Talk show: When wisdom became scarce
Nuzhat Rifa Ehsan ।। The Bengalis are typically known as ‘addabaaj’. Wherever, it may be at home or on the street or in a shopping mall or in nearby ‘mahalla’ regular chitchats among people are common feature, to say the least. Even women take part in the same manner and the same style. Nowadays our internal addabaj phenomenon has taken a formal stage. It is called ‘Live TV Talk Show!’ It all started nearly 20 years ago when formal TV talk shows used to take place. These talk shows were based on current affairs. Famous celebrities or personas used to take part. There were live telephone calls where people used to ask various questions to their respective persona. Later, the show was geared towards political show. Leading politicians or newcomer MPs gathered at the show. It was thought that these political live shows will bring an impact on the total political scenario of the country.
To some extent, it did. These political shows were mainly copied from foreign talk shows. But our political shows utterly failed to carry both in terms of political wits and sophisticated presentations. Even famous playwrights like Humayun Ahmed in his late book penned down, ‘People are not learning anything from talk shows or cooking shows.’ Indeed! Let’s analyze.
A talk show or chat show is a television programming or radio programming genre in which one person (or group of people) discusses various topics put forth by a talk show host.
Talk shows had been broadcast on television since the earliest days of the medium. Joe Franklin, an American radio and television personality, hosted the first television talk shows in 1951 on WJ7-TV (later WABC-TV) and moved to talk show (later WWOR-TV) from 1962 to 1993. NBC’s The Tonight Show is the world’s longest-running talk show, having debuted in 1954, and still going. Talk shows have created many stars like Larry King, Oprah Winfrey, David Colluman, and Tim Sebastian. Larry King hosted the Larry King Live from July 1985 on CNN and continued until June 2010. It was the most watched and longest running program of CNN which had over one million viewers every night. Oprah Winfrey started her talk show in 1986 and this program lasted until 2011.
Tritiyo Matra is the pioneer of talk shows in Bangladesh. It started its journey on 17th July of 2003 and was broadcasted every day. Most of the talk shows viewers believe that social and political issues are the most important discursive subjects of most satellite TV channel talk shows. Most of the audience think political talk shows as just a platform of power dominance between the government and opposition parties and these shows cannot answer public queries of the reasons and solutions of the socio-political problems. Again, politicians cannot deliver anything to create political awareness among the audience. According to them, though politicians try to manipulate people into getting the vote, but it has very little effect on public opinion. Our countrymen have their own mindset about selecting their political party, any order and decree and their own candidates. It is rare that political campaign has little effect on their mind. One glaring example is that, ideology of extreme nature never got popularity in this region. At present, political talk shows had never become able to make conscious movement on the young generation and failed to create a platform of communication between the government and the public. The producers of the talk show select strong and vocal guests from their own ideology and weak guests from the opponent ideology where moderators control the talk shows at their will. They conclude that talk shows with their agenda-setting and awareness creating capability help viewers to analyze the political environment. A group of teachers and journalists who are actually the supporters of different political parties, try to introduce themselves as intellectuals by just appearing in talk shows. They lack real knowledge, experience, and efficiency. Again, anchors and guests are more focused on how they look rather than presentation. Television talk shows are mostly elite centric, male centric and city centric. There is a little public participation in the talk shows. Discussions of talk shows are ill informed and polarized to any political party, with a few exceptions. Politicians, business people and other decision makers decide what the issues and discussions are. They failed to identify the areas what the countrymen should do in times of crisis. It is assumed that these talk shows often reflect the intellectual perspective of persons with little knowledge or persons doing chitchat in haatbazar. Rhetoric statements is not always workable. In these shows, the guests ignore the main problems while dwelling on some unimportant talks. There is a saying in English, ‘The best way to kill an idea is to take it to a meeting.” This statement holds true in our talk shows.
Those persons participate in the talk show often perceived as persons of high level. But in reality these high level thoughts are no longer practicable in democracy. That’s why the intellectual growth of our intellectuals are going down the drain.
During conversations, the guests of the talk shows neither demonstrate intellectual depth rather a new type of people like Shahed who are really manifesting themselves in contaminating the society, taking opportunity to establish themselves as intellectuals.
During the 90’s, a class of people devoid of development and working attitude have defined themselves in the society to establish their nitty-gritty statements. Such mother-father-daughter trio established themselves as intellectuals of the country. Their mouth of word actions has been plummeted due to the change of recent foreign and domestic policies of the present Government. Nowadays they post their comments in talk shows in a non-coherent way. Sometimes these talk shows have been commodified by monetary value. Here money rules the world. According to Amartya Shen, once Rabindranath Tagore, remarked that British Rule in India had got many items from Europe but they destroyed humanitarian relationships which existed in India over centuries. What we got from TV Talk Show in our country– sense of democracy has not been strengthened rather it has been sent to banishment. Talk shows has not established a democratic sense among our people. It is simply a show. Recently, it has been observed that most of the TV Talk shows air on after 10pm-02 a.m which is a sleeping time for most of the viewers.
In view of the above circumstances, I leave it to the behest of readers to express their opinion whether these types of merit selling based talk (talkative) shows are beneficial to society or not.
(The views and opinions expressed by the writers are those of their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Feminist Factor)
