It’s exactly 40 years ago, in August 1975, that Doordarshan Madras came into being. This event is intertwined with major changes in my life. At its inception, to meet the huge demand for engineers, the Government went about transferring staff from All India Radio to Doordarshan. At that time, my father was an engineer in AIR, Calcutta, and he was one of the many people who were transferred to Doordarshan, Madras. We shifted from Calcutta to Madras in April, 1976, and my father joined the DD team about eight months after the new centre was opened. My father was one of the pioneers involved in the setting up of Doordarshan, Madras.
The Government sent these new recruitees for a five-month course in the Television wing of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. ‘In service training’ was provided to a small group of cameramen, producers, floor managers, production assistants and engineers. The engineers were taught TV engineering and the programmers were taught programme matters. Both groups were given combined classes on general production issues. The idea behind this being that an engineer should know how a cameraman and a producer works. Also, the TV camera (unlike the still picture cameras that were available then) has an electronic circuit at the back. So the lighting and camera control during television production were handled by engineers and they had to be taught about this too.
After this training, they arrived at the Madras Doordarshan Kendra. In the beginning, there were only two studios in the brand new building near Santhome beach. Both English news and Tamil news were telecast live from there. However, some years later, the Telecom department set up a microwave connection between Delhi and other centres. After this, English news and other national programmes were relayed directly from Delhi to Chennai via these microwave links.
During the time we lived in Madras, we children would often accompany our father to his DD office and stare wide-eyed at the studios there. It was exciting to our young eyes to see the performers and news readers with heavy make-up, sweating under the bright arc lights. Some of them wore exotic costumes. In those days, most programmes were recorded in the DD studio, including studio-made plays, dance and music performances and children’s programmes. I remember seeing a production control room with an entire wall covered with rows and rows of monitors, which were outputs coming from the multiple cameras in the studio. The producer, who was seated in the room, would select the particular camera shots that were to be assembled in the programme. These would be then taped into a video recorder before transmission. It was all very fascinating and there was a lot for us to see.
Soon after we moved to Madras, our family bought a television set, so ours was quite the first (and for a long time, the only) family in the neighbourhood to own one. My parents were very social and generous; so events like the Sunday Tamil movie, Oliyum Oliyum and sports matches would see our living room filled to overflowing capacity. The ambience was like being in a cinema theatre or stadium. Our then maid was a huge MGR fan and when he appeared on the screen, she would rush to the set and kiss her hand and touch his face. Our relatives would descend in hordes for weeks together for the amazing experience of seeing cricket matches on television. The atmosphere in our house would be heady and joyous; with my mom handing out tea and delicious home-made snacks. Each boundary shot or a wicket would ring out with a huge cacophony of applause. For the cricket enthusiasts, it was a magical experience seeing the players, whom they had until then only followed on the radio or in the newspaper, in a live telecast.
After some seven years, when the 1982 Asiad required engineers, my father got transferred again and we shifted to Delhi. That was when Doordarshan set up colour studios and the Asiad was telecast in resplendent colour. By that time, India had its own satellite and using this and hundreds of terrestrial transmitters of lower power, colour television programmes from Delhi reached every nook and corner of the country.
Perhaps, it was the novelty and the lack of other avenues of entertainment; television was most popular during that time. To me, that was a golden period for Doordarshan.
