Les Guignols (French pronunciation:, The Puppets), formerly Les Guignols de l'info (French pronunciation:, The News Puppets), is a popular satirical latex puppet show on the French television channel Canal+. The show, which ran daily, was created in 1988 and drew inspiration from the French program Le Bébête Show (1982–1995) and the British puppet satire Spitting Image (1984–1996). Using a format similar to a news broadcast, the show satirized the political world, media, celebrities, French society, and international events.
Throughout the years, it usually aired at 7:50 p.m. as a segment of other Canal+ shows, such as Nulle part ailleurs or Le Grand Journal. On Sunday afternoons, Canal+ aired a weekly recap called La Semaine des Guignols, featuring a back-to-back replay of the week's episodes.
The show began in 1988 as Les Arènes de l'info (News Arenas). Initially, it did not cover current events in real-time and was less popular due to being scripted weeks in advance. However, in the 1990–91 season, the show rebranded as Les Guignols de l'Info and shifted to daily news commentary. It then enjoyed a tremendous growth in popularity with its different coverage of the first Gulf War, and quickly eclipsed its rival, Le Bébête Show.
The structure of the series stayed constant throughout the years: a headline, a few quick stories, a pre-recorded video skit, an interview with a personality, then one last story. It rarely diverged from this layout, usually only doing so to drive points across further (e.g. replacing all news with a seven-minute interview of one of the Sylvestres during the 2003 Iraq War).
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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