Those old antennas were veritable lightning rods. You were supposed to unplug the telly in a storm. They were also directional. A strong wind or even the burden of perched pigeons could disorient them, leaving you staring at an eruption of white and grey dots – colours, if you had a colour TV. The accompanying noise was unbearable. You ran upstairs, leaving someone in the room as a guide.
“Now?”
“No.”
“Now?”
“No.”
“Now?”
“A little more… That’s it. Stop, stop, stop.”
The whole building knew you had set your antenna right. You could go back to your Sunday evening movie, or Wimbledon final, or Chitrahar, or Rajani, or whatever else you had been watching. But there was nothing you could do if a big leader died. Days of national mourning followed during which DD shut shop and went home, or opened it only to drown you in sorrow with gloomy shastriya sangeet.
Not that DD was exciting otherwise. Children nodded off in the middle of the evening news. Grown-ups stayed up in the hope of catching an episode of Buniyaad, or Jeremy Brett in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or Satyajit Ray Presents, or Lucy, or whatever came afterwards. It was not unusual for DD to repeat episodes, but viewers watched them anyway out of habit.
Children had only Sunday mornings to look forward to (Johnny Soko and his Flying Robot was a rare evening show). Mickey Mouse, Spiderman, He Man, Street Hawk, Appu aur Pappu, Knight Rider and a few others walked the 80s’ generation to maturity. But Ramayan, Mahabharat, Chanakya, Bharat Ek Khoj and other shows had started encroaching on their time. The children twitched impatiently as Ramayan’s arrows took longer than intercontinental missiles to collide. When cable came, they happily jumped ship to sing, “I want my MTV.”
Radio with images
Still, DD in the early-90s was a much-improved avatar of its original. From the beginning, television in India had been intended to educate, not entertain. It started when All India Radio (AIR) approached the United States Information Service (USIS) in 1958 for help to start television services. USIS loaned AIR some cameras and other equipment, and Unesco gave 20 TV sets and portable generators to set up tele-clubs in Delhi.
And so, with a puny, 500-watt Philips transmitter, Delhi got India’s first TV service on September 15, 1959. For some years, there were just two shows of one hour each over the week. And they were only available in a radius of 24km. Parts of Ghaziabad and Gurgaon districts had no signals till July 1971, when a more powerful transmitter increased the range to 60km.
Nobody missed the signals, though. Even in 1973, Delhi had only 75,000 TV sets. Entire India bought 97,000 sets in 1975. The government kept a count because, back then, you needed a licence to own a TV or even a radio, for that matter. The annual licence fee was Rs 30. So, you had to be rich to have your private telly. In 1974, a 19-inch B/W TV cost about Rs 2,100 in India, while in the US it was worth $150, or Rs 1,200 at the prevailing exchange rate of roughly Rs 8 to a dollar.
While Delhi experimented with television as an educational tool through the 1960s, other metros didn’t get their stations until the early 1970s. Mumbai station was commissioned on October 2, 1972.
The main Delhi experiment in those years was called ‘Delhi School Television Project’. It started in 1960, and by 1964-65, 62% of the city’s 367 higher secondary schools had a TV set to show students 20-minute lessons.
‘Agricultural Television Pilot Project’ was the next big thing. On January 26, 1967, it started Krishi Darshan, the longest running show on Indian TV. But the audience for it shrank rapidly. A survey found the main reason farmers didn’t watch it was because they came home tired after working in the field and weren’t in a mood for ‘education’ about crops. The show had no entertainment component.
When AIR started daily telecasts from August 1, 1965, it wedged in some entertainment in its schedule. West Germany had helped Delhi build a modern studio. Once a month, it showed a feature film edited to fit a 90-minute slot. Then came Chitrahar, a Bollywood music show, but the guiding principle for both the movie and the songs was “suitability for viewing in a family setting.” Content for TV had to be “free from sex, nudity, violence and crime.” Each Chitrahar show was previewed by AIR’s senior programme officer and an assistant station director.
Despite the ‘sanskari’ philosophy, a 1972 survey showed Chitrahar was the favourite show in Delhi, closely followed by the Hindi news and the Hindi feature film. Krishi Darshan came last.
Doordarshan is born
Through the 1960s, the government neglected TV. Making shows was difficult because import controls kept 16mm cameras, film and processing labs scarce. A committee pointed out that studios were forced to erase old interviews and other programmes from tapes to reuse them. As a result, the BBC had more footage of Indian leaders than AIR.
It was the government’s policy then to not allow commercials on TV. An AIR director general said, “If TV is able to sell advertising time, then we will have to say goodbye to the present philosophy of TV.” But the 70s brought the realisation that Indian TV needed a new direction. More entertainment, if anything. More money too. “The newscaster should become secondary to visuals,” was a wise but ignored view of that time.
Between 1969 and 1973, the daily telecast duration had doubled from 2 hours to 4 hours, but the big change happened on April 1, 1976 when Indian radio and television were separated. The TV arm became Doordarshan (a literal translation of ‘television’) that day, with a revolving logo that looked like the rounded aperture blades of a camera lens. It was also the day Indian TV went commercial. All those memorable ads – Liril, Bajaj, Nirma, Rasna, Garden Vareli, Luna, to name a few – wouldn’t have become part of our collective memory otherwise. Of course, we could still have exchanged notes about Ek Chidiya, Anek Chidiya, and Mile Sur Mera Tumhara today.
Gradually, Indian TV became less preachy and more friendly with a little foreign help. Star Trek found an Indian following. The usually dry weekday evenings were sometimes brightened by English detectives in Target, and Shoestring. There was also the German detective show Derrick, and our own Byomkesh Bakshi. Didi’s Comedy Show, also from Germany, raised many laughs. Oshin from Japan was a lesson in grace.
There was no English pop on DD, but once a year you got to watch the Grammy highlights. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Alannah Myles, REM – the singers who stared at you from cassette covers came alive for an hour. And sanskari DD could do nothing when Robert Palmer left parents red-faced before kids with Simply Irresistible.
In 1982, DD had switched to colour telecasts in preparation for the Asian Games, and in April 1984 the country saw its only cosmonaut, Rakesh Sharma, tell PM Indira Gandhi India looked ‘Sare Jahan Se Achha’ from space.
While DD was scoring popularity points, it needed a blockbuster, which arrived in July 1984 in the form of Hum Log. A family drama with social issues at its core and veteran actor Ashok Kumar’s thoughtful epilogues after each episode, it prodded thousands of families to buy a TV. There was an explosion of TV brands – Crown, Weston, Uptron, Nelco, Texla, Salora...down to Oscar, Onida and Binatone.
Hum Log became so popular, by one account DD received 2 lakh letters from viewers over its 18-month run, and the cast got an equal number. Other shows replicated Hum Log’s success in the decade ahead, and the Indian viewer resigned herself to a life with DD, accepting it would be mostly dull but also interesting in parts. Then cable arrived and cleared the forest of antennas.
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