Je T'Aime: Love story of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (Omnibus)

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BBC Radio 4 Extra

Je T'Aime: The legendary love story of Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg (Omnibus)

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Je T'Aime: The legendary love story of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Je T'Aime: The legendary love story of Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg (Omnibus)

The story of how two major cultural icons of the twentieth century came together.

Serge was frosty on first meeting Jane, but the relationship soon intensified. How the two got together. Read by Jane Slavin.

Gainsbourg and Birkin were arguably France’s most iconic couple - synonyms for love, glamour, eroticism, poetry and provocation. 

They met in 1968. She, an English aristocrat just arrived in Paris from Swinging London. He, the son of Russian immigrants, already the author of Le Poinçonneur des Lilas and La Javanaise and emotionally wrecked by his breakup with Brigitte Bardot.

Their love story set Paris aflame as the 1960s ebbed, and set in motion many of the ideas we have by now come to think of as specifically French.

Skipping back and forth in time, Je T’Aime takes the listener from the foggy Normandy landscapes where Serge and Jane retreated, to their carefree summers on the coast. En route to superstardom in films and music, we experience their intrigues, triangular relationships and jealous rages, the genius and the self-torture.

Jane Birkin died aged 76 in July 2023. Serge Gainsbourg was 62 when he died in 1991.  

Le Monde Journalist and acclaimed author Véronique Mortaigne talked to the pair’s friends, family and colleagues to cast new light on these two massive personalities, who together created a model of the rebel couple for the ages.

Véronique has been head of music and arts at Le Monde and is the author of a dozen books, including biographies of Cesaria Evora, Manu Chao, and Johnny Halliday.

Read by Jane Slavin.  

Omnibus of five parts abridged by Polly Coles.

Producer: Clive Brill

A Brill production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in February 2019.

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Je T'Aime: The legendary love story of Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg (Omnibus)

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