Koh-Lanta is
celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with a new season which, as usual, achieves exceptional audiences.
Beyond its success on the small screen, the TF1 show has entered people's lives, especially through its vocabulary.
Everyone knows
Koh-Lanta
and our report to this program is an indicator of the evolutions of our society.
Will the term "the posts" ever regain its pre-2001 meaning?
That year landed, rather discreetly, a new TF1 program shot on an island in Thailand:
Koh-Lanta
.
20 years later, TF1 continues to break audience records with its adventure game and celebrates its exceptional success with a special edition entitled, very modestly: "The Legend".
In 20 years,
Koh-Lanta
has become much more than a TV show and has imposed its vocabulary - the test of the poles, the immunity collar, the totem, the irrevocable sentence ... - and its grammar - the campfire , reunification, trials of comfort… - in many interstices of our daily life.
Koh-Lanta vocabulary
Policies have often used terms borrowed from the game, organizers of birthday or wedding snacks reuse the events of the show, HR training in companies use
Koh-Lanta's
“values”
.
"That Olivier Véran say that there is no totem, that Rachida Dati says in a debate that she does not have an immunity collar… Koh-Lanta has entered the common vocabulary and in the mind people, ”notes Denis Brogniart.
Alexia Laroche-Joubert goes further: “The show is really cult.
The term is overused but for Koh-Lanta, it really means that, even without wanting to talk about the game, we can use the expression "pole test" in everyday life.
"
An intimate game
Denis Brogniart has a quantified and implacable analysis: “It is the palm of the seniority.
There is no such thing as a 20-year-old show that earns between 14 and 28 bonuses per year on the biggest channel and which remains the leader.
"
Virginie Spies, a semiologist specializing in media, agrees with this analysis to which a more intimate dimension is added: “The program has entered our lives because television is an everyday object, much more than the cinema.
TV is made to be watched at home, an intimate place, and to attract a maximum audience with, therefore, non-divisive programs.
"
Images in our brains available
“I don't think there is a person in France who can say that they don't know
Koh-Lanta at all
.
That doesn't mean she's watching, but it's still a social phenomenon old enough for everyone to know what we're talking about.
», Adds Denis Brogniart.
Thus, even an assiduous Arte viewer or a millennial who does without the small screen will know what three gugusses are doing perched on poles above crystal clear water.
“This is the strength of television, recognizes Virginie Spies.
She imposes her images beyond the screen.
"
Irrevocability in question
As in any self-respecting social phenomenon, references to
Koh-Lanta
have evolved over time. Take, for example, the corporate world. “For a few years, we had a lot of HR literature,” says Alexandra Parisien, specialist in human resources training. There were team building internships, manager training, things like that, around the values conveyed by the show and applicable to business life: cooperation, surpassing oneself, group strategy, resilience ... But for some time now,
Koh-Lanta
is no longer totem.
"In question, the exacerbated competitiveness on the one hand, which does not always go very well and especially the side" irrevocable sentence "and vexatious eliminations.
“The show has become very ambivalent in the minds of people who like to laugh about it among themselves but don't like their company or their manager to take hold of these codes.
"
Virginie Spies analyzes this turnaround by comparing
Koh-Lanta
to other reality shows.
“
Koh-Lanta
conveys more positive“ values ”than
Loft Story
, of course.
There is sport, there is mental… But there is also the strategy which has taken an increasingly important part.
However, in today's society, and in companies in particular, it is dangerous to make people speak against each other.
"
Children want their immunity collar
Quentin and Aurélie, animators and organizers of children's parties have observed the same turnaround with their own “clients”: “The problem is not the children but the parents, laughs Quentin, who has hosted Breizh Koh-Lanta, this summer on the beaches of Côtes d'Armor.
The events are fun but sometimes there is a bad spirit.
Dads scream at their kids and it ends in tears… ”
It is for this reason that the couple abandoned the
Koh-Lanta
theme
for birthday snacks: "In fact, we have changed the events so that it is only collaborative and not competitive," explains Aurélie.
Today, we must not lose the children… ”
"Blue and skin"
Virginie Spies sees in this evolution towards a more civilized society, "a sort of return to the
school of fans
where everyone wins", an additional reason for the audience success of
Koh-Lanta
, an expiatory spectacle of humans entering -hearted: "The salt of this program is that people betray each other!" At the campfire, we are in the sociology of group in crisis… ”
So, would
Koh-Lanta
be the shattered intimate mirror of our shattered public lives?
The reflection in murky water of our bloated egos (cuckoo Narcissus)?
“Maybe, or else it's much simpler than that, slice Virginie Spies.
Nicolas Pigasse when he was at
Public
had found a formula for successful celebrity clichés: “Blue and skin.
»
Koh-Lanta
has that on the program.
That and its posts.
Television
"" Koh-Lanta "is not the concentrate of tensions that we see on television", assures Maud, winner in 2019
Television
"Before their" Koh-Lanta ", Dorian and Aurélien trained in my gym", reveals Romuald
Vocabulary
emission
TF1
Worship
Koh Lanta
Television