Invasion of the twenty-somethings

These Mandalised thoughts come of watching too much television, not to mention the launch of a high flyin’ channel, NDTV Good Times. Let’s just go with the age/looks factor. Star World, this week, premieres Brother & Sisters, starring Sally Field and Calista Ally McBeal Flockhart. Calista is still skin and bones, but Sally has bags’n’sags in all the right places for her 60 years. There’s Alec Baldwin, 49, lead actor of 30 Rock looking every bit middle-aged with the appropriate bulging middle. Star Trek maybe over for William Shatner, 76, but he has embarked on an Emmy award winning role as a top-notch, vulgar and often drunk defense lawyer with a bloated ego and body in Boston Legal. Candice Bergen, 60, is his adversarial colleague with a face that retains the beauty of younger days, wrinkled and puffy. BBC Entertainment (for DTH subscribers) sitcoms star people well over 40 years and 70 kilos. Silent Witness has the lead character, female and if a day, 55 — we mean the actress and the character. Hollywood actress Glenn Close, 60, is currently starring in a new American legal show, called Damages. Basically, actors with chins doubled, trebled or lined like school notebooks are highly visible (never mind that it maybe in the twilight of their Hollywood careers).

Of course whites predominate but there are darker shades too, and the very typical middle class, professional and householders: Everybody Loves Raymond, doesn’t appear to possess a bread-winner, although they’re invariably cooking something up in the kitchen. English soaps like Coronation Street or Eastenders have always been working class domains, unlike our saas-bahus.

The news: our channels grow younger every day, with a few grey news hounds to lend experience and knowledge most abundantly lacking: hail Prannoy Roy. BBC and CNN almost flaunt their 50 plus stars — Nik Gowing, 56, Lyse Doucet , 49, anchor the most important telecasts and CNN’s weather vanes comes from every corner of the globe. Larry King, 74, is a quintuple bypass surgery survivor still kickin’ whatever he has to. Oprah Winfrey holds together admirably but she’d be the first to admit it takes a helluva workout for everyone over 50 (she’s 53) to look they way she does.

Everyone in the TV business proses on and on about the 15-35 age bracket being the only one that matters. NDTV Good Times is based on this obsession with youth and good looks. Hey, you want to shout out — what about the rest of us? We have eyeballs, too and many, disposable incomes and the time to watch TV while our 15-35 year olds are on the mobile, computer, iPod…

As for the reality of India, the argument goes that since we live with so much horror, inequity around us, we don’t need to see them on TV. However, while television might raise aspirations, it also increases discontent for those who can never aspire to or identify with what they see on TV.