SIGHT & SOUND

Crime stories
A case of overkill
Amita Malik

AS a professional media watcher, I am duty bound to watch certain programmes for my column. But I cannot claim that I enjoy them. And lately the number is slowly climbing.

To begin with, the programmes on crime which every channel now puts on at prime time and sometimes in a big weekly round-up. Conceding that it is important for citizens to know of the dangers around the corner, I still think this is done more to create sensation than enlighten society and I think they should remain confined to news items where other more positive items appear alongside and puts crime into its proper perspective. In any case, most of the crime stories have already been repeated several times in the news of the day and just lumping them together does not make them different.

Also, and I know not many people will like this, I squirm every time I see those Page 3-type programmes where the Page 3 wannabes are shown wining and dining, sometimes with their mouths wide open or swallowing food and sometimes making the most frivolous comments to the camera. The anchors of these programmes have a fixed feel-good smile, baring their teeth non-stop and the noise, over which the silly comments can barely be heard, really gets me down. To tell you the truth, I am not interested in those people and I doubt if anyone else is, barring those who go to such parties. You can call it the generation gap, but what galls me the most is the news captions running simultaneously at the bottom of the screen, reporting dowry deaths, deaths from cold and the rising figures of AIDS patients in India. There is a moral in this somewhere.

Then there are the tishum-tishum films, with the most inane plots, that they show. These can be seen when one wants to relax after a hard morning’s work or latish at night. They are amusing up to a point, but one cannot help thinking that TV has become a dumping ground for box-office flops. A better development is that different films such as Lagaan or Mr and Mrs Iyer are also now shown reasonably soon after their release and one can see a parallel audience for them slowly increasing.

As for the serials of the saas-bahu variety, there is an audience for their equivalents in every part of the world. But the over-made up women of all age groups — who emerge even from sleeping in bed with their make-up intact and in exotic sarees which never crumple — and the often strange twists and turns in their plots such as reviving a dead hero due to popular demand stretches one’s credibility to the wildest limits. But no one seems to mind. Here again, serials like Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi and Astitva`85 (with its unending ads which take up more time than the serial) are slowly catching on and popular tastes will hopefully change for the better.

Than, as a film specialist, I really blanch at the way programmes with a filmi base are anchored. All these half-starved-looking girls look alike, are attired in dresses that have strange noodle straps, and their artificial smiles and hugely contrived liveliness — what with all that jumping all over the place and screaming in excitement — makes the anchoring monotonous as well as ridiculous. It all started a few years ago and the strange language the girls speak is also extremely irritating. Generation gap again, I think, but there have occasionally been programmes which take a serious look at the cinema, mostly during national and international film festivals. These barely save the day because they come and go and have nothing like the lavish time given to the daily filmi chakkar on all channels.

By this time readers must have decided that a surfeit of TV viewing is making me suffer from TV lag. So I shall end with the ads. The ones in the poorest taste are the ones with crude sexual innuendoes. "Next best thing to naked" says a sexy voice in an ad for very tight men’s underpants. Not a pretty sight, I am afraid. And the explicit ones for sanitary towels, with no subtlety about them, do not really make for family viewing. I have known older people getting very embarrassed in front of visitors and younger girls feeling awful too. If not censorship, at least restraint is called for on the part of those who make these ads.