Caméra Café is a French-born concept of comedy television series exported around the world. A movie spin-off has been made in France under the title of Espace détente. It was originally a French television show created by Bruno Solo, Yvan Le Bolloc'h and Alain Kappauf and broadcast from September 2001 to December 2003 on the M6 channel.

700 episodes of 7 minutes each have been produced and were broadcast again on M6 in 2004. The show revolves around a dysfunctional office. Its originality stems from the fact that, within the fiction, the camera is fixed into the automated coffee machine of the office space.

Adaptations

• Republic of Ireland (2002-2003)
• Quebec (2002–)
• Greece (2002)
• Italy (2003–)
• Poland (2004)
• Spain (2005–)
• Portugal (2006–)
• Philippines (2007-)
• Indonesia (2008-)
• Australia
• Flanders
• Luxembourg
• Switzerland
• Ukraine
• Yugoslavia
• Brazil
• La Réunion, the show is both in Créole and French, depending on the origins of the characters.

The length of an episode varies on the locale. In Quebec, where the shorter format is less prevalent than in France, episodes are 30 minutes long, commercials included (inversely, the Quebec show Un gars, une fille, originally half an hour long, was reduced to 9 minutes in its French version). Italy kept the 7 minutes format and Spain chose a 45 minutes format.

Trivia

• A Caméra Café video game came out in 2005,and a sequel in 2006.
• The title is a pun of Caméra cachée which means ‘hidden camera’.
• The Principal gimmick of this show is that all the scenes are shot from a camera that appears to be located in the cafe machine, just above the space where the cups are served. Hence all the conversations and scenarios are exposed from this point of view.
• Camera Café has also been adapted in comics. The authors are the Belgians Didgé, Stibane and G. Van Linthout. The albums are edited by Jungle.

References