Grichka & Igor Bogdanoff Die Of Covid Days Apart: Eccentric Twin French TV Presenters Were 72

Max Goldbart
·2 min read
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Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, the eccentric French TV presenter twins, have died of Covid within six days of each other. Igor died Monday and Grichka on December 28. They were 72.

The BBC said the unvaccinated brothers had told friends their healthy lifestyle would protect them from Covid, but both were admitted to hospital in the middle of last month. Although their families did not specify the cause of their deaths, their lawyer Edouard de Lamaze confirmed that both contracted the virus.

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Igor Bogdanoff’s family said in a statement he had “gone towards the light,” surrounded by his children and family.

The identical twin brothers were raised by their maternal grandmother, Countess Bertha Kolowrat-Krakowská, in a castle in Southern France.

The Bogdanoffs first started making a name for themselves in 1979, when they hosted Saturday afternoon science-fiction show Temps X, which aired from a spaceship set and ran for a decade on French broadcaster TF1. The show exhibited the day’s cutting-edge technology along with introducing French audiences to the likes of Doctor Who and Star Trek.

Later, the Bogdanoffs also fronted France 2’s Rayons X.

Away from hosting, they became well-known for their facial features changing dramatically in the 1990s, and later they got caught up in the 2002 Bogdanov Affair, an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical papers the twins wrote after they obtained Ph.Ds. The affair –with an alternate spelling of their surname — led to a period of introspection for the peer-review system, which was deemed by many physicists to have failed.

The pair won a 2014 court case for defamation before losing a lawsuit against the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

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