Idiocy across the board

“Why don’t you do something about it?” she taunts me, fuming in the recent memory of some nitwit walking away with a car, Rs 20,000 worth of gifts and a fridge, or a paid-for trip to Timbuktoo from a TV contest. “Why don’t you show your wits in a contest like that?” Well, why don’t I?

“Perhaps I don’t have any to show,” I meekly submit. “Oh, I well know that,” she laughs, “but that should win you laurels on the idiot box!”

“Not necessarily,” I argue, “because there are brands of idiocy and I guess mine is different. For example, I can’t carry a headload of details and an in-built filing-cum-indexing system relating to thousands of films, good, mediocre and trash, their directors, lyricists, casts, who sang (or moved his lips for) what and who had a pet doggie of what colour, or got slapped by whom. These seem to be the qualifications necessary for winning acar.”

TV producers fall over each other to offer such temptations. Is this just salesmanship, offering just what the market will lap up? If the consumer wants vulgar, suggestive dances, let him have an eyeful. If viewers prefer to be treated like buffoons, can the seller be blamed — much less termed an idiot — for pandering to them? But our idiot box does more. It pushes its marketing methods as well.

One has been wondering, for example, what DART (Doordarshan Audience Research Unit) is and what it is supposed to do. The dictionary says a dart is a small missile. Accuracy appears to be the point. Take a typical telecast of the conclusions of a week’s viewership of Doordarshan’s various programmes. All the Best, despite its presumptuous name, ranked the lowest with an audience of 35 per cent, Shri Krishna had 44.39 per cent and Superhit Muqabla 52.3 per cent. Fantastic exactitude. One wonders, how these figures are calculated and by whom.

Does DART send out questionnaires by postor is it through personal contact? If the number covered is large enough to lend the survey some respectability, how is it no one seems to have come across it in operation? We have seen the raw, uncouth urchins DD goes out to interview outside cinema houses. A friend of a friend had run into a barely literate teenager asking people about the programmes they saw. He said he was paid Rs 120 for every 70 queries filled. Whatever the worth of his report, why on earth this secretiveness about it?

And, even more baffling is the question: why is such a song and dance made about it? For whose benefit? Why is it repeated so much and viewers’ time wasted? It is of course not the only nuisance in DD’s repertoire, which shows how idiotic the idiot boxwallahs presume us to be!