TV in India/The Magic Has Gone
Watcher Column for The Canberra Times, Tuesday 30 January 2007 by Kaz Cooke


Telly was in the headlines during the three weeks I just spent in India. If it wasn't racism aimed at an Indian actress in the English Big Brother house, it was a predictably passionate fight - like three possums in a bag - over cricket broadcast rights.

The mob who had the rights were going to delay broadcasting the match between India and the West Indies, or not going to share it with free channels. Or something. Frankly, who cared? Whoops, several million of the billion people in India.

Indian chaps have a puzzlingly fervent regard for cricket, and a polite way of introducing the subject. I was asked about Shane Warne up to 1734 times. If I ever get back there, I shall carry a set of printed cards saying "Apparently excellent bowler; witless, over-sexed buffoon".

Most diverting was the high rotation on TV of the bouncy, hit romantic duet featuring the good-natured performance of Australian fast bowler Brett Lee (displaying all the emotion and range of, say, bitumen) and the veteran Indian stateswoman of song, Asha Bosle. It charted to number 4. If you're a young Australian cricketer and you're not learning Hindi, sack your manager.

In Mumbai (Bombay) there are thousands of places where there are only slums as far as you can see, back-to back, tiny shanty shacks built with corrugated iron, salvaged wood, and cardboard, about a metre from truck traffic, or deep in myriad lanes. Some say up to 40 per cent of Mumbai's 17 million people live this way, each extended family in an area about a quarter to a third the size of a carport. In some places the overcrowding has forced a second storey. Roofing is sheets of black plastic held down by ravaged bike tires and the odd brick.

There's no plumbing, no toilets in the houses, but there's obvious and admirable communal spirit, facilities and organisation. Children go off to school in spotless uniforms, the girls in immaculate, looped plaits. An ever-present festooning of electrical wires is illegally jacked into mains electricity either by excellent electricians, and/or people who are now surely dead. Each mains pole sports an explosion of looping, noodle-like additions: about a fifth of national output is siphoned off. And in some of the shanty sheds, visible from the street through open doors and windows, there's a TV set linked in, or wired to a funky little satellite dish perched on top.

Each of these TVs can tune into the growing list of Indian cable channels, some showing exclusively Bollywood film trailers, or their ready-made excerpted music videos, or 24 hour cricket. Fabulous Hindi soaps (with a smattering of English) are entertaining even without the language: all boi-oi-oing sound effects, close-ups of appalled stares and actors going into dream sequences full of tinsel and beaded saris. Sadly, there's a Garnier cosmetics ad for "lightening cream". There's CNN, BBC World, a myriad of Indian news stations, US sitcoms, and the Australia Network featuring ABC news, Miss Marple and All Saints.

Last week the Star Plus Network pulled at least 11 million viewers India-wide for its re-launch of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire franchise, called Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Will Get the 10 Million?). The "old" host was the wildly popular Bollywood leading man, grey-beard Amitabh Bachchan ('Big B'). He's been replaced with the younger, savvy, smoothie actor and producer Sha Rukh Khan.

Most of the biggest TV and related advertising contracts are parcelled out between these two and and Aishwara Rai (she gets the mascara ads). It's initially puzzling, an hour's drive into one shack area, to see a desk-sized billboard of Shah Rukh Khan advertising cola -why advertise soft drink to people who can't afford even one bottle? A moment's thought provides the obvious answer: it used to be a billboard, but somebody nicked it, and now it's the wall of their home.

***

Ganesha, Shiva, Hanuman and God knows I love SBS. This week it offers a doco on Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the 15th century, (Metropolis: The Bright Cities of the Dark Ages, Sunday 7.30 pm, Paris and Venice to follow) and the first of five docos by new film makers on relationships and technology, also available online at www.sbs.com.au/podlove (Podlove, Monday 10.50 pm).

But I shan't be watching this Thursday night when SBS will show the first episode of Sick Tricks. According to publicity faff, what sounds like a duo of English oiks with magic skills will display their "recurring gags", including putting insects into a bottle of water in a supermarket and "turning the statue of a man into a giant phallus".

The Sick Tricks faff blithely continues; "a mental patient hears voices in his head and then conjures up a bottle of pills". In other episodes "a mental patient who hears voices in his head performs tricks with photos from his past". Presumably the "magicians" have had the uncommon luck of avoiding real mental illness themselves, or trying to help deal with it among family and friends. There's nothing schmick about the trick of taking the craft of magic, once the creator of wonderment, and reducing it to mean-spirited, useless, literally dick-brained jiggery-pokery.