Soap operas, shampoo sagas and cola cricket

MUMBAI: Television has thrived on the female gaze ever since story-telling on the small screen set out to sell soaps to women. As time passed, of course, it sold much more than soaps. Today, behind the success of every ''saas'' lies a face cream and behind the popularity of every ''bahu'' lies an anti-dandruff shampoo. While somewhere in between the soap operas and shampoo sagas lie the cricket matches driven by colas and cellphones.
Amidst all this brouhaha of selling more, and more, emerges the all-important question of gender preference for television programmes.
The tension between an audience of action-hungry men and drama-loving women has existed for ages, and still does. Studies of television viewing habits reveal a serpentine list of gender-specific differences: Women follow soaps; men follow Formula 1 races. Women prefer local rather than national news unless there''s a sensational national event; men follow national news. Women reject slapstick comedy; men love them. Women watch television with only half their attention, preferring to chat or keep an eye on the household; men watch TV in absorbed silence.Women prefer watching individual sports with minimal body contact, like gymnastics or diving; men love racy team sports like football, cricket or wrestling.
Toeing the line of gender preference is all-important for channels today because, as television producers claim, the whole and soul of the industry now revolves around selling the right product to the right target audience.
"There''s big money involved in television and the central issue is not about creativity but about what works and what doesn''t," says producer Neena Gupta. "If the TRP of even one episode goes down, an emergency meeting is called to analyse the ''failure''." "Today, apparently, pink eye shadow works, TRP audiences want women in soaps to wear pink eye shadow even when they''re sleeping," she adds with a laugh.
In television lingo, ''TRP audience'' refers to women since the driver of prime time shows is women''s products. "We''ve conducted research to understand gender differences in TV viewing," says an executive of Star''s research team. "Our main finding is that TV viewing schedules of men aren''t fixed. Women are more loyal to their TV watching schedules. Hence, they''re our main target audience."
Sunil Lulla, executive VP, Sony Entertainment Television, is even more upfront about stating the bottom line.
"At the end of the day, all our shows are designed with women in mind," he says, "although we do have a couple of crime shows like ''CID'' or ''Crime Patrol'' which are targetted at the urban male. ''CID'' has a male viewership of 50 per cent, ''Crime Patrol'', of 54 per cent."
Yet, that''s as good as it gets. Finally, Lulla admits that even in thesemale-targetted programmes, the "female sensibility" has to be kept in mind, or else..
"Our recent study on gender and attitude has shown that in urban single TV homes, the control of the remote is usually with women at prime time," he adds. "There''s a break in this pattern only during a cricket match."
Set Max tried to bring women into cricket too, by importing a popular soap character (Mandira Bedi as ''Shanti'') and glamour (Mandira Bedi as a spaghetti strap sporting veejay) into it. However, the result of the move remains a mystery because although the channel insists that Bedi did draw women audiences to cricket, figures circulated by Madison Media claim that she failed to do so..
"Today the television industry is confused because it''s facing the classic instance of the tail trying to wag the dog instead of vice versa," explains adman Prahlad Kakkar. "Advertisers think they can play God and rule over television content, but they only end up spoiling the creative process because they''re incompetent to deal with it. In their rush to sell their fairness creams, all they succeed in doing is encourage Ekta Kapoor to run her ''saasbahu'' factory."