SIGHT & SOUND
No fair play
Amita Malik

THERE are a large number of well-known TV personalities, including editors, who are now doing high-level interviews on TV. Some are doing two or three interview programmes on different channels, which has taken away the exclusivity which is so precious to both channels and interviewers abroad. For instance, I cannot think of Tim Sebastian except in association with the BBC. Which is what gives him so much status.

I have come to the conclusion that with the honourable exceptions of Shekhar Gupta (who does not interview so many women anyway) and Karan Thapar, most men interviewers have distinctly different attitudes when it comes to interviewing women. I shall start with two examples. I consider Vir Sanghvi, whom I have known personally and professionally for many years, a thorough gentleman, to use an old-fashioned phrase of which my generation is very fond. But I must confess that I was appalled at the way he kept on bullying Tabu in one of his interview programmes.

He asked questions about her personal life with a good deal of malice, and generally tried to make her as uncomfortable as possible. And, look at the friendly and constructive manner in which Sanghvi interviewed Naseeruddin Shah recently, bringing out the best in this most interesting and lovable of actors. I have yet to see Sanghvi put any woman interviewee, especially from the film world, into as comfortable and relaxed a mood. He always seems to be scoring points off them.

More subtle, and therefore more malicious, is Karan Johar in Koffee with Karan. He chooses the pair he interviews for each programme with great care. Sometimes it is a man and a woman who have had an affair in their personal lives, but are ostensibly selected for their professional standing. More cruelly, at times it is two women known to be rivals. For instance, Rani Mukherjee and Kareena Kapoor. He then pits them against each other on two planes: who is the better actress and who is more sexy.

This is done quite openly and then some man known to them both is brought in to assess them, to the acute embarrassment but outwardly great amusement of all three. This may titillate viewers, and is certainly entertaining, but I do not entirely admire Karan’s motives in the way he pairs them off. I also think the way he gets his women dressed in sexy clothes, while they worry about how to cross or uncross their legs or how to keep their single noodle strap from slipping is more worthy of DD’s odious programme Fourth Umpire, which is a poor filler during cricket matches and where a woman with noodle straps is kept as male voyeur bait.

Personalities like Shobhaa De and Shabana Azmi are known for their good style of dressing and I am surprised that they submit to being clad sexily and differently by Johar. Simi Garewal only asks her invitees to be formally dressed for Rendezvous and I think leaves it to them to choose their own colours, etc. What I am getting at is that most top women have the standing to say "No", and they should exercise that option. That they have coped skilfully and graciously with Sanghvi’s tough tactics and Karan Johar’s carefully laid out traps is a tribute to them and no marks to their interlocutors.

DD’s Fourth Umpire has only become more and more worse. One morning during the last test, Charu Sharma was absent and not missed at all. But Ms Noodle Strap (Roshni Chopra), who is at best qualified to be a telephone operator to take calls from viewers and announce ads for Fair and Lovely started trying to talk cricket. It was more irritating than laughable, as the camera was on her torso even when Mohinder Amarnath and Krish Srikkanth, the only experts, were talking. I suggest that these two experts are quite sufficient to talk cricket during intervals and Ms Noodle Strap and Charu Sharma are quite redundant and dispensable. I was flooded with protests by viewers on this score.

I expressed my helplessness to force Ms Noodle Strap to keep her mouth shut on cricket or to disappear from the screen. But I passed on their protests to the Director-General of Doordarshan Navin Kumar. He seemed just as helpless, as Ms Noodle Strap came back with renewed force, hogging the camera and trying to out-talk Amarnath and Srikkanth on cricket. Heaven help us.