Infamy As Fame

Guilt today is a global media event. So when Lance Armstrong finally answered the big question about his integrity in the widely televised interview with a, “I’m not the most believable guy in the world right now,” Oprah Winfrey almost brought back her under-performing OWN network from the brink. Lance could have given a newspaper interview to many of his journalist friends who had been supporting him during years of doping calumny but he chose television. For good reason. No one remembers newspaper interviews but a television interview becomes part of downloaded history.

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He will never be forgotten now. Infamy too is fame. And us? We love to see just how silly, clay footed or self-destructive our heroes are. We love to see reality shows for the same reason. When perfectly reasonable people go ballistic, lose their dignity and their masks, TRPs shoot up. In a rather tepid season of Bigg Boss 6, a rather mercurial character was introduced who began his interaction with the inmates by breaking things around the house, stripping, growing hysterical and storming off in a huff. But the ratings of the show zoomed so high that not only was he brought back but was one of the finalists. Remember also how Tom Cruise’s couch jumping love confession on Oprah Winfrey became a never ending television spoof?

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Here was one the biggest stars in the world, jumping over a yellow sofa like a hyperactive teen and making a spectacle of himself. What could be better? Sure, sometimes we like to watch Royal weddings, Oscar speeches by delirious underdogs, champions break records fair and square but in the same universe are hosts like Jerry Springer who encourage adulterous spouses to spill family secrets in front of a booing audience and come to blows. We like made for television proposals, heart breaks, the outrageous Sach Ka Saamna moments when families are torn apart by shuddering confessions.

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Rakhi Sawant, Dolly Bindra, Pooja Misra and many more have gained some amount of fame from their notoriety on TV. There is also a reason why Rahul Mahajan is still milking his non existent legacy on TV. Post a widely debated drug overdose, a broken marriage over charges of domestic violence, he not only appeared on Bigg Boss, flirted outrageously with the female contestants, left the show controversially but also managed to have a national Swayamwar and got married on national television. Even after his second wife accused him of domestic abuse, he is back with her now on a dancing show, talking about the tragedy that befell him when his influential father passed away, leaving him alone to fend for himself in the world.

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Television needs the Rahul Mahajans of the world like it needs Ekta Kapoor’s dysfunctional soap families in order to keep people from switching channels. There is a reason also why Arnab Goswami’s Newshour is one of the most widely watched shows on Indian television. A recent show where Abhijit Mukherjee was pulled apart by Goswami for his disparaging remarks about women activists, has gone viral on You Tube.

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Nobody knows what purpose was served by making the man repeat that he had withdrawn his remarks over and over again but it detracted from the seriousness of the issue and turned the exercise into a farce with people watching it again and again to laugh at both the anchor’s belligerence and Mukherjee’s monotonous regret.  From Emosanal Attyachar to Roadies, we want to see drama queens, people who remind us of who human beings really are beneath facades of civility and propriety. What this kind of television and our consumption of it says about us, we ignore. A new comedy show on Colors featuring Tushar Kapoor and Neha Dhupia even cracked jokes about women being molested by the old villain Ranjeet and Karan Johar danced to Fevicol Se at an award’s night, gender sensitivity be damned. It is all entertainment. It is all in good fun.

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