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Too rich for words By Amita Malik In many ways, NDTV has been a role model for other private channels. After the success of The World This Week by Prannoy Roy on DD, he set up together with his wife Radhika, a channel which observed high standards of professionalism from the start. Experts from the BBC and ITV were flown out from London to train its anchors. Much more recently, it sent its staff to Paris to learn how to manipulate the wonderful puppets which treat us to high satire on politics and other victims in Gushtakhi Maaf and its English version Double Take. NDTV has produced and built up from the start some of the present stars who emigrated to other channels. Rajdeep Sardesai and Arnab Goswami head the presentation teams of two newer channels and many slightly lesser fry are to be seen on other channels when they received their early training and experience on NDTV. Among many of the lesser aspects of NDTV's concern from its staff is that there is a creche in its office where working mothers can park their babies. All these add up to the high esteem which NDTV commands because of the high standards it has set for itself. And for viewers. However, the goodwill built up by a channel constantly put to the test for that very reason. And that happens when it starts expanding and tries out new ideas. I am not the only one who is a trifle disappointed by its new channel NDTV Good Times. First of all, it has a well- known brand breathing down its neck and one gets a bit weary as well as wary of the Kingfisher which constantly haunts the screen. It is so obtrusive that it takes away from one's viewing pleasure. It also makes us conscious of the fact that commerce must sometimes overrule artistic quality. Because the brand contributes 40 per cent of the channel's expenses. Then coming to the programmes. Somehow, the very idea of giving the rich upper classes a chance to experience the luxuries of life makes us wonder who will be the prime viewers of this channel. Surely they will be what are popularly referred to as "Page 3 types," both those who figure on page three and those who love reading page three for the exploits of what should be the high and powerful but are more likely to be, as my colleague Vinod Mehta once put it, the top jewellers of suburbia. He added that once he used to be envious of people figuring on page three but now he feels he is better off without them. The few programmes I have so far watched on Good Times for purely professional reasons and not necessarily because I am enjoying them, have confirmed my worst fears. Some of the titles are quite bizarre: Vanity, No Apologies and I am too Sexy for My Shoes, for instance. Then most of the programmes I saw were one long advertisement for selected people and institutions. The Best Hotels of India was a prolonged visit to a well-known hotel in Goa, with Neha Dixit doing the rounds of everything from rounds of rooms and bars to doing some fancy open-air stunts on a hillside. It was one long ad and nothing more. Then I saw the interview programme Lounge by Rajat Kapoor. The one I saw was about people who had got divorced and why. It was hardly an original idea, it has been done several times before, one of the best ones being done by Times Now in its early days, its programme took one through many other domestic problems. Lounge had a languid air and Rajat's casual style of interviewing did not brighten up the screen. I cannot help feeling that NDTV rushed into launching this channel without giving it adequate thought and preparation. Ideas which look great on paper do not always work out in practice. And that is what has happened in this case. And it is precisely because I hold NDTV in such high regard that I am so disappointed. Like Page 3, it will no doubt have its adherents and its MRPs. But unless it pulls up its socks it will not the enjoy the kind of high regard we normally accord to NDTV.
