Turn on the TV in the morning if you dare and tune in to the morning show circus.
You may encounter a bride, swathed in red, with a beautician who declares that she will clean the ‘dulhan ki moochhein’ (the bride’s upper lip hair). Surf ahead and you may see 20 enterprising beauticians, bending over women reclining in chairs, slathering layers of make-up on them in a ‘beauty race’. On another channel, women dressed in heavily embellished lehngas are having a ball as they try to burst balloons in a contest.
You’re also likely to encounter men and women in their wedding best, attending an on-air wedding. They’ll scream, they’ll laugh and they’ll dance their socks off to 10 songs or more. You may see a bride and groom, smiles plastered on their faces as they prepare to step into matrimonial bliss — and it could get confusing because you saw the same couple getting married in another ceremony on another morning show just a month ago. Even some of the wedding guests were the same. This motley crew of actors is on the payroll of multiple shows and they are happy to dance, cry and get married repetitively every time it is required.
"We do stage live weddings on our shows because those are the most popular episodes. Shows with intellectual content or even celebrity guests don’t guarantee ratings the way a wedding show does," says Nida Yasir.
On a truly gory morning, you may even see a host in morbid black, her head covered while she attempts to tap into the supernatural world with her guests for the day, a learned ‘baba’ and a harried soul who is ‘possessed’ and keeps succumbing to convulsive fits.
There’s more, so much more: the merits of polygamy are advocated, dark-skinned girls are freely called ‘negroes’ and ‘habshans’, remedies for becoming fair-skinned are suggested by learned ‘doctors’, potato and cucumber skins are rubbed on faces in order to miraculously cure acne and makeshift ‘catwalks’ showcase glaringly blingy designs.
The unabashed mediocrity and senselessness of it all reminds me of something that playwright Anwar Maqsood said to me a long time ago. “TV was once meant to show content that entertained but simultaneously elevated the intellect. Now, TV merely deteriorates the intellect even more.”
Pemra to the rescue
This all must have been precisely what the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) had in mind when it recently issued an advisory notice to television channels, highlighting the need to show sensible content in morning shows. The statement observed that the shows lacked creative content, relying primarily on subjects revolving around ‘matrimonial issues, wedding, dances, fashion, private lives’ and that many of the themes were likely to create an ‘inferiority complex among the masses.’
All this makes sense. Pemra’s moral police often gets things wrong, issuing decrees that curb creativity, but there is nothing creative about the shows that are being aired on our TV channels for two hours (or more) every morning. It’s just strange that these shows have hitherto been allowed to run rampant for nearly two decades now. What took Pemra so long to wake up and realise that morning shows were veritably the bawdiest representation of Pakistani society, slowly rotting away the cerebral capacities of the audience? Oh well. Better late than never.