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FRONT SEAT: Your question, please?
For the longest time, audiences in Pakistan have been watching Question Time India and wondering when BBC would bring it here. For those who might not be so familiar with the show, it centres around a lively audience asking questions from a panel drawn from political parties, the media and other public spheres of life. Most of the viewers here are fed up — this might be a slight overstatement, perhaps — with channels like the BBC concentrating more on the Indian perspective. This is not to say that Pakistanis per se dislike Indians but probably the response is due to seeing programming catering to a country that is next door to yours whilst you are ignored most of the time.
In a sense, a generation of young Pakistanis, in the lucrative advertising age bracket of 18-34 years, has grown up watching satellite and now cable television. Watching Indian adverts on Star or the sports channels, Pakistani viewers were able to see just how behind their own advertising industry was, and how our corporations — or at least much of the business sector — were so not ‘with it’ when it came to connecting with younger increasingly educated audiences.
‘We at BBC World are very keen on ensuring that coverage is balanced. And I think ‘Question Time Pakistan’ will provide an excellent opportunity to do just that since the country has much more to offer than just bomb blasts. Pakistan is such a good story to tell,’ says director Jane Godard
In fact, the absence of Pakistani issues — unless of course there was a bomb explosion involved — being covered on cable television was so disconcerting that a colleague recently pointed out how even on ESPN Pakistan was often ignored when it came to discussing cricket team rankings or even coverage.
So why exactly has BBC World come to Pakistan with one of its premier current affairs programmes, Question Time? Dawn spoke to a senior BBC World executive in London, marketing director Jane Gorard, to get some answers.
“In our terms it’s not late to come to Pakistan. We are really excited about the project. It’s something we are very very delighted about, and really, I can’t wait to find out how the response will be in Pakistan. We hope that it will be positive,” she said on the telephone from BBC headquarters in London.
Gorard said that 13 programmes, each about an hour long, will be aired beginning from the first week of August every Friday at 10.30 at night (the first would have aired on August 2, two days before this goes into print) and running till the end of October. Each programme will debate a topical issue, which, since it will have to be topical, will keep changing.
Gorard was asked why the BBC took so long in bringing this show to Pakistan, especially when it has had a presence for quite some time next door in India. Her response: “Well, to be completely honest BBC World is a commercial organization. No, we do not get any funding from licence fees collected in Britain since that goes to the BBC for programming to be aired only in the UK. So we have to depend on raising sponsors and our decisions are based on these commercial considerations. Having said that, Pakistan is very much a region growing in stature, in terms of news coverage and programming. We at BBC World are very keen on ensuring that coverage is balanced. And I think Question Time Pakistan will provide an excellent opportunity to do just that since the country has much more to offer than just bomb blasts. Pakistan is such a good story to tell.”
BBC World has also said separately in a press release that launch of Question Time Pakistan is in line with the organization’s “desire to extend the focus of its South Asian programming to better reflect the whole region.”
Jane Gorard said that BBC World was quite happy with the recently-concluded Hard Talk series done by Riz Khan. “We were very very pleased. You could say that we dipped our toe in the water with Hard Talk Pakistan. However, many who saw it here felt that it really did not make much of an impact, maybe because those who were interviewed had nothing new to say.
Question Time, though, will be shot every week in a studio in Karachi with a local television company Telebiz handling its production. Ghazi Salahuddin of Telebiz told Dawn that the audience for every show will be chosen from a cross-section of society though journalists will not be part of it. “We will have men and women, from different age groups, different occupations, and different class backgrounds. You can expect to see people from different parts of the city and the audience will not be restricted to any particular location,” he said.
Who gets invited to the panel of three politicians and one independent analyst, public commentator or journalist, will depend on vetting from programme’s commissioning director Narendra Morar who will be based at BBC World in London.
Mahreen Khan, a qualified barrister and former member of the Cambridge Union, will be the presenter and BBC World believes that she will be able to do a more than decent job at managing what is expected to be some lively interaction between the panelists and an audience of around 100. “I hope that Question Time Pakistan will provide an opportunity to the people of Pakistan to ask questions and express their views on the most burning issues of the week. It will also open a new window on Pakistan for international viewers,” she said.
Jane Gorard echoes similar views: “There is a lot happening in the region at present, and Question Time Pakistan will give the people of Pakistan the chance to express and discuss their views in a frank and open forum.” For better or for worse though, participation and perhaps comprehension of the show will be restricted to Pakistanis who can speak and understand English. The next thirteen weeks will probably be instructive in the sense that many Pakistani viewers who watch Question Time India were often shocked by the at-times virulently anti-Pakistan nature of some of the panelists and much of the audience, whenever issues relating to both countries were debated. Let’s see just how tolerant we are of dissenting opinions.
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