TELEPROMPT
Jackson gets record airtime
MANNIKA CHOPRA

It was the day that music died. The immortal lines written by Don Maclean in Bye Bye Miss American Pie when Elvis Presley died came to haunt us again last Friday when the world heard that Michael Jackson, too, had reached, hopefully, a happier hunting ground. The rock star, perhaps the last greatest pop icon that the world will ever know, slipped into a Never Neverland of his own making, and television all across the world collectively wept, idolised and remembered the star whom everybody had called Whacko-Jacko not so long ago.

There was a time when the death of stars caused only a little blip on the TV radar. Famously, America's leading channel, CBS News in 1977, when Elvis died, had not even led with the news. Millions of Elvis fans knew about the tragedy only 10 minutes into CBS's news lineup. Decades later, the news network has not been able to live this lapse down but it was also a sign of the times. Celebrities were just not fodder for news as they are now.

So all through Friday and Saturday, in our celebrity- obsessed times, Jackson's death monopolised the headlines. No celebrity passing away has occupied so much airtime as Jackson's death, in recent memory. Farah Fawcett, yesteryear's glamour girl, also died on the same day but she was at best a postscript. Because it was Michael Jackson, one automatically turned to the BBC, CNN and MTV. The BBC aired a fascinating documentary, Newsnight, outlining the role of Jackson as cultural icon; a kind of Jackson and the Black experience feature. When you see that report, you begin to realise why the troubled star had made a permanent entry into the psyche of millions of fans.

His music, his seamless dance movements, which revolutionalised modern dancing, and his various obsessions placed him in a completely different orbit. CNN, in its reportage, also looked at how MJ was single-handedly responsible for breaching that all-white culture of MTV and introducing videos of black Africans into the channel. In breaking these cultural barriers, he preceded Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods and, yes, even Barack Obama. In his controversy-ridden life, his role in reducing racial boundaries cannot be overemphasised.

The desi channels mostly preferred doing the predictable— profiling Jackson's rise and rise and then his fall, and interviewing the stunned generation. CNN-IBN unearthed the Indian angle and interviewed the girl who Jackson had hugged on stage when he performed in India. India TV had another way of uncovering the Indian angle. Apparently, or should I say, allegedly, one of the doctors performing the autopsy on Jackson was an Indian.

While on music and memories, in a more pensive nostalgic way, some channels also remembered the 70th birthday of the legendary RD Burman. However, in the film-nostalgia category I have to hand it to Times Now. Every weekend I try to catch the channel's feature, Total Recall. The weekly show takes an in-depth look at the stalwarts of Hindi cinema — from Amitabh Bachchan to Mohammed Rafi to Talat Mehmood, and the series never fails to give me goose bumps.

This week it was SD Burman, and it was brilliant. A complete collector's item. After months of anticipation, NDTV's Imagine unleashed Rakhi Sawant's Swayamvar, in which the item girl chooses a husband, or as the promos say, a life partner. What can one say about Sawant who has been in the public eye for a number of reasons, some not always pleasant?

In yet another publicity-inducing exercise, Sawant has to choose a husband drawn up from 16 finalists. The motley group includes a body builder, assorted C- grade stars and models, a management type from Canada and an advocate from Rishikesh. Against the backdrop of Fatehgarh Palace in Udaipur, in the first round, our heroes come up in ghoda- gaadis or Rolls Royces, bearing gifts. Sawant, makeup layered as thickly as a macadamised National Highway, and dressed in what can only be described as a big-fat-Indian-wedding-meets-what-were-you-thinking, accepts these nazaranas coyly.