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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Sins and salvation
By Tarek AtiaWhen is a captive audience more captive than usual?
During Ramadan, of course, since the various sectors of the TV and Radio Union always go into overdrive for the Holy Month's no-holds-barred open-buffet. You would think they would fear viewer indigestion, and space things out a bit but instead, year after year, all the money and effort goes into just one month out of twelve.
It's certainly a lot to watch, but for most people Ramadan boils down to one or two dramatic serials which are followed with a dedication unheard of the rest of the year.
"Plus all that silly stuff right after iftar, of course. The game shows and cartoons and all that. Oh, and Candid Camera, occasionally, when I get the chance." This is the casual way to describe your Ramadan TV-watching habits, so as not to sound like a couch potato who stares blankly at the screen from iftar to suhour.
Are there people who actually fit that tired cliché? You would have to be desperate for mental retardation to sit through all of it every night.
Umm Kulthoum with, from left, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Anwar El-Sadat and Mustafa Amin
The thing about Ramadan TV is that it's not like the shows you like only come on once a week... no, this is every single night for a month. And this year there were more shows than ever. To make matters easier, channels one and two -- where the action all takes place in Ramadan, in spite of the seven other free channels -- were consistently kind enough to space their programmes out, so all you had to do was switch from one to the other after each show was over to catch the next one.
Except, of course, for the lull between Samhouni makansh Qasdy and Umm Kulthoum. That hour or more between two big series was the perfect time to get some shopping done, or take a nap before the long late-night haul.
The time period between 10.30 and 12.30 was must-see TV. Umm Kulthoum and Al-Ragul Al-Akher captured people's attention like none of the other dramatic series on offer except, perhaps, for Lamaa Al-Ta'lab Fat at 7.30. The story of Egypt's finest voice was a while in the making, and had gotten a lot of press regarding actresses duelling for the lead role. It is a tough role, to be sure, considering the icon status of Umm Kulthoum, and Sabrine, who plays the grande dame seems a close to perfect choice made by director In'am Mohamed Ali. (It will be interesting to see what version of Umm Kulthoum Ferdous Abdel-Hamid will choose when the film version is finally released.) A little chubby, a little too smiley, but who really knew the real Umm Kulthoum? We all do, now, thanks to Sabrine. And, it seems, the series is inspiring younger viewers to find out more about her oldest hits, as well as seek out the poetry of Ahmed Rami and others who collaborated with her.
Umm Kulthoum's meteoric rise from simple village girl to the most famous star in the East made for a magnificent and exciting first ten episodes. But now that she's big in Cairo, the decades are going by at a far more leisurely pace. Still, we watch, because it's fascinating to see actors playing characters we had previously only seen in history books and newspapers. King Farouk. Ahmed Shawqi. Mohamed Abdel-Wahab... And who can resist Umm Kulthoum? The series makes it clear that the answer to that is no one, least of all her male admirers, who number most of the male characters in the show, except of course for her enemies, who fight her tooth and nail. But she, meanwhile, is tough, kind, authentic, stoic, and above all talented.
Pure talent is the word being used by both critics and large chunks of the TV audience to describe Nour El-Sherif, who plays the lead role in El-Ragul El-Akher, which begins just before midnight. El-Sherif plays a man with amnesia who sets about rediscovering his sordid past. Another tough role that could have easily turned into a cliché in the hands of another, lesser actor. El-Sherif manages to hold it together as the perfect picture of his filthy rich life unravels in episode after nasty episode. At the centre of the maelstrom is Mervat Amin, his faithful wife, whom we gradually discover (though we suspected it all along) is also his partner in crime. Amin's presence on screen is total, as she commands her household with an iron fist while attempting to re-paint El-Sherif a rosy picture of their past life. But, as Mukhtar El-Azizi (El-Sherif) learns, all that money made him nothing but corrupt, and surrounded him with hypocrites. His eyes have been opened by his sudden bout of forgetfulness and by being adopted by the residents of a poor quarter and renamed Abdalla by the local Sheikh. It is this literal renaissance as the simple but good Abdalla in the quarter of good old folks that provides the pivot of the drama once Mukhtar is found by his real family. Only his daughter stands by him when he decides to care for the retarded child of someone he had previously destroyed, and as the catastrophes of his past resurface day after day, we are left hanging as to how he lost his memory in the first place. Will they tell us in time? Every scorching pound of the background music's piano drags us deeper into the quagmire although, according to one viewer, the scary music sometimes goes too far: "They play it even when one of the characters says he's going to the bathroom." While it's becoming de rigeur for big productions to do some location filming abroad, the much ballyhooed London scenes in Al-Ragul al-Akher are the series' weakest link, a superfluous waste of a massive budget on typical video clip-style montages of the city's tourist traps. Overall, however, this is very well done drama, from the credits to the story line to the cast, the music and even the camera angles. Director Magdi Abu Ameira's El-Ragul El-Akher is a Ramadan classic, just like Nour El-Sherif's Lan Ayish fi Gilbab Abi of a few years ago.
The thematic unity of most of the Ramadan dramas this year is reminiscent of a few years ago, when the central theme of most series was historical (remember Hawanim Garden City). This year, it is are they corrupt or not? Have they repented for their sins? Regardless, look how nicely they're living as a result...
Lamaa' Al-Ta'lab Fatt fits the bill precisely. Mahmoud Morsi and Yehia El-Fakharani star as an odd couple, senior and junior antique swindlers who have a love-hate rapport. Scriptwriter Osama Anwar Okasha interweaves a tale of family ties and hidden surprises, with secret agents, Soviet professors, red mercury and other elements taken straight from the crime pages. For the most part it has kept viewers glued to the screen although, like Umm Kulthoum, the long stretches between major events resulted in a viewing drop until the plot picked up again and we found out that El-Fakharani is actually Mursi's long lost son.
The drama aside, Ramadan TV this year also features the overwrought fawazeer riddle and game shows, standard bearers like Candid Camera and Kalam min Dahab, and the by now standard ad agency produced short comic bits (all of which, by the way, over the years have without fail focused all their comic efforts on making fun of the stereotypically unemployed alley-dweller.)
This year the 30 days were divided between two sets of fawazeer, and even though ad girl Yasmine Abdel-Aziz got better reviews than ballet dancer Nelly, both song-and-dance riddle shows have bombed, big time. Is this the death knell for fawazeer? Probably not, much to most people's dismay.
Yasmine Abdel-Aziz tries her luck at the fawazeer
Candid Camera seems more "set-up" and fabricated this year, although the idea behind the pranks are still great, like the "International kiosk association" episode where host Ibrahim Nasr -- in drag as Zakia Zakariya every day this year -- tries to convince kiosk owners to go on-line. Another audience favorite that nonetheless confirmed the "staged" feel of it all was the singing contest and the poor guy who kept saying "el-idra alabtaha".
The two mobile phone companies dominated Ramadan's equally anticipated ad scene, and even produced several programmes each, throw-aways mostly, that may have been bad career moves for rising film stars like Ashraf Abdel-Baqi, Mohamed Heneidi and Ahmed El-Sakka, who agreed to host them. Then again, considering where all of this seems to be going, maybe not so bad career moves after all.
