Louise Cousineau, former TV columnist for La Presse, whose pen was often dipped in poison but who also knew how to praise those who made good television according to her criteria, left us on Monday.
Posted at 8:29 p.m.
During her six-decade career, Ms. Cousineau also worked for Le Petit Journal, La Patrie and TV Hebdo and wrote columns for CKAC and 98.5 FM, notably with Paul Arcand.
PHOTO PIERRE MCCANN, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
Louise Cousineau in the La Presse newsroom, 1969
Louise Cousineau died late Monday afternoon as a result of health problems.
Some will especially remember a journalist who didn't have her tongue in her pocket and whose acidity in some column titles was only exceeded by their content. Examples abound.
“CTYVON's Experimental Television: The Rats Are Us,” she wrote on September 13, 1989, about a humorous show directed by Yvon Deschamps. “The Dutchman's Mountain: a pretty Chinese soap opera,” she exclaimed on September 3, 1992 about this series, which ran for just one season on Télé-Métropole (TVA). “Bye Bye: Bring Dominique back to us!” she demanded after the disappointing performance on December 31, 1975, during which she looked at the clock “after 20 minutes.”
His own work colleagues have tried his medicine. This was the case with columnist and screenwriter Réjean Tremblay after the second season of Lance et Compte. “Lance and… tell me a better story,” was the title at the end of Opus 2 about the adventures of ice hockey player Pierre Lambert and his teammates.
“I tried to be fair with my criticism. “I would much rather love this than hate it,” she told Marc Labrèche on June 6, 2020, on the show Un Phare dans la nuit, which the presenter and actor created on Radio-Canada radio at the beginning of the pandemic. She added that she had trouble falling asleep some nights after writing a very tough column.
Marc Labrèche also admitted in this interview that he was spared by this columnist who also knew how to be enthusiastic, generous, grateful and sensitive.
On December 2, 1997, after the last episode of the Omertà series, she spoke of “an extraordinary ending” and described the author Luc Dionne as a “devilishly clever man”.
After the suicide of TVA journalist Gaétan Girouad on January 14, 1999, she said: “One day I wrote that he was my idol. Good television journalists who are at the same time intelligent and never stutter on the air are rare. »
Some of her columns were even characterized by enthusiasm that was directed against her. We think of November 22, 1990, when she, without hesitation, introduced the reader to a scene from the series Caleb's Daughters, in which Émilie and Ovila are excited to watch two horses mating. His title? “The most erotic scene on Quebec television? » One passage suggested that “two million Quebecers will be thrilled with pleasure.”
PICTURE LA PRESS/BANK
One remembers the chronicle of November 22, 1990.
Highlighted
After a serious accident on June 9, 1956 at Mount Washington, Louise Cousineau made a sensational entry into the world of media. As Le Petit Journal reported in its July 1, 1956 issue, the future journalist fell 1,800 feet into a ravine. She “tumbled through trees, rocks and onto the snow” before “escaping unscathed,” we read.
PICTURE LE PETIT JOURNAL/BANQ
Article with photo dedicated to Louise Cousineau's mishap at Mount Washington
The story appeared on the front page of the newspaper and in a long report by Guy Lemay on page 35.
It's hard to say, more than 67 years later, whether all of these details are accurate. What is certain is that Louise had a better fate than her father, Doctor Azarie Cousineau, doctor at the Miséricorde Hospital, who died in a plane crash at Lake Taureau in October 1949. This crash killed five people, including three doctors from Montreal.
Shortly after Le Petit Journal's report dedicated to her, Louise Cousineau began her journalistic career in the same publication. We found an article signed by her dated March 3, 1957. She reports that actor Paul Dupuis (Ti-Coq, Les belles histoire des pays d'en Haut) refereed a match between two professional wrestlers, Golden Venus and Gypsy Daniels.
One of the bosses of this popular weekly newspaper was Jean-Charles Harvey.
We also found articles by Ms. Cousineau in La Patrie. So she told us on January 11, 1967 that “Quebec is a 'mission land' for Mormons.”
The following year, again according to our research on the BAnQ website, she wrote her first texts in the daily newspaper on Rue Saint-Jacques. She is not yet a TV columnist, but is assigned to the general section. For a few years she did a little bit of everything.
A text dated May 21, 1968, perhaps his first, focuses on hairdressers in Montreal demanding an extension of the decree regulating their working conditions.
On January 13, 1970, a short article states that Miss Louise Cousineau was elected secretary of the Montreal Journalists' Union, La Presse section, whose president is Claude Masson, the newspaper's future deputy editor.
Two months later, Louise Cousineau was in Osaka, Japan, where she was among the journalists invited to visit the World's Fair before its official opening. His gaze is already biting. Of the Quebec pavilion, she says it's “beautiful to look at, but disappointing to visit.” She notes that the program is light and that there are about fifty paintings by Quebec artists hanging in the basement of the building.
EDUCATE THE PRESS/BENCH
A report by Louise Cousineau in Osaka
Radio-television
Ms. Cousineau began writing a column entitled “Radio-Television” in March 1975. An adventure that lasted until the early 2010s, when she retired.
Why television? Because it didn't happen regularly, at least in the French-speaking media. “In the French-language newspapers in Quebec, no one talked about television because everyone said it was good for fat people,” she told Marc Labrèche in the aforementioned program. While I was in English newspapers – I was married to a Brit at the time and we subscribed to The Gazette – I read very funny, very amusing television columns. They didn't take it too seriously. I told myself I wasn't smart enough to be a theater or literary columnist, so television was right for me [rires]. »
Its 35 years will be interwoven with hundreds, even thousands, of articles of great richness and peppered with a verb that has often brought pain to those affected and joy to readers.
She was to television what our colleague Claude Gingras was to classical music. The two, who faced each other in the newsroom for a while, were good friends before falling out. They had one thing in common: they smoked secretly, late at night when the room was practically empty, hiding their ashtrays in a drawer and ignoring the rules.
PHOTO BERNARD BRAULT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
Louise Cousineau with former La Presse president and editor Roger D. Landry, posing as Luciano Pavarotti and Claude Gingras in 1993
Shocking? Wait ! In her farewell column, published in our pages on March 13, 2010, she said: “The pot we smoked in the middle of the newsroom under the unsuspecting noses of our bosses in the '60s.” One Monday morning, the weather report announced: “Sunny tonight.”'' “.
She described herself in the same text as “always having difficulty with authority” and yet was patron of the General Affairs Department. It was she who hired, among others, the columnist Yves Boisvert, who was impressed by his work during the summer internship for young journalists.
“I was lucky to be on the right side of his human divide. This does not mean that of the “insignificant”.'' (press the S), which mainly populate our planet, wrote Yves in a tribute text, also dated March 13, 2010. This brought me some indulgences – yes, she is capable of it. »
In the late 2000s, Ms. Cousineau experienced health problems. She did not write for La Presse for a year before deciding to retire. An exit that did not come under the best conditions, as she announced in her last column entitled “We have no more room!” »
A few days after this publication, Le Journal de Montréal announced that she would write 50 columns for TV Hebdo, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. “I'm scared. Suddenly I could do anything,” she confided to journalist Dany Bouchard.
At the same time, she was happy about this order. “There will be one personalized article per week about programs from this period. That's exactly my thing. »
Since then she had slowed down her activities quite a bit. His name appeared in the news from time to time. Like in June 2014, when she, along with other notables, signed a letter asking Prime Minister Stephen Harper not to cut Radio-Canada's budget.
Louise Cousineau, mother of one daughter and grandmother, by all accounts invented the model of television columnist as we have known it for several decades. She loved the small screen that she watched in the company of her dogs Benji and then Mademoiselle Emma, whom she adopted thanks to the initiative of Julie Snyder and her researcher Marc-André Chabot from L'enfer c'est nous autres.
Beyond the raw footage, television and her columns, she kept her fondest memories for her companions on the third floor of 750 Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Let's give him the last word:
“We may have loved the news, spent nights wondering if we had been deceived, met extraordinary or despicable people, but what I remember after all these years at La Presse is the joy I had there. »