Behind his apparent good nature, the big return of Vincent Lagaf’s Bigdil on RMC Story did not happen without difficulties. Some sequences were cut…
THE Bigdil version 2025 has much less audience than the Bigdil from the 1990s. But it’s a hit that surprised more than one person. After 1.8 million viewers during the first broadcasts at the very beginning of the year, there were still 1.5 to 1.6 million faithful in recent Fridays on RMC Story. A score very far from the 6 million reached by the program on TF1 in the past, but more than honorable for channel 23 of TNT and in this new era dominated by streaming.
Riding on nostalgia, the show hosted by Vincent Lagaf and his extraterrestrial sidekick Bill has retained the original concept, which mixes school fair, kitsch gifts and redneck humor. But there is something else that has changed over the years and we still had to make some adaptations to the spirit of the times. The “goofballs”, confined to the roles of supporting the host, now have the right to a microphone! A very relative progress as they are still mainly content to dance and present the prizes.
Even Vincent Lagaf, who seems stuck in another era and who regrets on every set that we can no longer say “anything”, has paid the price for this creeping modernization of morals. No more heavy jokes about candidates’ necklines or imitations of accents on set, “under penalty of being accused of racism”. A political correctness that the TV troublemaker decries, but to which he is obliged to comply.
Thus, the 65-year-old host has already admitted that several of his projections were cut during the editing of the new Bigdil. A form of self-censorship that he publicly deplored, like a sequence where he imitated the Portuguese accent, ultimately deemed too limiting to be put on the air. “The world has changed, I have to learn to deal with it,” he explained in an interview with Télécâble Sat Hebdo, adding: “In the first show, I was in 100% Lagaf mode. The producer told me said: ‘We’re going to cut that, we can’t do it anymore’. And to justify himself: “When I do the Portuguese accent, I don’t make fun of the Portuguese. I still had a lot of fun holding back. You laugh by not making fun of anyone except yourself.”
This is not the first time that Lagaf’s humor has been singled out. In 2018, when he tried to relaunch himself with the game Strike on C8, he also regretted, in an interview with Le Parisien, that one of his jokes (about disabled children) had been cut during editing. THE Bigdil years TF1 had also experienced its share of criticism, such as its hit “La Zoubida”, singled out upon its release in 1991 for its orientalist clichés. The deadly spirit of the 2020s was not in question at the time, but Lagaf found another ready-made explanation. According to him, they were “three or four assholes who needed to be talked about”. Quite simply.