From ORTF to Canal+

For its first decades French television was a state institution, run by the government and watched by almost everyone on a handful of channels. It was then broken up, partly privatised and overtaken by cable, satellite and finally streaming. This chapter follows that change, and the programmes that went with it: the news, the dramas, the variety shows and the long-running series. Television tells a different story from cinema, because it was closer to the state and closer to everyday life. Dates, names and channel histories are from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

The State Monopoly

Regular French broadcasting began in the 1930s and grew after the war. Radio and television were put under a public monopoly, and in 1964 the state broadcaster was reorganised as the ORTF, the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (check the dates). Government influence on news was a constant complaint: the minister responsible could be said to have a hand in what the evening bulletin contained. Viewers had one channel, then two, then three by the mid-1970s (check). A shared national audience watched the same programmes at the same time.

1974: The Break-Up

In 1974 the ORTF was broken up into separate state companies, including TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3, with others for production and transmission (check). The aim was to introduce competition between the channels while keeping them in public hands. The three channels competed for audiences but were still publicly owned.

Private Television Arrives

• Canal+ (1984). A subscription channel, famous for its scrambled signal, films and sport. Subscribers rented decoders. It became a major funder of French cinema, which ties television directly to the film industry (check).
• La Cinq and M6 (1986). New private commercial channels. La Cinq failed and closed in the early 1990s, and M6 survived and grew (check).
• TF1 privatised (1987). The largest public channel was sold to a private group, and quickly became the country's most-watched channel, a position it has held for much of the time since (check).

Programmes That Defined the Medium

French television has also been a leading home of the feuilleton, the serialised drama, and of the made-for-TV film, often adapting literary classics. The police drama is the strongest tradition and is the television cousin of the polar in Chapter 7.

Game Shows Without Frontiers

One French television format travelled across Europe: Jeux sans frontières, in which teams from different countries competed in absurd physical games, with live linked broadcasts. It is covered in its own course, Jeux Sans Frontières (It's a Knockout): Europe's Game Show 1, so it only gets a mention here as an example of television as a shared European experience.

Cable, Satellite and the End of the Shared Screen

From the 1990s cable and satellite packages multiplied the number of channels, and digital terrestrial television in the 2000s multiplied them again (check). The old single national audience fragmented. Public television survived as France Télévisions, the group formed from the former state channels (check), and the public arts channel Arte, a joint French-German project, appeared in 1992 (check). It links to the Franco-German cultural story in German Film & Television 8.

Exercises

Next chapter: Contemporary Cinema & the Streaming Era, which brings the story up to date.