"Loft Story" is 20 years old: how TF1 and M6 betrayed their secret pact

Our series "Loft Story turns 20" in 3 episodes

How TF1 and M6 betrayed their secret pact

Behind the scenes of a top secret preparation

Why did the show stop after only two seasons?

And suddenly, TV was never like before… It is Thursday, September 16, 1999. Dutch viewers discover a new program, called “Big Brother”. Its concept? Film young people around the clock in a house and submit them to the public for votes every week. In a few days, the program becomes a hit in the Netherlands. Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, England and the United States are going ahead. France, it does not react. Officially, no one evokes what will become with us, a year and a half later, “Loft Story”, launched exactly twenty years ago, on April 26, 2001.

Behind the scenes, it's something else.

Because this phenomenal success obviously returns to the ears of the chain owners.

The Endemol company, which produces this "Big Brother", delighted to see that its concept is conquering the world, has every intention of making a hexagonal adaptation of it.

However, here, the leaders are firm: it is niet!

So much so that TF 1 and M 6 even enter into a pact.

To read also "Loft Story", twenty years later: how reality TV has imposed itself everywhere

In the fall of 2000, their respective bosses, Patrick Le Lay (who died in 2020) and Etienne Mougeotte for the front page, Nicolas de Tavernost and Jean Drucker (who died in 2003) for the Six, promised themselves not to give in to the sirens of this nascent reality show. "We wanted, thanks to this agreement between the two large private television networks, to prevent the intrusion into France of trash TV", recalled Patrick Le Lay, on May 10, 2001, in a column published in Le Monde.

But good intentions did not last long.

Convinced of the future success of this kind of format, which is starting to be talked about a lot abroad, M 6 breaks the pact just a few days after the said meeting with TF 1. Until late at night, Nicolas de Tavernost negotiates hard with John de Mol, Dutch father of “Big Brother”.

Impossible to make a faithful adaptation of the format.

The French would not join.

We have to find a little ploy.

Discussions drag on.

Benjamin Castaldi in 2002. “Loft Story” will only have had two seasons on the air.

LP / Olivier Corsan

“M 6 was in a very societal logic, not at all entertaining, remembers Benjamin Castaldi, presenter of Loft Story. It was scientific limit. »An agreement is finally sealed: it will be both a program where the participants will be filmed 24 hours a day but also a meeting program, with the objective of electing a winning couple (there were two winners, Loana and Christophe, but who were not in a relationship). The next morning, M 6 offers himself "Big Brother". A few minutes before, TF 1 confirms its refusal.

The show will be prepared in the utmost secrecy.

Until the choice of host, revealed just three weeks before launch.

And for good reason, before his arrival, Benjamin Castaldi was a columnist for “Celebrities”, the people magazine of… TF 1. “I wanted to announce my departure to them, but M 6 told me not to do it, he says today. 'hui.

I was prohibited from communicating on the show.

"

And suddenly, the pool scene ...

On April 26, he took control of “Loft Story”. The launch attracted 5.2 million viewers, allowing the Six to post a 26.1% market share. A nice performance for the chain, usually around 12 to 13%. And figures which get carried away after only a few days and more particularly after the evening of April 28, 2001. Under the effect of alcohol, two candidates come closer. Jean-Edouard and Loana start to frolic in the swimming pool, before concluding in the bedroom.

“I remember, I was called in the middle of the night and I was told:

They are fucking!

»Confides Benjamin Castaldi.

Captured by the cameras, broadcast live on the Internet, the scene is resumed and made the headlines of the press.

The audience explodes, in prime time every Thursday evening as during the daily summaries in the early evening.

As much as the reviews.

Until the boss of TF 1, annoyed to see the public desert his channel for the Six.

"From April to June, we are going to live hell," recalls Etienne Mougeotte in his book "Powers", published last February (Ed. Calmann-Lévy, 342 pages, 18.90 euros).

Loana, Jean-Edouard and Christophe leaving the loft, July 5, 2001. LP / Frédéric Dugit

On May 10, 2001, nineteen days after the launch of “Loft Story”, Patrick Le Lay took up writing.

In the columns of the World, he castigates the behavior of his rival and wishes "for ethical, moral and political reasons [...] to calmly make the voice of TF 1 heard in the ambient cacophony".

Recalling the commitment made at the beginning of 2001 with his rivals, he shoots the choice of M 6 to launch into "the tele-trash".

And goes so far as to qualify the show as “pornography”.

A striking rant, especially since the two groups are then associated in the TPS cable network, where the adventures of the “Lofters” are broadcast day and night, live.

Patrick Le Lay even tries to ban the channel which broadcasts the candidates' daily life 24 hours a day. In vain.

And TF 1 locked up its lofters ... on an island

On the side of M 6, the blood of his boss, Nicolas de Tavernost, only turns. A few weeks before the arrival of "Loft Story" on the air, TF 1 also broke this pact according to him. The crime: the filming of an adventure game, called "Koh-Lanta", adapted from the "Survivor" format, on which the Six also had an eye.

What Tavernost claims to have meant when the pact was put in place.

“We told them

, Okay, but you're taking Survivor away

.

All the same, we shouldn't be taken for idiots or altar boys.

On the one hand, TF 1 arrogates to itself the monopoly of real TV with

Survivor

, and, we, we should have made a pact whereby we gave it up unilaterally?

"Plague then in a tribune, published in Liberation on May 11, 2001, the one who was able to catch the front page thanks to the live broadcast of the" Loft ", where" Koh-Lanta "was recorded and required several weeks of editing before its arrival on the air.

Read also "Koh-Lanta": how adventurers also became influencers

M 6 does not give up and dares an ultimate provocation: the daily summary of the "Loft", first scheduled at 6:20 pm, is shifted a few days later at 7 pm in front of the "Bigdil" of Vincent Lagaf ', on a particularly time slot. important for TF 1. Worse: certain numbers of “Celebrities” recorded by Benjamin Castaldi before his departure for the Six are still being broadcast on the front page. "They told me at a meeting, Patrick Le Lay arrived furious shouting:

Can someone tell me how the guy

Celebrities

we slaughter the mouth every night? !

»Remembers, amused, the host.

The anger of the front page does nothing.

“Loft Story” is becoming a phenomenon, every day a little more powerful.

And the referrals of the CSA do not lead to any sanction.

The Wise Men are satisfied with recommendations such as the establishment of a rest period for candidates, "one hour CSA" during which the images are no longer broadcast.

The audiovisual policeman also wants the show to no longer call for votes to exclude candidates but to save others.

Nothing dramatic for M 6 and Endemol.

Their "Loft" can quietly continue on its way, in front of more and more viewers.

In June 2007, TF1 launched “Secret Story”, presented by ... Benjamin Castaldi (from behind, facing Laly).

LP / Delphine Goldsztejn

For its part, TF 1 wants its revenge. She launched “Koh-Lanta” in August 2001. But above all, signed a juicy contract with the producers of “Loft Story” to have, for five years, the exclusivity of their reality TV formats. This is how the “Star Academy” was born in October 2001, where apprentice singers were watched by the cameras during their lessons but also their daily life in a castle. Opposite, “Loft Story” ends definitively after two seasons, in July 2002, with declining audiences.

"M 6 won a battle, but she did not win the war", summarizes Etienne Mougeotte today. The same who, just six years after the “Loft”, and on the eve of his departure from TF 1, will air with Patrick Le Lay “Secret Story”, a copy-paste of the “Loft”, secrets in extra charge. The anti-reality TV pact was only a distant memory.