The Horrible Morning Shows
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
Westfield, IN
Irrefutably contentious and ignominious, water boarding is a form of torture to extricate information from suspected terrorists. The procedure simulates drowning — a near death experience — with severe respiratory distress, lung damage and intense discomfort. During the process, water is poured over the captive who gags and chokes in agony as all his extremities are physically restrained and his face covered by a piece of cloth; he is unable to breathe, unable to see and definitely unable to prove his innocence in that situation. Evidently, Pakistanis suffer a similar form of abuse every day — painful and humiliating — when they browse through the various morning shows on private television channels. They are dismayed by the sheer lack of professionalism in these programs across the board.
Morning shows gained popularity when Nadia Khan, a young and energetic television actress, switched her career to host a newly introduced, yet skillfully crafted program. She had improvised a candid and colloquial style to conduct her broadcast. With her approach being so relaxed and natural, she was an instant hit and was able to keep the transmission in vogue for years to come.
Following her success and the emergence of numerous private entertainment/news channels, the demand for similar morning shows surged; but, unfortunately, the growing demand did not translate into higher quality, resulting in compromise on ingenuity and novelty by all private channels. This compromise on quality has led to a series of indecent and substandard telecasts that touches a new low every day and the race still goes on. Their hosts, who ventured from various backgrounds to gain stardom in a blink of an eye, also ranged from physicians to journalists, and from supermodels to movie actors without any meaningful insight about the job requirement. Consequently, almost all of them imitated Khan’s candid and casual style without her talent and adroitness to conduct an entertaining and informative show. Their presentation in this manner also became a hodgepodge of bitter politics, ‘sweet religion’ and salty magicians.
Most anchors launched their program with very little or no training in this field. Having no idea of a professional demeanor, some of them are noted to be lying in the semi Fowler’s position (three quarters supine) instead of sitting upright on the chairs. Not only that, in one of the live telecasts, I was amazed when the host introduced her eight-year-old daughter, who had missed her school, taking a nap in front of the camera for almost one hour. Their lack of training is further exposed with the abuse of our national language with repetitive incorrect pronunciations, poor vocabulary and excessive use of slangs. Although, the command on language can easily be portrayed with a well written script and multiple rehearsals, these aspects are ignored as the imitating anchors intend to sound spontaneous and innovative. The net result is a shabby, boring (sometimes obnoxious) and poorly researched transmission when compared with the international broadcasting language standards.
Their content too is almost always identical in which a female host invites a few guests and takes some live telephone calls. A typical guest in these morning shows is a fortuneteller, a palmist, a tarot card reader, a black magic expert or a self-proclaimed ‘sufi’ with unique capabilities of precognition and telepathy. One of the sufi guests who also conducts his own ‘religious’ program, once predicted a divorce between the female caller and her husband on television just after listening to their names (prophecy at its best). In another program, the guest was a paranoid schizophrenic faith-healer who had brought his cat in the show and was publicly claiming the treatment of Diabetes Mellitus and Hepatitis B through his cat!
The live calls add further fuel to the fire; as the callers are not correctly scrutinized, they invariably want to comment on the physical beauty of the host (in detail) or the guest and are mostly oblivious of the topic of discussion (if any). Many of these naïve callers would indiscreetly discuss their family and financial problems with the ‘experts’ during their live conversation. And once they made that mistake, they are immediately diagnosed with the spell of black magic by the sufi expert and are provided with effective remedies, like the lizard liver oil, rat droppings and cat’s brain extract, for a successful marital and financial future.
In many programs, the guests are popular movie stars and sportsmen but our hosts still are incapable to conduct an interesting interview with the celebrity because of their inadequate information about the contributions and performances of the luminary. As such, they rely heavily on their personal details and ask dull questions like ‘favorite color, soup, dress’, etc or even worse, ‘idea about life, truth, commitment, hard work’ along with many other irrelevant philosophical ideas. Doubtless, the revelation of some private information of the celebrities is important but it becomes counterproductive if the interviews are only limited to such questions. In one of these transmissions, the top ranking Indian actress was obviously offended and refused to comment, when asked about the performance of her male colleague and ex-boyfriend. She was visibly annoyed by the indifference and insensitive attitude of our excited, nonprofessional host.
The newest and most dangerous trend set by TV anchors is to act as self-proclaimed vigilantes. They go out in public places, mark young boys and girls sitting together and question them if their parents knew about their location, company and association with each other. To make the situation from highly questionable to borderline criminal, they ask their prey if it was even permissible in Islam to sit with a girl. In a patriarchal society like ours, where honor killing is a virtue, these exposés can be life threatening for the girls and even the boys. But, who cares? The important objective is to create a controversy that can bring high ratings for the program.
(The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com )
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Pakistanlink Homepage
