Anna & the telly tale

Watching — and, I must confess, enjoying — the gusto with which our television channels project Baburao Hazare is a reminder that the excited debates of more than 40 years ago on the miracles the new medium could achieve ignored story appeal. TV was seen then as “an instrument of power and responsibility and wonder,” as a British commentator put it. No one imagined it would emerge so strong as to be able to choose its own agenda.

The Hazare saga’s heady mix of money and religion, a lofty cause, constant invocations of Gandhian piety, public frenzy and middle-class militancy does, indeed, make the medium the message.
Discriminating Westerners soon shed their initial illusions about television. David Attenborough justified quitting as head of BBC TV with the grumpy comment that there was more in life than a job that “made him watch television most evenings until midnight”. It wasn’t the greatest show on earth for him. Here, despite vastly inferior programmes and the heavy dose of ads, watching TV until midnight may be the acme of sophistication (and pleasure) for many.
Television easily out-dazzles the humbler radio. It has a far longer reach than the print media. Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana raised Arun Govil above mortal folk.
A British opinion poll showed that viewers were convinced that spaghetti grew on trees after watching a programme which sought to instruct through not-too-subtle absurdities. The telly is God for hoi polloi. Its word is truth. Those in charge control a tremendous force for good or bad.
India wasn’t alone in believing that problems of education, population, agriculture and health — corruption hadn’t become the rave word then — would miraculously disappear once the message was flashed on the small screen. Television was the instrument of change — Parivartan isn’t Mamata Banerjee’s brainwave — throughout the Third World. Twelve countries screened educational programmes. Yugoslavia’s immensely popular ABC by Television portrayed an illiterate woman’s struggle for emancipation. Peru and Brazil conducted experiments comparing the effectiveness of solitary and group watching.
Inder Kumar Gujral spoke of TV closing the communications gap between an informed and caring elite and the great unwashed. Nandini Satpathy demanded “social control” (we knew what that meant!) while the Soviets went further in seeking censorship of foreign (read Western) satellite-beamed programmes. The bad old Unesco under the bad old Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow tried to impose a code of conduct.
It would be unfair to say that now that TV is its own master, the channels have betrayed that heritage. Any news service anywhere in the world would have been proud of their round-the-clock coverage of Mumbai’s trauma in 2008. Foreign collaboration harnessing the wonders of modern technology enabled such coverage to be extended to the recent upsurge in London. Some interviews and panel discussions bring us the thoughts of the best minds in the country on the day’s major issues.
But, generally speaking, rumbustious coverage of Hazare’s movement confirms the absence of a sense of perspective. It’s treated as tamasha, which it probably is. Hazare may not mind for publicity is oxygen for others besides terrorists, but a great opportunity to discuss, dissect, report and explain is missed.
In other matters too, infotainment is more entertainment than information, the entertainment being pitched at society’s lowest common denominator. Robert Morley once defended this aspect of TV in Britain. It wasn’t theatre which is by definition highbrow; it was the Big Tent, colloquial for circus. “Then suddenly the circus was no longer in a great tent; the circus came into your home. All you had to do was press a switch.” Had he been alive and in India today, Morley would have savoured the excitement of the Ramlila Grounds in his sitting room.
Fearing that commercial barbarism would dumb down standards, Britain wouldn’t allow direct sponsorship of programmes for many years. Here, sponsors and advertisers don’t have to do the dumbing down, TV people do it themselves. Ads featuring Bollywood stars and impossible and irrelevant stunts that maintain the circus illusion wouldn’t have mattered if serious programmes didn’t also become showbiz.
The ramifications of corruption in everyday life which no Lokpal Bill will solve are ignored. The media, including TV, is so star-struck that no one asks Hazare about the constable who must be bribed, the doctor who demands cash or the lawyer who won’t give a receipt. We have swallowed hook, line and sinker his obsession that an ombudsman will cure all ills.
Serious discussion does sometimes rises above the circus and aspires to be theatre. But like village jatra, theatre must have a plot, a cast, a hero and a villain. If Pakistan is the permanent baddie, to be mentioned in tones dripping with scorn, Hazare oozing righteousness is the goodie for now. Theatre’s other impact is that it makes everyone an actor. Even newscasters act their lines instead of reading them deadpan. With certain honourable exceptions, our anchors are ringmasters, now hectoring like schoolmasters with errant pupils, now pontificating patriotically.
Showering Hazare with saturation coverage entitles TV also to claim a share in promoting the public interest without risking lathicharges or having to fast. It pleases viewers and is therefore good for advertising. I doubt though if TV would carry profitable populism to the extreme of the American company that reputedly manufactured and marketed badges reading both “I love Elvis” and “I hate Elvis”. I would also be very surprised if any television personality were committed enough to Hazare’s cause to join him like Arvind Kejriwal or Kiran Bedi. They are in it for a lark and the lolly, and who cares if the legislative and governmental order is being destabilised in the process? The story is all.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist, columnist and author