Expression with a vengeance

It has been 5 months that I have been off the airwaves at my home. So when I finally checked into my hotel room in Kolkata I got to see it after a good- long gap.
I will not go into the details of why I decided to tune myself off from television. Let’s us keep that for some other post, but I would definitely like to share an ‘outsiders’ perspective on television of today.

Out of the, around, 85 channels that we pay for, from about Rs. 100/- to 275/- (depending on where we are living and how aggressive the cable operator is) the rough make up is thus.
About 15% are prime time channels, about another 10% are film channels (both Hindi & English), add another 20% as news channels (in different languages), to this add 20% of regional language programming, about 10% sports channels, 10% of channels for kids and another 10% channels for music loving audience (Hindi or English). The rest 5% or less can be put under the statistical ‘others’ (this includes Travel & Living or History Channel and a few more like these).

When you see the above approximations it is amply clear what the programmers think is selling:
1. 25%: Regional language programming sells
2. 20%: News sells (more on the ‘news making’ nature of news sellers later here)
3. 15% Prime Time Channels: Long and strange (to me) plots sell
4. 15% Film Channels: For lazy, cinema avoiding, husbands and non-working women
4. 10% Music Channels: ‘Watch’ music rather than listen to it
5. 10% each: Kid programming sells as much as sport (read Cricket)

Let us now try and look behind these percentages. I cannot say much about the regional language programming (except Punjabi music channels) because I do not understand most of the other languages. But I can sure hazard a guess that content-wise they are not very different from the plot-lines of most of the leading prime-time Hindi soaps. These regional language soaps, like their prime-time counterparts in Hindi, are about joint (but ‘fractured’) business families, where men work more on their marriage & family than in office, where mobile phones are more a way to create confusion among different relationships than to communicate, where clothes are worn as if one of the characters were getting married and others had come to attend their wedding, where background scores, over shadow the scenes in the foreground.
In sum an overdose of emotion, expression and mascara, laced with ornate settings and dominating sounds.

The second dominant group of channels is News. Be it business or politics, it seems that today we more number of reporters per citizen! For almost everything is reported.
On one side media enthusiasm has done many a good. Be is collecting aid for natural or man made calamites or helping people express their opinion on issues of everyday concern or even getting culprits to justice.
But in their enthusiasm to continue with their spoils and under the pressure to deliver the desired number of TRPs for the next round of Venture capital funding, news channels are turning into entertainment modules. This is a good way or breaking free from the classic ‘News for Information Paradigm’ but at what cost?
Today we have reporters going overboard on camera, getting emotional about the situation they are reporting – casually measuring the depth and width of potholes on Mumbai roads, or shouting loud into the camera about a dialer’s unanswered call at a customer care help line number, or worst still reporting everyday happenings as globe altering events!
News reporting mannerisms of today seem to be driven by a thumb rule – the viewer would be bored, if you do not go overboard!
Curiously even the News Channels serve an overdose of sound, emotion and expression.

I am not talking as much about kid’s channels because they have already been colourful and full of expression. But I would sure like to make point about the way cricket is reported. It is over analyzed, over hyped and grossly over rated by those who make a living out of talking about cricket! I sincerely hope that cricket continues to be as big a draw as it is made to be.

The bigger picture emerging seems to be that as a society we are going into an expression overdrive. Everything we feel or thin needs a loud expression. In many ways subtlety has been reduced to a marginal trait of the contemporary Indian. And marketers know this very well.

Try and recall the spicy and yet subtle Mr. Yogi that was a big primetime success of yore. Or even a Hum Log. Despite the fact that this serial for the then, urban strata that could be called the counterpart of today’s Himesh Reshmayya & Tere Naam fans.

Both of them were anything but over expressive. Try and recall the news reporting from the west (I am not saying that they are the best). But somehow they still have been able to retain the sanctity of the 30 minutes of World News on BBC. It is calm, composed, objective and rich. Not to mention the holding power of that rare smile from the news reporter. It is almost as if it were a window to their emotional side. But you only get a glimpse of it and that too only once in a while.

May be over expression symbolizes the contemporary urban (and who knows even rural) India. May be it is the media clutter that makes channels pump up the emotion and expression levels of the content in order to be heard better.
But one thing that seems to be certain is that audience & viewers like the one who wrote this Blog is a minority - a minority that is not being addressed on the Tube (leave aside Travel & Living, History Channel, BBC or NGC).

No wonder then the 35” LCD TV in my Kolkata hotel room still could not excite me about the content on it.