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Soaps full of stars
Are huge star casts in favour on television? Both the new sitcoms on Star Plus - Cincinati Bublaboo (gee,I hope I’ve got the spelling right!) and Life Nahin Hai Laddoo (gee, I hope it isn’t much laddoo about nothing!) - boast of more acting talent (a euphemism for a jostling cast) than Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Saath Saath Hain and Raj Kumar Santoshi’s China Gate put together.
Of the two, Life Nahin Hai Ladoo looks more interesting. Many cast members are new. Even Suhasini Mulay who plays the female protagonist’s mother hasn’t done any television except for two episodes of Sony’s Bhanwar where she was cast with her good friend and colleague Mohan Agashe.

Life Nahin Hai Laddoo is about a callow guy named Laddoo who wants to be a writer and a girl named Diana who wants to be Aishwarya Rai. Director Vijay Krishna Acharya just wants to be funny. His method of getting laughs out of us is to cram the presentation with contemporary references to Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan and other modern day icons. The editing is fiercely restless, engendering a sense of impending collision in the comedy as Laddoo and Diana’s destinies prepare to converge.

“Do you know Aishwarya’s gown got stuck in her footwear during the Miss World pageant?” Suhasini Mulay tells her screen daughter encouragingly. Once a serial maker makes a virtue of life’s setbacks, there’s no end to how far he or she can take us down that long and ‘whining’ road of bourgeois day-dreaming.
Cincanati Bublaboo is conceptually cadged from a British sitcom. The serial is set in a shopping mall where characters move in ‘antsy’ clockwise movements. Smita Bansal and Rakhi Tandon lust after the same salesperson (played by Rahul Bhatt who plays Heena’s now-repentant husband in Rakhi Tandon’s Heena discount for two serials from the same production house).

In the inaugural episode Bansal cracks a joke in the mall canteen to her colleagues about a girl who gifted a package to her friend on the latter’s wedding day saying, “Wear this, and your husband is going to go crazy.” When the bride opened the package there was nothing inside. While watching new serials, we often feel like the idiot who opens a gift package only to find nothing inside. Of the new lot of serials on air only Star Plus’ Rajdhani with its subtle digs at Indian politics and an impressive cast of sensitive plays, holds some promise.

Aatish which features Neena Kulkarni as a bereaved mother forced to look after her twin grand-daughters after her son and daughter-in-law’s sudden death. Kulkarni is a capable actresses. As this Neena battled with the the Raj Purohit about the dos and don’ts of a family curse I was reminded of that other Neena (Gupta) in the inaugural episode of another long-running serial Parampara on Zee.

That seems ages ago. But have norms, procedures and customs of serialisation changed between Parampara and Aatish? Not really, if you ask me. Even today serials rely on cliched conventions rather than a strong narrative structure. Rishtey, which has again started to air fresh episodes, gave us a ‘trite’-and-tested material last Saturday. In a story entitled Ittefaq the girl Seema shied away from human contact. She’s haunted by memories of being molested in the past. Enter the suave and sympathetic boss (played with habitual subtlety by Akshay Anand) who advises the shaken and tormented girl, “Why do you only look at the darkness? Why don’t you look at the moon piercing the dark?” I guess we can refer to that instalment of Rishtey as Pierce Soap.

All the synthetic lather was washed away on the night of Saturday May 20 when Sony finally telecast Shraddhanjali - Lata Mangeshkar’s concert paying homage to music, melodies and melodists from the last millennium - which was held in Mumbai last month.

The deftly edited footage interspersed with nuggets of information and compliments by colleagues, was a treat from the word go. Of course, anything that Lataji touches turns into pure gold by magic. But this concert with the entire Mangeshkar clan crooning forward to support the star of the family, was a heartwarming phenomenon.

Of course, Sony spoilt it by cramming the space between one segment and the next with the maximum number of advertisements. I suppose the thorns must accompany the rose,and all that jazz.

Speaking of thorns, why was there so much of Sudesh Bhosle in the concert? I am sure not a single person at the jam packed venue had turned up to hear Mr. Bhosle do impersonations of singing legends. We certainly didn’t stay up till midnight to hear him maul Sachin Dev Burman’s O re majhi by changing the gender in the line Mat Khel Jal Jayegi to suit his own murder-dangi. Because of Bhosle’s vocal exuberance, I hear Lataji was forced to drop two of her solos.

As one wag commented after watching the concert, “Somehow one Bhosle or another seems to be the bane of her existence.” Let’s hope the second part of the concert has more of the main event and less side attractions.

I truly liked Milind Soman on Star News’ Limelight for defending the television medium. Now that he’s ready to make his large-screen debut, Milind was in no hurry to write off the small screen. He told Sunil Sethi it’s far more difficult to give a consistent and impressive performance on television than in cinema because in the latter, an actor has time to prepare.
At the same time Soman made sure that he wasn’t treated like a Johnny come lately in movies. “I have a name. I have a celebrity status. So people treat me very nicely,” Milind smiled over the long-distance line.

After this balanced and intelligent interview I have decided to forgive Milind Soman for his stilted performance in DD1’s Noorjehan. That’s the serial where the credit titles are almost as long as the narrative. When you have half the television industry in a serial the credit titles are bound to take their own ‘sweat’ time.

Subhash K Jha