierre Bellemare at the Book Fair in Domme, August 2017
Born in 1929 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Pierre Bellemare had a pronounced taste for romance from an early age.It was in 1948, on the radio, that this Parisian cut his teeth. Within Radio Service, a private company that produced programmes for Radio Luxembourg.In the 1980s, he imported the concept of teleshopping into France. This is how he launched in 1988 on TF1, Téléshopping, first called Le Magazine de l'objet. A show he hosted with Grégory Frank until 1994. Twenty years earlier, he had already revolutionized the small screen by offering the first hidden cameras of television with the actor Jacques Legras who trapped anonymous people.
But it is above all for his qualities as a storyteller that Pierre Bellemare will become the man of radio and television that we know. Man has no equal to set up an atmosphere, mysterious, intriguing, sometimes distressing. He published some forty collections of extraordinary stories: It happened one day, Suspense, The Criminal Year, True Stories… The younger generations know him on television, on NT1, where he presented Les Enquêtes impossibles, or on the radio, on Europe 1 always, in the show Les Pieds dans le plat, hosted by Cyril Hanouna.
In recent years, Pierre Bellemare, reclusive in his manor in Périgord, was much less solicited. An observation he deplored in an interview with Télé-Loisirs last April.
"One possible explanation is that producers may be afraid to ask me to do things because they think I'm going to take a lot of money. Today, however, it is the other way around. I often agree to work for free. I've always loved working and it's hard to hang up. The only condition is to come and shoot at my house, "he said.
From now on, he only hosted Les Enquêtes impossibles on RTL9 and Chérie 25. His last TV appearance was on April 14 in Groland. That day, Pierre Bellemare had ensured some launches for the 25th anniversary of the show.With more than 80 titles published and ten million copies sold, he was and will remain a popular author, present on several fronts.
He is an icon of radio, television but also literature who died last night.
