Anchors Ahoy!

A small, silly detail. Still...Channels had threatened 72-hours live, continuous coverage of the election results. A few excluding regional...

A small, silly detail. Still8230;Channels had threatened 72-hours live, continuous coverage of the election results. A few excluding regional channels which were not monitored carried about 60 hours. Others less. Silly? Petty? Conceded.

But quite pertinent: if you claim 72 hours, then 72 hours it ought to be. If it isn8217;t, then a your claim is fraudulent, misleading; b your credibility is undermined. If channels cannot get their arithmetic right, who8217;s to know what else they8217;re getting wrong? And so what if it was a blessing not even in disguise, that the 72 hours8217; coverage was a bogey? So what if viewers could not possibly have echoed Oliver Twist8217;s 8220;please sir, could I have some more?8221; More? Heaven8217;s no!

Which raises another niggly-naggly question: why on earth did channels contemplate a three-day telecast? To soak in advertising? Or was it simply 8211; anything you can do, I can do too? Channels knew 8212; and if they didn8217;t, they should have that the counting of votes was going to be a fast-forwardexercise. Which meant that by 4 pm., Monday, you could predict the likely outcome and by midnight, you didn8217;t need to predict: you knew the result. Furthermore, it was evident that post-poll alliances would take more than 72 hours to broker a new government. Ipso facto: TV would be unable to introduce us to the new Prime Minister.

Live, prime time specials of two-three hours on day two and three, with hourly news bulletins would have sufficed, thank you very much.

Okay. What follows is half in jest but only 50 per cent. First, let8217;s blank out these politicians: Amar Singh, Jairam Ramesh, George Fernandes, D. Raja, Arun Jaitly, Najma Heptullah, Pranab Mukherjee, V.K.Malhotra, V.P. Singh, Sitaram Yechuri, Sushma Swaraj, V. Naidu, Gonvindacharya. They shifted from one channel to another, faster than the results were coming in.

At one point on Wednesday, V.P. Singh was appearing apparently live simultaneously on two channels! The studios of DD1 and DD2 are kissing distance, NDTV8217;s STAR News and TVi8217;sair-kissing distance; so politicians could switch channels quicker than you.

If we never see any of them again on TV, we won8217;t be inconsolable. Sonia Gandhi, messiers Vajpayee, Advani and Kesri by refusing to be tube-lights had the right idea: absence does make the heart grow fonder.

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Second, a plea to all politicians: give us, this day, a five-year government so that election specials are 1825 days away. By then we might just want to see a graphic again; hear about vote banks, swings, vote percentages, caste factor, Sonia factor, alliances8230;Just maybe.

The shows: if STAR News was all information, Aap Ka Faisla DD1 was pure infotainment and India Decides DD2 just entertainment. Chunav Chunauti Sony was a commercial break, while Zee India and TVi were competing to be the longest panel discussion in the history of television.

Doordarshan, alongwith TV Today, were always going to win this one. They had all the advantages. Where they scored was with lively discussions, the phone-in questions fromviewers Laloo Yadav in Patna fielded a question from Pathankot and Pramod Mahajan in Mumbai one from Kota and their fillers: the Chunav Maidan Se. These features were refreshing and informative, dealing with issues rather than personalities.

Main anchor Rahul Dev was a revelation: after initial awkwardness he was poised and in control. Sanjay Pugalia was a quiet achiever too. However, Yogendra Yadav seemed to be suffering from an identity crisis: was he a bharatnatyam dancer or a psephologist?.

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DD2. Its USP was People. Aggressive anchors provoking the politicians/guests. Such fun. Kapil Sibal versus Prabhu Chawla versus Arun Jaitly: pure venom. Except that like all discussions, finally, it wasn8217;t going any where. People talked, but the Politburo would decide, Sonia would decide, Chandrababu Naidu would decide8230;Off air.

A word about DD28217;s anchors: over-enthusiastic. Karan Thapar was so theatrical you thought he was auditioning for the Royal Shakespeare Repertory. His posturing and rhetoric werevaluable assets, once; now he needs to mature into a skillful, subtle anchor. Madhu Trehan mistook the studio for her drawing room: she was talking to Meira Kumar and Navin Patnaik to name just two as though they were her dinner guests. She was rude and caustic to many others. Someone needs to teach her table, sorry, studio manners. Tavleen Singh, alone, got the rightish balance.

STAR News Channel had the results on time, on the dot. Without NICNET. Its graphics were a work of art, the best things to look at, frankly. Its analysis of the results, this way and that, was way ahead of the others, and after a while, way ahead of our interest levels. Went on and on. As did messiers Prannoy Roy day one he was on air at least 10 hours, Jairam Ramesh and Rajdeep Sardesai. Also, the ploy of having two different set-ups didn8217;t quite work. Every ten/fifteen minutes Roy would turn to Sardesai, Ramesh, Jaitly for a political view of the results. Lacked incisiveness. Sopariwala was incisive and so was Rangarajanbut why do they come in twos?Okay8230;Enough no more..