SIGHT & SOUND
Ads spoil the fun
Amita Malik

I think it is time we assessed the influence of television on elections and voters. One is beginning to think that it cuts both ways. On the one hand, viewers see their candidates electioneering, sometimes with little heed to courtesy or fairness in the allegations they make about their opponents. In fact, it is a case of no holds barred. I think Indian voters are now mature enough to think for themselves and make up their own minds. And so we come to the TV pundits, with all their psephology and political analyses, holding forth for weeks in advance, making their all-knowing forecasts. And you have each channel claiming to be the first with everything under the sun.

Well, there have been many red faces in the past and this time it was even worse. If the Congress was unpleasantly surprised and the BJP pleasantly so, our TV pundits ended up with egg on their faces. What remained to be seen was how the victorious and defeated candidates behaved once the results were out. Some gloated, others blamed everyone except themselves for their defeat and a rare few behaved with grace both in victory and defeat. Vasundhararaje and Sheila Dikshit were very dignified about their victory, while Digvijay Singh too was exceptionally gracious in defeat. Ambika Soni was rightly subdued and Pramod Mahajan quietly modest. TV is a very revealing medium and if our forecasters were by and large looking pretty silly, at least they did not blame others, which was the right attitude for saving face.

For me, the best part of the election coverage was that for the first time DD took advantage of its sarkari monopoly status and beat the others to it while giving the results, because they had a hot line, which others did not.

.Some will call it an unfair advantage but considering how DD has had the habit of being left behind because of its sarkari hang-ups and timidity in the past, one is glad it has at last woken up to the advantages it has as a sarkari channel. However, its field reporters by and large speak very badly, particulary in English, which has a surfeit of undecipherable regional accents. It was all the more prominent this time as regional reporters were at last given a chance to show their skills.

At the same time, it was good to find that DD’s own rare staffers of exceptional merit were given a chance, instead of the pushy outsiders who have so far dominated interviews with top personalities. I was particularly impressed by Elizabeth Jain, who did a first-rate interview with Chief Election Commissioner J M Lyngdoh. Jain was up-to-date with her facts, was relaxed and confident. She smiled at the right moments, never interrupted and covered every possible aspect of Lyngdoh — his career, his experiences during different elections (he said the Kashmir elections were particularly "scary") and even his dogs and his pastimes. He said after retirement he would at first do nothing (except perhaps look at butterflies) and then write a book on how he conducted the Kashmir elections. Well, done Elizabeth, this is one of the finest interviews I have seen on Indian TV and not just Doordarshan.

Trust a most exciting cricket match to clash with the elections! You would be surprised how many viewers were so sick of dirty politics that they preferred to watch the cricket test in Brisbane, especially as ads did not obtrude at the wrong moments on Star Sports, as they do on Doordarshan. It was also touching to have Geoffrey Boycott back as commentator, after facing bouncers over several months in the form of cancer of the throat. He was in fine voice and it was good to have him back with his witty comments.

Some of us even caught up with Jogger’s Park, which we had missed at the cinema. But I must tell Zee TV that the film was ruined for everyone by long interruptions with boringly repetitive advertisements which stretched the reasonably middle-length film to three hours. The action was broken up for long periods so many times that some viewers thought the film had ended and switched off. I slogged on for purely professional reasons, to see how long they could carry on. But it did not make for pleasurable viewing.

It is time that channels exercised some sort of self-control on advertisements so that neither sports events, as in the case of Doordarshan, nor serials, films and other entertainment programmes on Indian channels are so overladen with advertisements that viewers feel that the ads come before them. A better idea would be to lump the advertisements at the beginning and the end and have one in the middle as a sort of interval ad. There should be no interruptions every few minutes. The serial I watch every week, Astitva, has also been ruined first by a mindless change of actresses and the long tedious ads apart from the mid-week interruption of the serial itself. Keeping viewers perpetually irritated for the sake of making big money may sound good to producers and advertisers but it is not the way to keep viewers happy.