Some stories no screenwriter would ever dare to write. This one begins outside a nightclub, passes through a circus menagerie, boards line B of the tram and ends up on television sets, in sports stadiums and even in the pages of the Guardian. Its hero has four legs, a white fleece, an unflappable gaze and the name of a French crooner. Thirteen years ago, on the night of 30 to 31 October 2013, in the small hours of Halloween, Bordeaux met Serge the llama. And the whole of France smiled.
An autumn night at the Bassins Ă flot
It is the night between Wednesday and Thursday. Five young Bordelais leave a nightclub in the Bassins Ă flot area, in Bacalan. They have been drinking, the night is in their legs, and just a stone's throw away stands a big top: John Beautour's Cirque Franco-Italien is in town. The five friends walk into the menagerie and open the stalls. They apparently first had their eye on a zebra, then settled for a calmer resident: an eight-year-old white llama, born in 2005 in Saint-Nazaire, named Serge in honour of the singer Serge Lama.
No plan, no cause. One of them would later tell Sud Ouest that it was not an activist stunt to free circus animals, and that none of them saw it as theft. "We went back to being kids, really," sums up Mathieu, one of the five. He adds a detail that says everything about the group's state of mind: they were afraid the animal would be rough "like dreadlocks", but it was "really soft".
One more passenger on line B
The little troop heads to the Bassins Ă flot tram stop, on line B. And Serge gets on board. No trouble at all, according to one of the young men interviewed by BFM TV: the llama apparently put up no resistance. "We love animals, we took him for a walk with us the way we would have with a nice dog," one of them told Sud Ouest.
That is when the famous photos were born. First, a group selfie on the street, under the orange glow of the streetlamps: five grinning faces, eyes lit up by the flash, and right in the middle, a llama's head peering at the lens with total composure. Then, inside the tram, a shot of Serge standing on his own in the aisle of an empty carriage, between the rows of blue seats, like a regular waiting for his stop. Shaky, grainy, overexposed pictures, a long way from polished photography, and yet unforgettable. Posted on social media, they would go round the country in a few hours, then round the world.
The driver, for his part, is not used to carrying camelids. He reports the incident and stops the tram. The llama is tied up while waiting for his owner to arrive. The five young men are picked up, near the Place de la Comédie according to press reports at the time, and spend a few hours in police custody before being released.
A gloriously stupid idea, and not without risk
Let's be honest: taking an animal out of its pen in the middle of the night, after a boozy evening, to put it on a tram, was not a good idea. Serge could have been hurt, panicked or fallen onto the tracks. Mathieu admitted he had not really thought about how dangerous it was. At the circus, nobody was laughing at first either: while the group was out walking, a zebra nearly escaped, John Beautour told Sud Ouest, and staff had to run all over the place to catch it. The director filed a complaint at the police station that very Thursday.
Fortunately, the story ends well. Serge got back to the big top safe and sound, and every outlet that asked after him got the same answer: he was fine. The following Sunday, seeing that nobody had been hurt and nothing had been damaged in town, John Beautour withdrew his complaint. In his line of work, he told 20 Minutes, "we're not the suing kind". He said he held nothing against the young men, and even admitted the episode had brought him more spectators than usual.
Serge, a global star in 48 hours
What happened next took everyone by surprise. The story started in Sud Ouest, on TV7 Bordeaux and France 3 Aquitaine, then reached Le Parisien, TF1, France 2, BFM TV and iTélé. It crossed the Channel: The Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian all told the tale of the Bordeaux llama's night out. On Facebook, a page supporting "the 5 Bordelais who took Serge the llama for a ride on a tram", a tongue-in-cheek nod to another support page that was stirring controversy at the time, passed 100,000 fans by 3 November, then several hundred thousand. More, people joked back then, than the page of the President of the Republic.
Photoshopped images popped up everywhere: Serge sightseeing in Bordeaux, Serge with his travel pass. A parody Twitter account gave him a voice. The real Serge Lama, born in Bordeaux in 1943, was amused, telling Le Parisien he had "had a good laugh", joking that nobody could ever again say he lacked a young audience, and seeing this story of a llama from his home town as a welcome break from the general gloom.
From the menagerie to Le Grand Journal
Serge, meanwhile, set off on a celebrity tour. On 7 November 2013, he performed the ceremonial face-off at the Boxers de Bordeaux ice hockey game against Mulhouse, at the MĂ©riadeck rink. On Sunday 10 November, he walked onto the pitch at the Stade Chaban-Delmas before Bordeaux against Nantes in Ligue 1. As a lucky charm he did not quite deliver, but who cares. He turned up at a radio show at Bercy in Paris, and on 13 December he presented the weather on Canal+'s Le Grand Journal alongside SĂ©bastien Thoen.
A Nouvelle Star contestant, Philippe Krier, dedicated "Lamaoutai" to him, a parody of Stromae's Papaoutai watched more than four million times. A little smartphone game, Serge visits the city, featured his wanderings. A classified ad even offered the famous llama for hire at 500 euros a day, and one nightclub reportedly paid 2,000 euros to have him over. Faced with imitators keen to cash in on his fame, John Beautour registered the "Serge le lama" trademark with France's intellectual property office as early as 6 November 2013.
And then?
A year later, the buzz had died down, but not the affection. Serge had become the star of the Cirque Franco-Italien, whose poster proudly announced "the famous Serge the llama", and spectators queued after the show for a photo with him. According to Wikipedia, he died of old age in the summer of 2020, at around fifteen years old.
Why we still love it so much
Thirteen years on, why does this story still make us smile? Perhaps because it is almost disarmingly innocent. No victim, no villain, no grand moral: just five friends who did something hugely silly, a llama who kept his cool better than anyone, a circus director who ended up offering his hand, and a singer who laughed it off. A very Bordeaux story, too, with its line B, its Bassins Ă flot then in the middle of their transformation, and its Chaban-Delmas stadium.
In 2013, the internet could still get excited about a llama on a tram. In times like these, when we often wonder where it is all heading, it feels good to look in the rearview mirror and find what used to make us laugh together. So next time you board tram B at Bassins Ă flot, take a look at the back of the carriage. You never know.
Serge the llama: key dates
29 June 2005: Serge is born in Saint-Nazaire
Night of 30 to 31 October 2013: five young men take him on tram B, Bassins Ă flot stop
3 November 2013: the Cirque Franco-Italien withdraws its complaint
6 November 2013: "Serge le lama" trademark registered
10 November 2013: Serge on the pitch at Chaban-Delmas before Bordeaux v Nantes
13 December 2013: weather forecast on Canal+'s Le Grand Journal
Summer 2020: Serge dies of old age, according to Wikipedia