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DISAPPEARANCE – Friend of Jean-Luc Delarue with whom he had founded his production company, the fifty-year-old died on the night of December 7 to 8.
“I am devastated to learn of the death last night of my friend Franck Saurat, an exceptional television producer. I am proud and happy to have known him and to have worked so well with him.“, wrote this Thursday morning on Twitter the director of TV5 Monde Yves Bigot. The Carson Prod co-founder died at the age of 55, on the night of December 7 to 8, “following a cardiac arrest in a Parisian hospital”explained to Parisian Yossef Balti, ociate producer at Carson Prod.
After working with Arthur and Stéphane Courbit, Franck Saurat founded his company in 2001 with Jean-Luc Delarue, with whom he was very close. More than 1000 hours of entertainment programs and more than 150 prime times will be created in their offices. We owe to Franck Saurat “Stars at home” on TF1. For France 2, “Fête de la musique” between 2002 and 2009, but also “Les Victoires de la musique” in 2020. For W9, he produced “Génération Hit Machine”. We find him at the helm of Michel Drucker’s “Grand Show”, with Celine Dion as a guest in 2012. More recently, he co-produced the TV movie I Love You Hairstyle with Muriel Robin on TF1 and Welcome to the Bodins on M6.
France Télévisions paid tribute to him in a press release. The teams “wish to salute the memory of this great producer with whom they have written significant and emblematic pages of public television, and this for several decades”we read there. “Michel Drucker and the family of the very many faces of France Télévisions, who have had the chance and the opportunity to work with him throughout his career, join in this tribute. (…) The teams of France Télévisions are all the more moved by his disappearance as it is with Franck Saurat and Carson Prod. that France 2 paid tribute to Jean-Luc Delarue in 2012 and to Johnny Hallyday in 2017“.
For ten years, Franck Saurat had also worked with another relative, Jean-Marc Morandini, who expressed his great sadness on social networks, to produce programs such as “Crime” and “Retrouvailles”. Several programs at the origin of which was the producer must be broadcast in the coming weeks. This is particularly the case of “300 choirs”, broadcast on France 3 this Friday in prime time. It will be dedicated to his memory.