Christophe Beaugrand is at the rendezvous of season 5 of "Ninja Warrior" -
Laurent VU / TF1
Ninja Warrior
is back on the air at TF1 from this Saturday, January 2.
In duet with Denis Brogniart, Christophe Beaugrand still ensures the presentation of the show for the fifth consecutive year.
"I have never been so good in my sneakers," says the host to
20 Minutes
.
It is perched several meters high that we will find Christophe Beaugrand on the TF1 antenna from this Saturday, January 2.
The host will be alongside Denis Brogniart and Iris Mittenaere to launch the fifth season of
Ninja Warrior
.
Due to the coronavirus, the filming of the show had to be postponed to September and the program is therefore broadcast during the winter for the first time.
Christophe Beaugrand answered
20 Minutes
questions
about this new season but also about his more personal projects.
Between the new rules, the new trials and the various jokers and bonuses, is this season 5 of
Ninja Warrior the
one of all the novelties?
Every year, we bring new things.
Last year, we incorporated the mega wall, so every year we have to push new things.
The viewer will find what he likes and what makes the success of the show and these novelties which add a little suspense and challenge because it is important to bring something new, we need that.
And also for the candidates who return from one year to the next, we cannot do the same course twice for them.
It is necessary to surprise the fans of the show and the candidates.
In this regard, how do you explain that candidates keep coming back year after year?
There is a cult side.
It's a bit like a big sports competition, the champions come back and rub against the course again.
There are a number of our competitors who have an obsession with this tower of heroes that they want to try to climb.
There was a winner last year, Jean Tezenas du Montcel, who himself returns to put his title at stake. Most of the candidates want to try again, some are frustrated because they have fallen to such an obstacle so that they had the capacity to go further.
In
Ninja Warrior
, you only have one chance.
If you fall or slip by mistake on the first obstacle, it's over.
There is no room for error.
So inevitably, they want to come back.
And that's part of the concept of the show, we make
Ninja Warrior
stars
, we make heroes out of them.
Besides, you talk a lot about the next generation in the first show, that means that there are automatically old people if there are new ones ...
It's great to realize that some kids, who were 13 when we started the show, waited until they were 18 to sign up.
Behind the scenes, when they met Jean Tezenas du Montcel or Clément Dumais, for them it was Madonna.
There is really the idea of a passing of the baton and what is great is to see to what extent this program arouses sporting vocations among many young people.
We laugh, we admire sports performance and it conveys hyperpositive values of surpassing oneself, the rewards of training, the values of sport.
When you observe the candidates with Denis Brogniart, do you feel more like a host or a sports commentator?
I still feel more the soul of a host but casually, Denis, who has long been a sports journalist and commented on sports events, taught me a lot of things about the tone to adopt.
It's funny because we brought things to each other.
Today, he plays more self-mockery than on
Koh-Lanta
or on sports broadcasts where there is not much room for joking.
I push him to sing, to dress up and he pushes me towards the sports commentator.
It worked better on his side, he got more into self-mockery, he made a lot of progress and I haven't made much progress on sports commentary yet.
We're hypercomplices and I think that's also what makes the show successful.
This year, the shooting was impacted by the health crisis ...
We were afraid of not being able to shoot the season at all.
The first shooting date was scheduled for March, in the middle of confinement, for a broadcast this summer.
We canceled everything and we feared that the season would be completely canceled.
We had a shooting window in September.
It's past, we could have less audience, but we could have.
The shooting, which is already long, was even longer.
We start the show when the day goes down around 8 p.m. and we finish at 3 a.m.
We made sure that things went well, but there was the fact of clearing the obstacles.
For the interviews that Iris Mittenaere does, we added a sound engineer with a long pole for the microphone so that she does not approach people while handing them the microphone.
The candidates also had to use hydroalcoholic gel before passing the obstacles ...
It's a funny little anecdote, but we struggled to find the right hydroalcoholic gel.
Sometimes that leaves your hands sticky and it's not possible to keep climbing holds on
Ninja Warrior
if your hands are slippery.
We tested hydroalcoholic gels with testers to see if it bothered or not, and we managed to find the right model.
And then there were daily PCR tests.
Everything is shot in eight consecutive days.
On each program, we have about fifty candidates and we have four selection programs.
So that's still 200 candidates, in addition to technicians, editorial teams.
Roughly speaking, it's 400 people mobilized.
We were in separate hotels to avoid crossing each other as much as possible, we had a plexiglass plate between Denis and me to present the show.
It was sometimes frustrating but we are delighted to have been able to shoot anyway while respecting all the sanitary rules.
And it went really well, we didn't have any contamination on our shoot.
We were able to prove that it was possible.
On the 31st, we will be with you.
On January 2, we will still be with you.
We still see you on LCI for
Le Brunch de l'Info
then soon in
Stars à nu
… 2021, will this be your year?
2020 was already pretty good (laughs) I'm lucky enough to end the year with viewers and start it with them too.
I am lucky to be able to express myself on different media and different channels of the TF1 group with very different styles.
I am at the same time a journalist and I lead political debates or interviews of testimonies on LCI, and then at the same time pure entertainment with the bloopers, with
Ninja Warrior
.
I'm pretty happy, I had the chance to become a dad.
I have never looked so good in my sneakers.
Hope it lasts !
Outside the screens, we can find you in bookstores since you are currently writing.
What is it about ?
I became a dad last year with my husband thanks to a woman who carried our baby to the United States, which is called surrogacy.
I had started to write little things with the idea of telling my family story for him, without having vocation to be published.
This summer, an editor contacted me telling me that he had read an interview with me where I was talking about my son, and he offered to publish this testimonial to shake things up.
He managed to convince me.
I hesitated at first, I am not a standard bearer.
I don't have a co-author, I'm the one who writes everything on my own.
I put a lot of heart and my guts into it especially because it is a message for my little boy.
It was a struggle to become a parent and I want to tell this story to defeat the caricatures that we sometimes read from homophobic people on social networks who say that we are buying a child.
I try to explain how it goes in practice, far from the fantasies of some, and to show that it is above all a love story.
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