This column is about sex!

Watch prime time hours of major news channels — they’re evolving back to their roots as hybrid of news, entertainment.

It starts off as a pretty straightforward love story. The girl has a job that brings her into contact with a young man who seems charming and interested in her. She reciprocates his advances, and agrees to share a short private moment with him.

Then comes the twist. He tells her he has a video of their last encounter and demands that she go further in the next encounter if she wants him to keep the video out of public circulation. She’s shattered, but keeps faith that she can appeal to his better nature, reach out to that considerate and charming young man she thought she had met.

The blackmailing escalates. He invites two of his friends into the scheme and they rob her family with her coerced connivance. Imprisoned in her silence, she watches with growing remorse as her family struggles to understand what is happening to them. Then the inevitable moment of truth, the climax, where she attempts suicide, is rescued at the last minute and from the depths of her helplessness, tearfully narrates her predicament to her family members. Then they plot their revenge.

I’m not making this up. This is the latest fad in our news media these days. This is what passes for a ‘human interest story’ or a ‘crime show’ today. The show that aired this particular story is a low-budget one but with high ratings — the sort that channel management loves — on one of the top-rated news channels of the country.

The show bills itself as a ‘crime show’, but it looks more like one of those cheap dramas that entertainment channels carry. And quite likely, all the content is made up, the product of a scriptwriters overactive but, under cultivated imagination.

When the human interest turn began in Pakistani news media, most of the stories tend to be about the terrible things that people end up doing to each other in the course of a dispute. Most often, it was family disputes, and almost all stories featured a murder and a wailing woman. The look was macabre, with an anchor displaying a deadly seriousness, heavily treated visuals and an accompanying musical score designed to get the juices flowing.

But now the ‘human interest story’ is lapping up against far more primordial urges in its thirst for ratings. On the show, which is leading the pack these days, the stories are almost always about young boys and girls. The girls are depicted either as hapless victims of an unaccountable male sexuality, primitive and dictatorial in its constitution. Or they’re manipulative vamps, always plotting and scheming for money, and using their youthful wiles to deadly effect. We’re supposed to believe that these are real life stories. I suppose we’re also expected to believe that their close thematic correspondence to Urdu pulp romance literature is purely coincidental.

Meanwhile, the news channels are reaching across the isle to their brethren on the entertainment side, for ideas on how to execute this info drama that is the new genre. Production technique is being brought in from entertainment and dubbed ‘re-enactment’, trained actors being recruited as anchors, combined with scripts that scandalise the senses or tease the imagination. Watch the prime time hours of the major news channels now — it seems like they’re evolving back to their roots as hybrid news and entertainment outfits.

For some, the route back is via programming that straddles the divide, such as crime shows and ‘human interest’ dramatic presentations. The other route is political-comedy and satire. Tragedy and comedy: the two grooves into which all storytelling ultimately falls.

No, I don’t intend to make this another ‘oh-the-injustice-of-it-all’ type of column. I have far humbler things on my mind this week. I know that boys and girls getting up to no good makes for better television than squabbling politicians. My only problem with this enterprise is how seamlessly it blends fact and fiction to create a scandalous and titillating sensory cocktail. It’s bad enough when that sort of thing is happening in our news bulletins and talk shows, but these programmes are taking the whole thing to a new dimension altogether. The programme under discussion, for instance, begins with a disclaimer that the content may not be appropriate for younger viewers, thereby, ensuring that younger viewers will watch the show. Perhaps another disclaimer — that the stories you are about to hear are entirely made up — might also be called for, in the interests of protecting what’s left of our diminishing sanity.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 22^nd,  2011.