A star anchorman in france is saying farewell

Must-see TV! The last of a high priest caste of telecasting anchormen disappears from the silver screen next week, and the curious may want to watch a final service or two, relics from telecasting's Golden Age, earlier they fade to black.

You'd survive missing them, of course of study.

But once Saint Patrick Poivre d'Arvor sinks from view on July 10 as the 8 p.m. Anchor on TF1, French Republic's most-watched channel, an era when subject congregations gathered for a news-pastor's every night information wafer is gone.

Look about: the main eve news programme continue, but their overall share of audience is dramatically smaller. And who knows the names of the men and women, irrespective of their virtue, who've followed the Rathers, the Brokaws and the Jenningses as ground tackle?

The net, round-the-clock news and special interest scheduling on cable TV, pitching shards of info at, say, Rosicrucians or vivisectionists, have done in the star anchor's old unifying rite.

And now Poivre d'Arvor, who, at 60, is departure unhappily after 20 years as French Republic's emblematic TV reporter, will take with him the idea that one ground tackle with a 30 minutes broadcast could be a state's every night, ecumenical link to what's going on.

Here was real power: just on his say-so as editor in chief in chief, he could order up a 20-minute analysis of Taleban tactics and say to hell with an umpteenth appreciation of Lady Di.

Not that Saint Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, known in French Republic as PPDA, has systematically made that kind of pick.

He is not a Bruno Walter Cronkite, who lived with an image of probity and do-gooder concern. Or a determined Dan instead. And in no way could PPDA's not-in-anybody's-face style be compared to the hot-pursuit questioning of the BBC's Jeremy Paxman or the late Tim Russert of NBC (neither an anchorman.)

In fact, the marionette representing Poivre d'Arvor on an extremely popular political satire show remains bent in obsequiousness, and PPDA's curriculum vitae includes a fabricated Fidel Castro interview and a conviction (with a 15-month suspended sentence and a €30,000, or $47,000, fine) for pocketing cash and lavish gifts from the crooked son of a disgraced politician.

Poivre d'Arvor told me that the Castro mess involved bollixed editing by someone else, and that the conviction was later erased from the judicial record.

The press screamed at each offense, but his bosses shrugged and PPDA carried on. It's testimony, in a very French way, to a one-off talent.

Poivre d'Arvor, with good inspiration, cast himself on-screen as a neutral, a reasonable man against the backdrop of a television landscape in France that can exude constant argument.

The truth of the line about no one being able to fool all of the people all of time pertains - Poivre d'Arvor never could have lasted if the French regarded him as a fraud - and it translates into his total domination of the ratings over two decades and into his last weeks.

I've often watched him, waiting for an inflection of his soft voice, or a half, closed-mouth smile, the way you might for small moments of special skill from Anthony Hopkins or Jack Nicholson.

Disbelief, contempt, distance: they were all there, slightly amused or mocking, fleetingly visible but nothing you could pin on PPDA as being disrespectful to an important pol or demeaning the intelligence of his viewers. He was actor-slick, but almost never outside the boundaries of professionalism.

Poivre d'Arvor also worked hard and it showed. He reads books (and still writes them in amazing profusion), and with the money of television's Golden Age paying for charters to semi-exotic and semi-dangerous locales, looked to the French as if he were a cultured man going afar to bring them fair glimpses of the real world.

Now, he's on the way out, very much against his will (and without explanation, he says), to be replaced by a woman, Laurence Ferrari. The surest notion of why combines the ideas that TF1's private owners have had enough of PPDA, whose time has passed in terms of costs and revenue generation, and, in parallel, an interest in redeploying the channel's investment in news.

Poivre d'Arvor seems to have suggested to some - not an unreasonable notion in France, where government pressure on broadcasters is a tradition - that Nicolas Sarkozy wanted him gone.

But although the government is now conspicuously leaning on the independence of its state-financed TV stations, that explanation sounds like prideful searching for a self-important political reason.

It always struck me, instead, that Poivre d'Arvor's careful, deflective gifts and style made him insufficiently confrontational to have much status as a political target. In fact, PPDA acknowledges getting caught in the gears of an epoch as it winds down.