You know what it’s like when you’ve got 500 TV channels but nothing to watch?
Well, being too busy, I rarely watch TV. Seriously. I pay for all these damn channels, and then spend my life doing stuff that means I’m not watching TV. I never understand how people find the time. I mean, there’s a stack of things recorded that I thought at the time would be worth watching, and so set the box to record them. And there the recordings sit.
At odd times of the day, week, or month, we will sit on the sofa and switch the TV on. Usually the need is for something light, fluffy and not as heavy or complex as the stuff waiting for months and months to be watched. Most times this means flicking between the music video channels, or maybe a truthful news channel like RT or Al Jazeera, or just zapping away until something odd takes the fancy.
In recent times, well, quite a while ago, this led to the rediscovery of the ridiculous films on Syfy. These are made using bad actors, and not much more than the After Effects package to add the, ahem, scary special effects.
We sat up late one night laughing manically and having near hysterics over a film called Sharknado. The idea was a simple one. Humans meddled with the weather, and created a whole load of tornadoes across Hollywood, a place that never has tornadoes.
To add a twist, the tornadoes sucked a whole school of hundreds of sharks into the air. The sharks then rained down on people, eating them whole.
Apart from the most awful continuity errors, there were errors of logic. One second places appeared to be deep enough for sharks to swim quite freely, the next second people were standing in water up to their … ankles. This was enough water for sharks to exist in undetected and then leap out to swallow the humans whole. Indeed, anywhere vaguely damp became shark infested.
Ridiculous.
We were chuckling about Sharknado for many weeks.
Indeed, for a short while after that we didn’t get a chance to watch any TV. Weeks went by before we switched it on again. Immediately, we checked the Syfy channel for anything as hilarious. There was nothing there.
This forced us to do further zapping along to other channels. We became glued to Star Plus. Star Plus seems to broadcast Bollywood style Hindi Indian soaps. And now we are addicted. Damn it. I blame the English subtitles.
There are a number of different soaps running, so it doesn’t matter when one joins the channel. The central characters of every single soap are a young married couple. The central storyline is always about friction in the more traditional households where a large house is occupied by many generations of the same family. The friction is usually with the elders of the house. I do quite enjoy the ‘dramedy‘ Diya Avr Baati Hum, which is all about, well, I’ve just described it really.
But, none of that actually matters. What is important is to know that each moment of dialogue is followed by many moments of dramatic pauses whilst we spend a few seconds looking at all the facial expressions on everybody in the room, as they indicate the respective relief, or worry, or whatever emotion it might be that we the viewers know the reason for, that nobody else in the story knows. Usually this is played out in slow motion to help us not miss the tell-tale thoughts going through their minds.
This plot device, or story telling technique is of course Bollywood films all over. It is perhaps a little bit more daft because a soap has a limited budget for the sudden completely unrelated random dance-offs of the higher budget films. Instead, on these soaps it’s a slo-mo face off.
On English and American soaps there are plenty of expressions of emotion by face (that miraculously nobody else in the room ever sees, just us viewers), but the dialogue trots along at a realistic pace as it does in real life.
It doesn’t on an Indian soap. An exchange of just three lines can take up to 5 minutes with all the pausing for slo-mo face-offs. All this meaning that the storyline shuffles along completely unnaturally at slower than a snail’s pace. This is as painful as the story stopping so that everybody can sing a happy song in a musical. I hate musicals. Mary Poppins was always spoilt for me by the stopping for singing. Cut all that out and it would have been a much more bearable film as well as quicker and more to the point.
Anyway, add to all the above the fact that Star Plus takes commercial breaks every 2 to 3 minutes, and you have a reality that a simple storyline that would have taken 15 minutes on EastEnders or Coronation Street, will take up to an hour and a half to develop on Star Plus.
And, this whole ridiculous result is what makes it so addictive such that hours will come and go and the soap you are watching is still trying to get to the 10th sentence in the script.
These Indian soaps are so popular that some scholars are hopeful they can be used to try to encourage women to educate themselves about family planning. Considering that India is about to overtake the population of China, this may have a good purpose.
For me though, I have found a stream of entertainment that just isn’t matched by any British offerings. It’s brilliant.
England's England 