It’s tunnel vision on television

I watch very little television. Not because I have anything against the medium, but because I rarely find anything on it to sustain my interest.

I watch very little television. Not because I have anything against the medium, but because I rarely find anything on it to sustain my interest. My TV viewing consists of films on the movie channels once in a while and some favourite English serials. And sometimes I watch bits of Indian reality shows to see how much of an ass people are ready to make of themselves to be on television and earn big money, and how blindingly gaudy are the clothes they are willing to wear in the process of doing so.

Several new entertainment channels have been launched in recent months, and only a Cassandra would know how many more are itching to unleash themselves on us in the coming 12 months. And the absurdity of the whole situation is that each new channel is exactly like all the old ones we had! It is amazing to see the same mix of content in channel after entertainment channel after channel. The identical saas-bahu serials shot in that bright flat lighting that casts no shadows, that is Ekta Kapoor’s contribution to film technique. The reality song-and-dance shows starring vaguely familiar TV stars. The over-the-top comedy shows about eccentric joint families (strangely enough, TV producers appear to believe that Gujarati families are more likely to be eccentric than those from any other community). The serials about troubled young men and women where the actors look like they spend their weekdays in beauty parlours and their weekends at their colleges. Stand-up comedian contests replete with sexist and quite often offensive jokes, but none of the judges, guffawing like runaway locomotives, ever seem to notice this. Not a single new programming idea, not a single attempt to break the mould, do something that has not been beaten and bludgeoned to death, no intention at all to cock one’s ear to a different drummer. Even Ramayana has returned.

Is there no TV audience in India for anything other than repetition, reiteration and recapitulation? Of course, I can sense the logic these channels are following: these formulae have been successful for many years now, so go with the flow, while claiming to be unique. As a client once told me during my advertising days two decades ago: “What I want is a breakthrough idea that has been tried and tested many times before.”

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But how many saas-bahu serials can a human being watch? The people who direct these serials would surely look at themselves as ‘creative’ people. Don’t they ever feel like creating something new and distinctive? If the answer to that question is: the masses want only this kind of stuff, and we have to give them what they want, my reply would be: but when was the last time you did anything different and checked? When was the last time any channel aired something like a Nukkad or a Karamchand?

OK, fine, let’s assume the masses have changed since then, and a Nukkad won’t get high TRPs today. And TRPs are crucial to get advertising and sponsorship. So how come MTV commands higher advertising rates than ETC, when the latter music channel has much higher TRPs? The answer is that the MTV viewer is perceived as richer and better educated and more likely to buy premium products. It’s the same as in print media. Upmarket products with smaller readerships are getting fatter by the day, gorging on more and more advertising pages. Have mass television, by all means, but surely there is a market for class television in Hindi (I am not familiar with TV programming in other Indian languages, so can’t comment on them)? That market may be much smaller than the one for serials in which everyone wakes up in the morning in full make-up, but the average household in that market would surely have higher buying power than the saas-bahu one, and is also more likely to be an opinion leader. And they are interested in Hindi entertainment; that’s why so many quirky Hindi movies are making money, the ones that are referred to as ‘made for an urban audience’.

I wish someone would take the risk and try a channel that is intelligent and entertaining for an evolved audience, and call the bluff in this cloning game.

And the client who wanted the tried-and tested breakthrough idea? We got a cricketer to endorse his brand. I don’t think the brand exists any more.

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(Sandipan Deb, former editor of The Financial Express, heads the planned magazine venture of the RPG Group)