Often, with a difficult extract, one is tempted to give up; it's just too hard, one is missing too much. But of course, such extracts are the best exercises of all, they force the ear to improve, little by little. The best thing is just to keep going to the end, then leave the exercise for a day and come back to it. Follow the video through without reading your transcription. You're trying to fill in the holes by understanding the context.

 So here, from Café Picouly  is the actress Muriel Robin describing  a difficult time in her life. As well as a good actress she is a superb stand-up comic, whose cult sketch Le Noir you can find here 
 

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When the Roman Polanski/Frédéric Mitterrand scandal broke, I felt I had to put an extract on this page, without much wanting to. Sad to see the French taking the prurient interest in these matters for which the British are notorious. I recorded all the discussions, to find the one that best recounted the facts, showed interviews with Mitterrand, and was as balanced as it is possible to be. So full marks to France 2's evening news and David Pujadas for this excellent extract. Myself, I refrain from comment...

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When I saw Guillaume de Depardieu in Château en Suède, I was enormously impressed by this young actor, about whom his father does not often speak. So I am glad to have caught this portrait from the series Café Picouly

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From La grande librairie, here is Justine Lévy, daughter of Bernard Henri-Lévy, whose first partner the philosopher Rafaël Enthoven left her for Cqrlq Bruni, and who now turns the emotional hangups of le beau monde into the stuff of her novels. But it makes for an interesting listening exercise, because much of this is quite difficult to decipher. One hopes the lady writes better than she speaks...

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 The series Empreintes on France 5 offers documentaries on well-known people. This was on Guy Bedos, a beautifully filmed piece. Bedos reads extracts from his own autobiography. Very funny, very moving. Linguistically, the voice, old, gravelly, offers a good test of the ear.

The political series Déshabillons-les is at least as interesting psychologically as politically. Here we have a reference to a series called Le Divan ( = The psychiatrist's couch) of Henri Chapier. While the discussion was interesting, I have chosen extracts from his interviews with Ségolène Royale and Jean-Marie Le Pen.  You'll see why ...

The book show La grande librairie interviewed Florence Aubenas, and what a breathe of real life that brought to a programme which has become terribly dry recently.  I won't even comment on the lady herself except to express my admiration. Here is a excellent extract from the interview. Excellent linguistically also, because she speaks very clearly, very precisely (she even uses the negative 'ne') - but very, very fast. And that, combined with the bumbling of François Busnel - seriously outclassed on this occasion, makes it a very useful listening exercise.

I have said more than once that I am a great fan of histoire of popular culture documentaries such as this one La folie des années '90.  This one was particularly abrasive, because this is the period when the effects of popular, and deeply vulgar television were felt. Today there is a massive division between France Télévision, the public broadcasting service, which has remained not unlike the BBC of the 50s, and the other immensely popular channels, TF1, Canal+, M6 etc, which offer the same unremitting bas taste as the majority of British or American channels. Good clip

 Le boulet is the sort of comedy that one can enjoy even if much of the language rests incomprehensible. Benoît Poelvoorde is the inadequate little man, and the superb Rossy de Palma plays his wife. It's action comedy, but it gives the ear a good workout

I have commented elsewhere that for an Anglophone, Molière is a difficult taste to acquire, because he reminds us of our terrible Restoration Theatre, and, of course, because we have Shakespeare. So, whenever there is discussion or commentary on Molière, I watch. It's a different view of the world. Here is Dénis Polyadès in Le Grande Librairie, talking about the play, and we get some extracts thrown in.

Le bal du siècle is a strange programme in which Fanny Ardant does the voice-over for films about the sort of people that the French guillotined during the revolution. This is about Charles de Beistegui, an indecently rich and egocentric individual of dubious taste. There were many such in France between the wars. Linguistically I found it far harder than I expected. These are people who speak with the accent of their class, but carelessly, and without premeditation. So it's pretty horrible, but very good practice. If you can bear listening to them, that is....

Here are some formidable ladies. Florence Foresti, Elizabeth Buffet and Anne-Sophie Girard talking about women comics, with a male interviewer who, after Foresti has carefully explained that she doesn't want to tell jokes about women for women, asks whether there are any particular subjects that women comics like to talk about !  It's a wonderful listening exercise, but I can't pretend that I pick up absolutely every word. One goes with the flow...

Dany Boon had such a success with Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis that one wondered how he could ever follow that film. Here is La maison du bonheur, and it's pretty good. He has the best actors now, of course, here, Michèle Laroque who plays the anguished mother duck to perfection. This is fast, and there are many moments where the intimate, idiomatic dialogue defeats us. Hang in there though. It couldn't be better as an exercise.

Early evening on France 5 there are a whole series of programme whose titles contract C'est  to C - C'est à dire, C'est dans l'air, and  C'est à vous, which is a trendy dinner party, hosted by a trendy lady. Surprising, because the adverts suggest that the viewers interests are mostly Stannah stair lifts and death insurance. However, they invited Laurent Ruquier, chat-show host, and one of the best presenters on French television. If you were looking for a listening exercise where a lot of people talk fast and at the same time - you've found it !

France 5 did an excellent docu-fiction on Charles Darwin, who seems to touch a chord with the French. Not just the impact of his theory, but the combat he was obliged to lead against the protests of the Church of the period.  I am quoting it for the voice of Jean-Pierre Marielle, who plays Darwin in old age. Marielle's voice is always pretty gravely, but here it descends to the very depths.

Empreintes did a programme on the actor Fabrice Luchini. I love his voice, and his over-the-top manner (British actors have become very boring in recent years), but this was quite hard going. Lots of background noise and Luchini muttering into his beard. However, interesting both on Luchini and on another passion he and I share - Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  As a listening exercise, quite hard going.

Apart from being an interesting programme, Café Picouly, with the incessant background noise of the café-bar, tests the ear. Here is the daughter of an actor of the 50s, Gérard Philippe, talking about her father. She is a good example of the problem we have when a speaker becomes excited, or amused, and suddenly our understanding drops out. A matter of improving the contextual filter of the brain.

I don't often quote from Bibliothèque Médicis LCP's programme for clever people chaired by Jean-Pierre Elkebbach. However, the one on Albert Camus was magnificent, and we have to have the wonderful extracts of Camus - greatest of all 20th century French writers, footballer rather than intellectual - being interviewed or speaking to camera.

What would we do without Arte ? They screened Le Dictateur - Chaplin's Great Dictator. Here is the speech right at the end. The mawkishness goes with the period. (As indeed does the music of Wagner - greatest of all the Hollywood film composers). And I don't care how often I have to say it - this is the sort of thing that French teachers should give their students as ear-training. A great film about liberty and humanity, spoken in French becomes a French film.

Pierre Palmade is an excellent comedian that we don't see often enough on French TV, so I was glad to catch this interview with him on TV8 Mont Blanc. But the extracts from his play are very difficult to follow. It's the problem of context. If the brain can guess the likely content of the speech, it can fill in the gaps caused by laughter from the audience or background noise on the stage. If not... then we have a problem.

The doyen of the French stage is Michel Bouquet. A great exponent of Molière, he has also done some extraordinary film parts, including President Mitterrand in Le promeneur du Champs de Mars. The voice is beautifully modulated and crystal clear, apart from the film extract at the end, which gets a bit difficult doesn't it ?

Man of the year stars Robin Williams - as great an actor as any country has produced - as a talk-show host who runs for President. The French audience will not have missed the parallel with Coluche, and I think we'll have to have an extract from a Coluche documentary dealing with that period of his life.

And following Robin Williams as the fictional comedian who runs for President, here is the real Coluche, greatest of all the French comedians, who did it for real in 1981, and got his fingers severely burned. The wonderful thing about Coluche is not that he took to drink and drugs and went off the rails, but that he made a determined come back and ended up as the saintly figure of Les restos du coeur.

The actor that figures most often on the cover of my telly magazine is Hugh Laurie, a minor British comic actor who went to America and has achieved fame as Dr House. The series is immensely popular on the most popular of the French TV channels, TF1. It is certainly better than most of the series that, sadly, constitute French popular culture today. But for us, it is good listening practice.

The series L'air du temps combines a retrospective on celebrities of popular culture, with the history of their times. France 5 gave us Serge Gainsbourg, a charming singer when young, a very great figure of popular music as he grew older.

We don't get many scientists on this page, but here is Jean-Pierre Luminet who, following an ancient French tradition, is happy to relate his work as an astrophysicist to the thoughts of Heraclitus or the beauty of a woman's hair. And quite right too. I enjoyed this number of La recherche nous est contée. Incidentally, people often talk of the French 'swallowing their words.' This man demonstrates this habit to perfection. But he is still pretty clear.

On Toute l'histoire I discovered a programme about two people of mixed French-English parentage, one of whom is Emilie Loizeau, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (as upper crust as it gets in Paris), and the grandchild of the English actress Peggy Ashcroft. She grew up in Paris, cuisited her grand mother at Christmas, and spent a couple of years in London as a student. She speaks English with a trendy London accent and her French is fast, trendy - and do I detect a hint of British in her voice ?

We know Jean Dujardin as a comic actor, star of the television series Un gars et une fille, and popular films such as OSS177 and Brice de Nice. But we've also seen him in plays such as Deux sur la balançoire. He's a fine actor. This film, 99F, is a comedy, but of the darkest sort. The subject, the world of advertising agencies and the horrors of modern capitalism, is very French, of course. It's a difficult test of the ear, but not a hard film to follow - one picks up the general sense easily enough. The detail is something else, though.

I found this biography of the poet Jacques Prévert hard going in the linguistic sense. Even the voice-over is slightly clouded, while Prévert's own voice is extremely indistinct. If suffering is the route to success, then this is a good exercise. But this is a very great poet, so it's worth the effort.

I don't often quote from Jean-Pierre Elkebbach's Bibliothèque Médicis, which is a little too rarefied for me, but here is Loràn Deutsch, an excellent actor who here speaks about the book he has written on Paris. And he speaks very, very quickly.Another very good exercise - and interesting too.

From time to time it does us good to listen to a very difficult extract. Here is Folie Douce, a film starring the very talented Muriel Robin. It is typical of the intimate style of dialogue that is typical of modern cinema. The exercise is less about identifying indindividual words than inferring the sense. Unfortunately the sense we infer is very often far from what the French audience will understand. We have to live with that. Good exercise.