Télévision Suisse Romande

With the films: La montagne l’a fait comme-ça! The Mountain Made It Like This! by Armand Caviezel 25’, Switzerland, 1978 L’Etivaz, mon amour L’Etivaz, My Love by Jean-Paul Mudry 27’, Switzerland, 2008

Télévision Suisse Romande and the World of the Mountains

The first Swiss Television channel was founded in 1953 in Zurich, in the German part of Switzerland. From 1954, the first programs in Swiss Romandie (in French) were broadcast and later Swiss-Italian Télévision was born. Advertising arrived on Swiss channels (German, Romande, or French, and Italian) in 1965. Color reached our screens in 1972. Today, Swiss Télévision is run by a central institution with headquarters in Berne (the capital of Switzerland) and goes by the acronym SSR (Société Suisse de Radio et Télévision). Télévision Suisse Romande has an audience numbering 1,650,000.

I began working for Télévision Suisse Romande in Geneva in late 1964, as the producer of the regional news broadcast. Since I was also an alpinist, I often favored stories about the mountains, and alpinism in particular. Every year, before and after both the summer and winter vacation periods, I oversaw the program,

, that talked about safety and the discovery of new places, and offered advice and ideas. Over time, I thought about creating a program devoted entirely to the mountains. For a country like Switzerland, that comprises a major part of the 4000 m of the Alps, it seemed important to me, if not indispensable! This was the period (1968) in which I got to know the founder of the Festival International du Film Alpin des Diablerets, Jacques Lavenex, when he asked me to help him to organize his festival. This proposal gave me the push to ask my directors to create a specialized broadcast, Montagne. After the third try, they finally accepted my idea and gave me a budget. The program was hosted by the Youth Service. And thus,

was born.

The first program, filmed during the summer, was broadcast in September, 1972. For a number of years, the program was co-produced with the director Paul Siegrist, who had had the same idea as mine. That program lasted for ten years, during which we broadcast twice a month, alternating a program of our making with a film about the mountains that we had acquired. We explored the Alps, the Calanques of Marseille, the Algerian Hoggar and many other mountain areas, and we talked about all aspects of the mountains: summer and winter alpinism, climbing, accident prevention, excursions, materials and their uses, mountain guides, the great alpinists, mountain film festivals, skiing, and avalanches. I often recount that I spent ten years of my life in which I was in the mountains twenty days per month – for work! What luck! Then, in 1982, during a time of major changes at Télévision Suisse Romande, the directors eliminated this broadcast. No comment!

Later, in 1993, another team composed of Benoît Aymon, Pierre-Pascal Rossi and Claude Delieutraz, journalists and director, realized in turn that it made no sense for a country like Switzerland to be without a program devoted to the mountains, and they created Passe-moi les jumelles (Pass Me the Binoculars). This program is monthly, and still exists. They have more means at their disposal than I had in my time and have gone further, exploring the most important formations and the most prestigious locations. They, too, focus on alpinism and climbing, but also on ethnology and encounters with “mountain people,” a subject that was less fashionable in earlier decades than it is now. Long life to Passe-moi les jumelles!

Pierre Simoni