MEDIA MATTERS
British dottiness
SEVANTI NINAN
|
BBC Entertainment’s landscape, humour and diction are all inimitably British.
|
This summer it seems we can finally move beyond “Friends” and “Seinfeld” to British rather than American dysfunctionality.
WE got BBC on satellite TV in 1991. But the Corporation did not think this market was ready for its entertainment offering in the 16 years which followed. So we bumbled along making do with Ekta Kapoor and her forbears on one hand and American reruns
on the other. Until the movie channels got more varied, what Star World and later Zee Café dished out was what we consumed. This summer it seems we can finally move beyond “Friends”, “Seinfeld” and “Desperate Housewives” to British rather than American dysfunctionality. And have some fun. Despite the same canned laughter, the humour is different.
Interesting offer
The DTH channel on Tata Sky, so imaginatively titled “BBC Entertainment”, is the newest offering on the block. Its landscape, humour, diction and dottiness are all inimitably British. When there is spy stuff, it fictionalises MI5 rather than FBI, as in “Spooks”. And given this race’s ability to laugh at itself, there are comedy shows which poke fun at typically British institutions, such as the Vicar, in “Vicar of Dibley”. A 102-year-old Vicar dies, and his replacement is Geraldine, a large, cheerful, irreverent woman, who cuts straight through her parish’s conservatism with her wacky ideas. We’ve begun with “Series One”, which first aired in 1994. The series was written right after the Church of England changed its rules in that year to allow the ordination of women.
The new channel runs from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Other offerings too are different from the usual. “My Life in Film” revisits a different classic film in each episode as a low-budget film maker casts about for inspiration. Another series worth catching is “My Family”, featuring a British dentist, his wife and kids who have the ability to make you laugh out loud. Watch it, until you grow tired of it. There is nothing sanitised about the shows, BBC is no Doordarshan. Practically every third programme has a statutory warning about sexual content, or risqué humour. Its crime drama series, “Silent Witness” does not flinch from featuring either gore or human nastiness. In Britain, viewers would sometimes write in to protest. But the production values of this and some of the other series are a cut above what Star World and Zee Café usually dish out. The other crime series currently on offer is “Waking the Dead”.
The Sci-Fi show that figures in the current schedule aired in India is “Dr Who”, which the BBC likes to call the longest running science fiction series in the world. It originally ran from 1963 to 1989 and has been aired on U.S. television. If you were to compare some of these shows with those on Star One which tried to be different (and usually had you guessing as to where the ideas might have been borrowed from) you get some sense of the difference between British and Indian production cultures. One uses restraint, the other excess. There are exceptions. The dysfunctionality served up on some of the shows on BBC Entertainment is excessive to the point of being tiresome.
Something for the kids
Star One’s “Hotel Kingston”, one suspects, was inspired by “Hotel Babylon” which BBC Entertainment is now serving up. The BBC is using a single transponder for two very different channels: the one described above runs through the night, and CBeebies, its pre-school offering, runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Indian parents in 2007 are more fortunate than those of a decade back, there is now a fair variety of channels to choose from, at least one or two of which, if you count the new one, have something innovative at any given time. CBeebies’ idea of customising for its new Indian audience currently amounts to no more than throwing in words like kahani ands maza in its English promos.
For those who don’t subscribe to Tata Sky, this pay channel is likely to be available if cable operators think there are takers in its area for it. Above all there is one very big reason to watch the BBC’s new double bill. Currently, neither channel has any ads.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
