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Spoilers Ahead by Rajeev Masand: The last of the heart to hearts
Tabassum and Barbara Walters set the standards for honest, engaging chat shows. Today’s shows are just PR
The passing of Barbara Walters recently, and of Tabassum just a few weeks prior, may be emblematic of an end of an era. The grand dames of talk shows couldn’t be more dissimilar when it came to their styles of interviewing. But for those who grew up watching newsmakers and celebrities open up on their respective shows week after week, they became a window into the world of politics, current affairs, and entertainment.
Between friends
Walters, who was 93 when she passed away on December 30, 2022, had developed a reputation for a forthright, direct, and frequently brash line of questioning. Yet she landed some of the biggest guests over the years. She posed questions to every sitting US President and First Lady from Richard and Pat Nixon to Barack and Michelle Obama; her 1999 interview with Monica Lewinsky broke viewership records; when she got an audience with Fidel Castro she called him out for suppressing dissent in Cuba. When interviewing celebrities, she routinely prodded them into sharing closely guarded details of their lives, and on many, many occasions her guests found themselves fighting back tears as they bared their hearts on her couch.
Closer home, Tabassum, who is hard to picture as anything but the jovial, ever-smiling hostess with the red rose lodged in her hair, can and ought to be credited with leading the way for every successful celebrity chat show since, including TRP-juggernauts like Rendezvous with Simi Garewal and Koffee with Karan. Tabassum, who passed away at the age of 78 following a cardiac arrest on November 18, 2022, rose to fame in the 1970s and ‘80s as the host of Doordarshan’s massively popular chat show Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan. The former child-star and sometime actress found her signature in conducting anecdotal conversations with leading film personalities in a warm, always amiable, never-confrontational style that felt like one was eavesdropping on a drawing room catch-up between friends.
The currency of access
Over the years celebrity interviews, at least in India, have been reduced to PR exercises to plug films, brands, causes, or anything really that the ‘celeb’ is committed to promoting. Sure, blame the interviewers and hosts and TV channels for selling their souls… and their airtime. But the real culprit is Bollywood itself and its culture of publicists, managers and handlers who’re so fixated on ‘protecting’ their clients that they won’t allow any room for spontaneity in conversations.
Bollywood has realised that access is currency—and they have weaponised access. Journalists and talk show hosts are regularly required to send their questions in advance; they’re given a list of “no go” subjects that celebrities must not be quizzed on. You could offer that you’ll ask the question and the guest is well within his right to decline to respond, but that’s a strict no-no too. After all, the guest cannot seem to appear like he doesn’t have an opinion on so-and-so hot-button topic, or worse still, she absolutely cannot come across as scared to speak about something. Refuse to play by the rules and there’s a 90 per cent chance you’re not getting the interview.
Karan Johar is widely (and perhaps deservedly) criticised for turning what used to be a fun chat show, where film stars would inevitably let their guard down and take irreverent digs at each other, into a show where he mostly quizzes them about their sex lives. But it is still the closest that any talk show host comes to getting movie stars to speak candidly without filters. That five out of 13 episodes in the most recent season of Koffee With Karan featured star-pairs who were promoting their latest films is further evidence of how access is being controlled and negotiated at every stage.
A culture of silence
It would be unfair, and frankly dishonest, to solely blame talk show hosts and interviewers or celebrities and their machinery for this sad state of affairs without addressing the elephant in the room. The truth is that movie stars don’t want to have honest, unguarded, free-wheeling conversations in a climate where anything and everything can and frequently is used against them. We live in times where a clip from a years-old food show in which an actor speaking about his family’s love for beef is pulled out and circulated en masse to deter his fans from going to watch his new film whose plot has its roots in Hindu mythology. You get the drift.
Let us mourn the passing of legendary and fearless interviewers like Walters and Tabassum. But let’s also acknowledge the passing of a time when they could ask a guest exactly what they wanted… without a publicist jumping into the frame the moment the conversation threatened to go off-script.
Formerly a film journalist, Rajeev Masand currently heads a talent management agency in Mumbai
From HT Brunch, January 7, 2023
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