As I look back, a little more than a quarter of a century later, I seem to have lost count and track of the large number of people we encountered and featured on the programme.
I remember Dr. Piyasiri Vijayasekere, illuminating a Bonsoir Sinhala programme on French literature in his lucid and easy-going style. Siri’s knowledge was an asset to Bonsoir.
His most famous French to Sinhala translation to date is Marcel Pagnol’s La femme du boulanger (The Baker’s Wife) as Bakkara Biriya, Hevath Babie (1991).
This was followed by Albert Camus’ L’etranger, as Amuthuma minihek (1992) which went on to win the “Best Translation” award at the Independent Literary Festival in 1993.
There was also Georges Bizet’s libretto of the opera Les pecheurs de perles into a lyric Sinhala translation as Muthu kimidenno (2008) and then again Marcel Pagnol’s La fille du puisatier as Lin maamage doniyenda hevath lindo (2009).
Once when Srimani Athulathmudali was a Minister in the Chandrika Kumaratunga Government she spoke to the incumbent French Ambassador and requested that her teenage daughter Serala do a two week “internship” with Bonsoir. I didn’t know why she chose Bonsoir but I knew that that particular week, we were doing a programme on the “smart card” and plastic money.
We had various guests come for interviews and some of them were quite shocked to see the Ministerial offspring holding up the mic stand just like any studio assistant would. Yes, Serela Athulathmudali (now Mrs. Wilian Da. S. Santos) resembled her mother greatly. I believed she learnt something about television production, but better still I remember the boxes of warm cutlets she brought the perennially hungry Bonsoir team.
I remember musician Anura Jayasinghe of “The Balladeers” fame performing for Bonsoir by the swimming pool of the now Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel. Jayasinghe is credited as being the first Sri Lankan musician to bring original Sinhalese songs to French radio and television in 1987.
Having begun his career with the group La Ceylonians, he had the honour of performing on board Air Lanka’s inaugural Tristar flights on the US and Tokyo sectors.
In 1989 Anura Jaysinghe signed a contract with the Arion Recording Company, which made a compact disc and a cassette titled ”Welcome to Sri Lanka” which met with great success and was sold in 20 countries.
In 1996, he signed a contract with French Television’s Channel 4 and later with the cable television RFO satellite in 2003.
My dear friend Yashodha Wimaladharma once graced Bonsoir with her charming presence and had our viewers entertained with her multilingual skills. She spoke in English, Sinhala, French, and Hindi.
Yasho was cast in the 1993 Franco-Swiss-Canadian film Le Prix d’une Femme (The Price of a Woman) directed by Gerard Krawczyk and related her experiences on location, one of which included having her face slashed (and cosmetic blood oozing from a gash and also having her tresses (a wig really) chopped off by a rival actress.
That was also the first and only time, alas, I was cast in a full length movie. The role lasted a fulfilling 15 seconds and I was seen on a television screen in an airport’s departure lounge as a Dordharshan news reader. So much for cinematic glory!
Reliving his six months training at the House of Christian Dior in Paris was the celebrated couturier Kirthi Sri Karunaratne in the Bonsoir studio one day. He took viewers back to the mid 1950s when Geoffrey de Seynes from the House of Dior came to Ceylon and happened to read an article by Times of Ceylon Features Editor Sita Parakrama. It was titled “School Sari Designer”. The Frenchman was intrigued and, as I fast forward the story, KSK ended in Paris, “spending some of the best moments of my life”, as he recalls.
Once upon a time, somewhere in the nineties a person called Gilbert Abeygoonaratne called Bonsoir and asked us if we would like to feature his two little daughters who were both Francophone pianists living in Monaco. That’s how Bonsoir struck a friendship with Shani and Rika Abeygoonaratne, two delightful little children who have grown up to be two charming young women.
They were our guests on Bonsoir whenever they visited Sri Lanka. The keyboard of the grand piano at the Alliance Francaise was their canvas with which they used to transport Bonsoir’s viewers into the realms of music.
So also was Roshini Herat, later Madame Chapillon, sister of Sirisha, one of my batchmates at the University of Kelaniya. Those were the days when we carted cumbersome U-matic recorders around for recordings. Roshini was performing at the Lionel Wendt one evening and we decided to record the concert. I didn’t realise that one of her pieces was particularly long. Our cassette finished half way through, and in the dead silence of the auditorium, Chintha ejected it to insert a new one. It made such a noise in that pin drop silence that one furious patron lashed out at us with four letter adjectives. We were from the French Embassy and thus could not lash back. We hastily apologised and sat transfixed to our seats the entire evening.
The guests we have met have been innumerable and too numerous to mention by name. I close this chapter now more out of compulsion than out of wish.
The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.