I WONDER who has told our TV playwrights and directors that crying women and funeral scenes are the highest forms of dramatic art. I am no TV addict, but I cannot help watching TV plays when my family looks at the idiot box while having dinner.

Several TV plays are being broadcast these by many channels, and all I see are dialogues in monotone — angry people exchanging hot words but never kind and polite ones. Then women cry and keep crying, and the director thinks this is entertainment.

Then there is no play in which they will not show us funerals — not just a glimpse of it but showing dead man’s face wrapped up in the shroud. So addicted are TV people to scenes of dead bodies that even when they broadcast a programme about legendary humour genius Moin Akhtar they showed his cortege. Then experts talked about him without TV showing any videos that could make us laugh and remember the kind soul.

We are also aware of the circumstances leading to a little girl’s death because of a wrong injection. We all sympathies with the family. But we daily see her on TV, which shows her face covered with post-portem bandage. Don’t our TV people watch Hollywood movies? They too show tragedies and deaths, but I have seldom seen dead bodies in their movies or crying and shrieking women.

I remember seeing a Hollywood classic way back — I forget its name — which revolves a lot around a woman taking care of her sick, elder sister. Her death and aftermath are shown dramatically. Instead of showing scenes of her death, the director merely shows her framed photograph on a wall behind her empty bed. The message to the audience was clear. The woman was dead. The director didn’t show her dead body or the shrieks of her sister.

Rafiq Ahmad

Lahore

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2019