TELEPROMPT
Cricket will hog the limelight
Mannika Chopra 

We all know that TV thinks that the best way to entice viewers is by using that old viewing formula — the four Cs, cricket, cinema, crime and comedy. You can be rest assured that over the next few months, 70 per cent, no, make that 80 per cent, of non-fiction viewing time is going to be swamped by news about cricket. First, with the World Cup, and then the India Premier League. Ye old viewer is going to be inundated with cricket mania.

Already the news channels are running nostalgia stories about when India won its one and only World Cup. The glory days are being revisited in documentaries, discussions, quizzes and oodles of flashback footage. Prizes are being offered for daily questions: reference to context, watch CNN-IBN, which is offering daily inducements for questions like when did India win the World Cup. Well, this is all very well for diehard cricket fans and even those vaguely interested in the game, but what about the rest of us non-believers?

Blasphemy, I can hear you gasp, but you might as well know there are a lot of us who do not eat, breathe, live cricket and, heck, still manage to survive. Well, for us there the old staples will do — crime, comedy and cinema. For crime there is a new twist to Fox Crime, which focuses on crime 24x7 and variants thereof, like death and investigations. In the death category comes a horrendous series, 1000 Ways to Die. And just when you thought this was one of those crazy fiction shows, you realise it is a mixture of fact, myth and history with a narrative that stresses black humour. The title says it all, though the series could happily be called Good Grief, too, without too much trouble. Or even Comedy of Terrors. This is a death parade that showcases the really, really, whimsical ways a person can meet his maker.

News channels are already running nostalgia stories about how India won the World Cup in 1983

Here are some random examples. A woman who dies because of a faulty butt implant; or the Japanese who bowed down, as his countrymen do, to greet a fellow Japanese and fatally cracked his skull. Then there are the two bootleggers who, during the days of prohibition in America, drank their own cheap, country liquor and died. The examples are straight out of Ripley's Believe It or Not, but you better believe it; they are all true. Rating? A bizarre must watch.

Still on the crime trail, Zee Studio offers In Plain Sight, a series on a federal agent who relocates people because of a witness protection programme. All predictable stuff, which always ends happily, with the chief protagonist solving the “who dunn it” efficiently, like Michael in Burn Notice on Star World. Here a federal agent has been eliminated by his organisation, not killed, but his official existence has been wiped out. His mission, while sorting out neighbourhood crimes, is to find out why. Rating for both these shows? If you must.

TV has this unerring habit of building up personalities, brands if you will. In the days gone by there were people like the late S.P. Singh, Prannoy Roy and Rajat Sharma. But, strangely, these tele brands remained brands only if they stayed with the channel that gave them that initial platform. Rajat Sharma exploded on the Indian television scene through his in-the-dock interview format, Aap Ki Adalat. The programme ran on Zee TV forever. Sharma became well known, almost a household word. But when he shifted base from Zee, he took his show with him first to Star Plus and then to the channel he started, India TV. But though the format remained the same, the programme lost some of its USP. It failed to capture the popular imagination as it did in the past. May be it was the competition or the other “me-toos” that have sprung up; whatever, but the show lost its glitter.