Questions pour un champion

How to improve your French listening skills, if you hardly ever have contact with Frenchmen? One way is listening to radio or TV. However, whilst living in the Netherlands I was never a keen TV watcher, and the French channels we can get, France 1, 2 and 3, are not much better than the Dutch ones. The only watchable programs were the weather forecast and the news.
Clear pronunciation and diction, known subjects, at least that did not have disaster written all over it. Some time later we discovered game programs and quizzes. After watching some rather stupid programs for a couple of weeks, we stumbled upon Questions pour un Champion. The program has just celebrated its 20th birthday, has all these 20 years been presented by the same charismatic presenter, Julien Lepers, and is immensely popular. I will not bore the reader with a description of the rules of the game, but the candidates, each having a tremendous general knowledge, must answer question on many subjects, such as art, science, gastronomy, geography, history, etc. The presenter asks the questions in a tempo that makes a machinegun sound like an old lady, because there is also a time limit in answering. We normally switch on the subtitles for the deaf, because without that it really goes far too fast most of the time. Not only is it good for our French, but we started to like the program as well. Nowadays we both are sitting in front of the TV, shouting out the answer on the rare occasion that the candidate has not got the answer before us. By now we are so addicted, that we switch on the answering machine between 17h50 and 18h30, because we do not want to be disturbed during that time!

The website of La Tuilerie de Chazelle