Time was when as kids we would listen to jingles on the radio and sing along whenever we heard them - I still remember the famous Glycodin syrup ad , which went something like this - ” mummy had a coughing fit, dear dear me ,All day all night ,dear dear me, Glycodin will make it go ,just you wait & see, la, la , la la, la la” (oops forgotten this line) “glycodin for me ! “. The there was the famous Lifebuoy ad - Tanduristhi ke raksha karta hai Lifebuoy… ” which one still remembers when one sees Lifebuoy soap ! All these ads belonged to an era much before the advent of the television.
A major development in the area of entertainment was brought about with advent of the idiot-box - today’s kids would be hard put to believe that there was a time when television did’nt exist in Indian homes! TV medium being part of All India Radio , programmes were decided by it and even telecast would begin only in the evening and wind up in the night -24 x 7 just did not exist ! I still remember eagerly looking forward to Chitrahaar every Wednesday evening and a movie every Sunday evening. Television sets being expensive ( by those days’ standards ) , owning a TV set was a big thing ! Parents also did’nt suffer from anxiety about children neglecting their studies to watch TV, simply because the number of programmes were not many (most of them were in fact quite boring e.g krishi darshan ) and neither was the duration of telecast very long . It was no different when Indian television went for a makeover ,changing from black and white to colour- By now Doordarshan ( as it came to be called ) increased the duration by having some programmes in the morning as well on Sundays and a few hours in the afternoon on weekdays. The nation got hooked on to watching “Hum Log” (India’s first ever daily serial ) , followed by Ramayan and Mahabharata- simutaneously Doordarshan encompassed the entire nation and not only the big metros. By now companies vied with each other to sponsor programmes and thus came into existence, ads on tv too ! Some of them like “Washing powder Nirma, doodhi se safedi ” , Lalithaji ’s Bhai Saab “( Surf ), “such much kaafi bada hai ” (Okay Bathing soap), “Utterly Butterly delicious”(Amul Butter), “Char Boondon wala ” (Ujala whitener) cannot be forgotten .
Continue reading ‘March Of Time - Radio and Television’
