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Doordarshan's horror show

Doordarshan's horror show

Rahul Bhatia
26-Mar-2005


Don't they deserve better? © Getty Images
It was the final ball of an over on a tense last day at Kolkata. The game had been nobody's to begin with and now, after four hectic days of madly swinging scales, Asim Kamal, with a smile on his lips and a tree trunk in his hands, was doing the improbable for a Pakistan team in dire need of a sign. So it was on this last ball that Kamal, after pushing it toward the square boundary, hesitated as his partner thundered for a second run. By now a fielder had intercepted and thrown the ball back with surprising economy of movement. Nothing could have prepared you for what came next. Not decades of cricket-watching or worldly wisdom, for what came next, as a panic-stricken batsman raced the ball, was a commercial break.
It was also, in other words, the curse of the national interest. For a while, Doordarshan, India's oldest and probably most stagnant television channel has argued that any cricket game involving India at home should be broadcast by it for free, regardless of whether the rights have already been bought over by a private television channel. This, it insists by some stretch of logic, is because showing cricket is in the national interest. Whatever your stand on this, it goes against a basic business principle: you get only what you pay for. But if the reason behind its demands was recent, the final product it produced for the cricket-watching public remained staid, uninterested, bored. It stripped cricket bare, and tore all pretensions away; cricket, under Doordarshan, stands nude as the pesky intrusion between commercials.
And so it has come to be once again. The legendary fourand five-ball overs have disappeared, but with the benefit of seeing six legitimate balls, have come the price of not seeing anything further. Programmers stand at attention ready to cut to ads at the first hint of a delay. Tendulkar annoyed with the sightscreen? You could fit a motorbike advert before play resumes. Laxman hit by a vicious bouncer? That gives us space for at least three ads, and five if he's retiring hurt. If a ball crashes into the stumps, before the bail hits the ground, you are watching a cola ad. How is that for speed?
With speed comes certain carelessness. Sometimes so trigger-happy have the programmers been that in the middle of an over, Rameez Raja's voice is replaced by a cola jingle. Or as Aishwariya sells you a coke, you hear Rameez expounding on health drinks. So not only is a decent cricket broadcast out of Doordarshan's reach, even the commercial breaks drip with incompetence.
A reason why Doordarshan provokes not a murmur of protest is its consistency in poor coverage. It explains, in part, why ESPN-Star Sports came under fire last year when they deluged their Asia Cup coverage with logos: this was not expected.
There is nothing to stop Doordarshan from flogging cricket and pulling up ads in a trice because there is no regulation against it. But what this does do is rob cricket, a sport like any other, of its moments. Moments after India won the second Test, we were watching Tendulkar on a bike rather than on his team-mates. A day before that, just as Ravi Shastri began to interview Rahul Dravid, the hero that day, the channel cut to the studio, where two former cricketers, eye-candy and an anchor with a plastered smile greeted you to the always inane post-match babble. For a channel that broadcasts women's volleyball games from the 1980s, surely five minutes of coherence from an articulate player wouldn't have upset their schedule.
ESPN-Star or even Zee TV, with its limited experience, would have been more professional than this. An India-Pakistan series is a rare spectacle for, besides the cricket, it comes with so much baggage attached. This is lost on a channel that has put little into the game and sought to extract as much as it can from it. A series of this scale needed the whole hog. What it got was a rump.
Rahul Bhatia is on the staff of Cricinfo.