Ben oui! Of course it would. I have, over the years, bent the ear of executives at both CBC-TV and CTV trying to convince them that they should buy rights to the made-in-France TV format for the talk show Tout le monde en parle and launch the show in English in Canada. But to no avail.
The Toronto broadcast execs have always been afraid of taking a chance on this – even though the French Quebec version on Radio-Canada is one of the dominant shows chez nous. Tout le monde en parle is a simple but brilliant concept – take six or seven of the hottest personalities of the week and put them together in a TV studio.
The debate was relaunched Wednesday when La Presse TV critic Hugo Dumas asked me and others on Twitter if we thought an English-Canadian version of Tout le monde en parle would work. What followed was dozens and dozens of tweets weighing in on the issue.
Some, like Tout le monde en parle head-writer/editor-in-chief André Ducharme, worried that there wouldn’t be enough stars to fill the show every week in T.O. To which I and others replied: Avril Lavigne, Nelly Furtado, NHL stars, Don Cherry, Anne Murray, Drake, David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, Rick Mercer, Mary Walsh, Russell Peters, Nickelback, Brent Butt, Paul Gross…..and the list goes on.
I admitted that there are less local vedettes in Toronto than there are in Montreal but the advantage Toronto has is the fact that it pulls in way more Hollywood stars than we do. (As in, no Hollywood stars ever come to Montreal.) And it is handy to be able to have a George Clooney or Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt on the set every now and then.
Then my Twitter pal Hugo Cassivi leaded into the fray to quite rightly note that we had oh-so-unjustly failed to mention NDG hero Jay Baruchel in all this. That’s when I suggested we get Baruchel to host, with at least one Montreal Canadien as a guest each week! (To satisfy Baruchel, the world’s most obsessive Habs fan this side of me.)
Other host possibilities raised on Twitter included Q main-man Jian Ghomeshi and CBC funnyman Rick Mercer.
By Thursday morning, both Baruchel and Ghomeshi had chimed in, sounding pretty interested in the job. So everything is falling into place. Now all we have to do is convince the fraidy-cat CBC and CTV executives that this is a win-win proposition.
