Sanjay Jha column: Once upon a time on TV
“Sir, our TV crew is limited today as one of our camera persons fell ill. And the only other one is in the house of the BJP spokesperson, sir.” This was a guest relations coordinator of a popular broadcast channel, requesting me to appear on an early evening show.
“Can we kindly request you to come on Skype?” he implored.
“Of course,” I said. “No problem.” I sent him my Skype address on WhatsApp.
Half an hour later, I received a phone call from one of the media officers from the Congress party headquarters. “Please do not join the show.”
“Why?” I asked, taken aback.
“They cannot ask us to go on Skype when the BJP gets a full TV crew. They are doing this deliberately, giving us a step-motherly treatment. We have categorically refused. Kindly avoid this programme.”
I did not quite agree with this irrational logic and pettifogging over something so trivial. Did it really matter?
As it turned out, the harried guest relations person eventually managed a TV crew to arrive and the show went on as usual. A few months later, India went into a national lockdown in March 2020 on account of the pandemic. The rest is history.
It seems like another period altogether when I last saw a TV crew at home. There were days when one did back-to-back shows on different channels and the drawing room of my house would have wires snaking around the floor in an endless labyrinthine mishmash.
In the early days, the average crew size was at least three people per channel. One was a technical assistant who pulled the cable from the Outdoor Broadcast ( OB) van into the apartment and coordinated with the staff monitoring that in a stationary vehicle, sometimes parked on the main road hundreds of meters away.
The cameraman did the lighting, angular positions and the final frames. He was usually assisted by another crew member who managed the batteries, back-ups, and internet connections were the satellite connections to malfunction, besides chatting with the programmers in the studio.
Between them they would later transport the heavy equipment back to their vehicles once the program was over.
Over a period of time, I saw the team size dwindle, as the economy faltered and advertising revenues shrank. With the advent of mobile 4G, the crew size shrank to just one sometimes, with just a lone cameraperson holding fort using a wireless gadget.
When the coronavirus rage trampled remorselessly over our parched lands, it was Skype and Zoom that roared. The TV crew was now part of folklore. Almost.
A few months ago one of them, a gregarious, perpetually beaming guy, full of beans who would often signal his approval of my observations, called me from his home-town in northern India.
“I have a marriage ceremony in the family and I don’t have enough money to even buy gifts for people, new clothes for family members etc… Can you help me? Can you send me some money, please?” I had seen him in better times, boisterous laughter, sublime confidence, dressed in flamboyant shirts.
Jobless, no certainty of future income and feeling down in the dumps, he was a pale shadow of his former self. I assume his abrupt financial crunch is not a one-off story. Another cameraperson was contemplating starting a food cart and selling sandwiches at a busy terminus.
These were passionate professionals for whom the camera was a lifeline once. I am sure there are innumerable stories which are heart-rending that we will never know. Social distancing is the final nail in their coffin. The pandemic upended their world.
What I miss often is the conversations off-the-record that I would have with them. None ever breached their corporate confidentiality even when sharing some inside gossip. What I always marvelled about them was their faultless punctuality and the imperturbable manner in which they handled erratic mind-bending scheduling; once a whole crew rushed from far-away Versova to my home in South Mumbai at peak traffic time only to be told on arrival that the program stood cancelled.
They would then dismantle the entire complex arrangement and head miles away for another assignment. I forged relationships with many of them; their humility and simplicity was authentic in the Instagram-filtered world we all live in.
Skype and Zoom are the new normal, the standard operating procedure for TV chat shows. For Big Media that makes smart business sense; a huge savings in operating costs that boosts shareholder value. It is unlikely that the equity analysts will endorse a return to the Age of Tripods.
Even if some guests are sometimes upside down, or talk in partial darkness as if they need to conceal a criminal antecedent or only a big shining Pinocchio nose dominates the square box, we have become tolerant of these unintended skylarking. We find them as entertaining distractions. The cameraman would have zero tolerance for these amateurish transgressions. The frame had to be perfect. They were fastidious about their work pride.
As with everything in life, particularly technological disruptions, there are some tangible positive offsets. The household privacy is unaffected, there is no time-lag between conversations, geographical mobility is assured as all you need is your mobile phone and a good internet connection and one can even conceal a cluttered drawing room by using a sterilised virtual background.
As we move into a new digital cosmos , spare a thought for those whose flash-bulbs and those adjusted shoot-through umbrellas once lighted their object’s face. And the world.
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