2012 was one of those years where there should have been cause for celebration. After all, it was the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Intervilles in France, and yet the management of France Télévisions chose to keep the series in mothballs for a third year - it had not been on French television screens since the summer of 2009.

But was it really in mothballs? It can't have been as there was an Intervilles International series recorded between May and June 2012, pitting French teams against others from China, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia and Spain... but this series was never screened in France, quite possibly because the French teams performed so poorly.

However, a book written by Sylvie Hamez and entitled Génération Intervilles was published on 21st September 2012 by L'Agenda du Sport, was published to mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, even if France Télévisions spurned their own opportunity. The book - now hard to find - traced 50 years of Intervilles through a series of memorable anecdotes and paints an engaging and little-known portrait of the series' emblematic host, Guy Lux.

by Alan Hayes

JSFnetGB Series Guide pages researched by
Neil Storer and Alan Hayes
with Ischa Bijl, Julien Dessy, Sébastien Dias, David Hamilton, Denis Kirsanov, Paul Leaver, Philippe Minet,
Christos Moustakas, David Laich Ruiz, Marko Voštan and JSFnet Websites