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Now we have two actors reading the day's news on a leading news channel. Are we trivialising a serious genre? By Indrani Rajkhowa
As the number of TV channels increase by the day, channels are resorting to gimmicks; some bordering on the bizarre, to outdo each other. And partnering with Hindi films is seen as one of the surest ways to grab eyeballs. One such "partnering" by a leading news channel stretched the tenets of this partnership a bit too far. On prime time (8 p.m. slot), Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherji read the evening news on the channel as a promotional blitzkrieg for their film Bunty aur Babli. The duo introduced themselves as Bunty and Babli for the news reading. Though a few appreciated the creativity and uniqueness behind the idea, it no doubt left the country's think tank bemused. News is supposed to be serious. It's surprising that a respectable news channel had to resort to such a desperate attempt to garner some eyeballs. The moot question: does this help the channel in any way? People who watch serious news are in a certain frame of mind and they get distracted with such gimmicks. If Bollywood stars are reading news, viewers pay attention to how they look and how they talk instead of the actual content of the bulletin. Hardcore news is still considered sacrosanct by viewers belonging to all walks of life, and its delivery by a duo of glamorous film stars surely is a disappointment to them, not to speak of the wastage of valuable prime time. Well, it would be incorrect to say that the publicity stunt didn't manage to raise a couple of eyebrows-yes it did-but certainly not in appreciation. Bachchan and Mukherjee might be playing tricksters in the film, but casting them as newsreaders is no neat trick.
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