MEDIA MATTERS
Missing ingredients
BY SEVANTI NINAN
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The Indian take on reality TV is to create a patently contrived setting and then smother it in excess.
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Photo: Shashi Ashiwal
Trendsetter: Abhijeet Sawant, the first winner of the "Indian Idol" programme.
WHAT'S in a halibut steak? Rather more than you might imagine. If you are a contestant in "Hell's Kitchen" (Discovery Travel and Living) you could find yourself out of the contest for overcooking it or for not cooking it in four minutes flat. "I don't understand halibut, I don't do halibut," stormed a done-in departee, rueing that he had been coerced by a teammate into putting it on the menu instead of salmon. (Which he does understand.) More people ordered the halibut than the competing team's menu, but six out of 19 returned it. That's the sort of thing you don't live down in cuisine kingdom. There is high tension until somebody is made the fall guy for what happened.
Chef Ramsay is picking a team through blind tasting. And we discover that there are chefs who cannot identify spinach by taste. Not being able to identify sweetbreads is probably forgivable, but spinach? And those who mistake hamburger for tenderloin. Expensive mistakes, these. The losing team is set to work on an entire restaurant's dirty dishes from the night before. Looks pretty real, all that kitchen sink sludge.
Key difference
Dirt is a key word if you are looking for the difference between their shows and ours. It's missing from Indian reality television. Greasepaint yes, but grease on dishes — are you kidding? Indians are soft. The shows abroad which made reality television famous had a sadistic streak, you had to half kill yourself in some test of endurance to earn your moment of fame. That included surviving on an island, and not the kind that a Subroto Roy or Vijay Mallya might own. The core of reality TV is to contrive a situation and let people fight it out. But the Indian take on reality television is to create a patently contrived setting and then smother it in excess. If they did "Hell's Kitchen" here, the chefs would first be given a designer makeover.
On "Big Boss" (Sony Entertainment Television) the bored-out-of-their-wits inmates lounge around in a large, comfy house with a swimming pool and mess around making meals, but it never occurs to the cameras to close up on any of this except in passing. The beds are always made, the swishing of brooms is perfunctory. As are the emotions on display in this fancy boarding school set up. "Big Brother", the original inspiration, was about ordinary people in a contrived set up and the relationships that develop. Over here you have to be careful. There is only so much you will do in that house when you know spouses and kids are watching, not to mention producers and sundry others. Candid camera works when the people it catches don't know that there is a camera around.
The first fear in India is that ordinary people will not be interesting though I imagine the success of "Indian Idol" should have disproved that. The more everyday the guy, the more you root for him. Lots of rude things have already been said about the B grade (actually B is kind) actors and models who find themselves shut up in "Big Boss's" house. But the point is that their interaction is far from riveting. Those 30 cameras are capturing precious little. "Sources" at Sony have been quoted as saying that they will not show sex on "Big Boss" under any circumstances. Chee-chee, we Indians are not like that. But who wants sex? All you want is a show producer with some notion of how to get some real frisson going.
Tough life
Not all of Arshad Warsi's hype can transform everyday petulance into a must-see episode. (Sniffle, sniffle, "she is a sadoo!" Sniffle, sniffle.) Or everyday chores that would normally be done by a bai. ("This is the first time in my life that I have washed clothes... I used to always feel that we pay our servants very less, but now I realise the kind of work they are doing...") That's the toughest it gets on "Big Boss". You wash your own clothes. And maybe it will result in Social Change. Some boor's bai will get a raise when he gets out. Then again, maybe not. What is mind-blowing is the money that's going into promoting and creating something as asinine as this.
Unlike a talent contest, there is no climax to look forward to except who will survive eviction to win the cash prize. Who cares? The real prize has already been won by "Big Boss" for being a spectacular bore. Give me a harried cook in "Hell's Kitchen" any day.
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