Telly tamasha: CID

All my friends look at me with astonished expressions when I tell them I don’t watch TV, but my stand has been vindicated. Stumbled upon something called CID on Sony TV last night and after watching 10 minutes of it decided that I must either end all my friendships or put my eyes out so I have a pretext for keeping the dubious tubious switched off.

CID was indescribable and so, in the best tradition of people who use that word, I’ll attempt now to describe it. It was set inside a palatial estate. Many murders had occurred (and kept occurring during the course of the show, which incidentally was in real time, a point accentuated by a digital clock in a corner of the screen). There were CID people including a shrill forensics woman who kept ordering the CID top dog around even as she repeatedly called him "Sirr, sirr..." There was a large family of hysterical, eye-rolling sorts who reacted to each fresh discovery of a body with "Oh my God, yeh kya ho raha hai??!" There were gunshots. There was a caterwauling son trying to stop the CID people from fingerprinting his bedridden father (the old man in turn rolled his eyes and moaned as if being fingerprinted ranked very high on the Physical Torture scale). There were CID small fry who shone their torches right into the eyes of a dying man as he tried to stutter out his last, crucial words. There was much, much else, too much for my weary mind to assimilate.

The USP of the show seemed to be that there was no cutting; it was filmed in one shot, with a tracking camera, like Hitchcock’s Rope or the Russian film Ark. (Without the brains.) But this makes it sound much more interesting than it was.

GSB, a writer-in-exile who still watches and commentates on television, tells me that this show has been around for nine years and is one of Sony’s most popular programmes. Ah well, what do I know of matters such. In sorrowful spite, I’m borrowing her column name for this blog.