Television Entertainment Programmes:
Television is a tribute to three broad functions: to inform the people, to entertain the people and to educate the people. Out of these three, the entertainment element occupies largest share in terms of time and resources. Television is basically an “entertainment – oriented” medium. Even the education and information elements contain a touch of entertainment in-‘order to capture the attention of its target viewers.
Today television plays and music shows attract hundreds of viewers who sit > before mini screen, sometimes to kill time – sometimes to satisfy their internal instinct. Obviously we love being told a story – to get out ourselves escape – to dream of being bigger, stronger, braver — to risk life, stalk a killer — all this.safely, secretly in the intimate closeness of our own television screen.
All television broadcasts are either targeted towards general public (the masses) or to a more specific population group, such as, women, folk, youth or
children. The former types of programmes are referred to as “general audience programmes” while the later are called ” special audiance programmes”.
However while making a distinction between general and special audience, in actual practice, the fact should be kept in view that the “general audience” is a relative term. For people in a European homogeneous classless educated society the general audiences include all citizens. On the other hand in an under- developed heterogeneous society where there are apparent classes of people, such as poor and rich, jagirdars and harees and privi.ledged urban people and unpriviledged rural masses the term “general audience” does not actually denote the average citizen of a country. In such a case the general auidence are, paradoxically, those “specific’ people” who have access to media and the programmes are about them. For example, in Pakistan, television viewers are the people who live in cities and towns with sufficient earnings and having television sets. Thus we observe that the programmes from PTV labelled as “genera! audience programmes” infact cater to the needs of city dwellers who are relatively literate and comfortable massess. Consider Pakistan television plays where the characters, dialogues and the themes consciously or unconsciously reflects the living styles of middle class people of Pakistan.
Interestingly the television centres in big cities like Karachi and Lahore produce plays with urban oriented story-line, while television centres at Peshawar and Quetta choose the topics relating to feudal or tribal backgound and their rural life depiction is near reality.
Pakistan Television has made five categories of programmes. Five separate production divisions are responsible for the production of programmes.
a) Programmes Division,
b) Current Affairs Division.
c) News Division
d) Educational Programmes Through PTV-2
e) Sports Division.
PROGRAMMES DIVISION is responsible for the production of all sorts of entertainment programmes. These programmes are further categorised in national network programmes and regional language programmes.
Both the categories include entertainment and general programmes of the following types:
1) Plays – TV Dramas – Telestories,
2) Music – (classical – Light music – Folk – Pop music).
3) Children Programmes – (Plays – Music – cartoons – Quiz-shows).
4) Shows / Magazine Programmes.
5) Youth/ Women/ Student/ Special occasion programmes as on Eid, X-mass, Anniversaries etc.
6) Religious Programmes.
Other than entertainment programmes are produced by other production divisions, mentioned above, produce current affairs programmes covering national/ international important events, governments policy projection programmes, news bulletins, sports programmes and educational programmes.
A separate T.V channel PTV-2 is exclusively meant for the production of educational programmes.
PTV also import entertainment programmes in foregin languages which includes English feature films, comedy shows, cartoon programmes etc.
Entertainment Programmes on Private T.V Channel.
NTM, Network Television Mraketing is a Private T.V Company which transmits its programmes through the transmitters of STN, (Shalimar Television Network). Most of its programmes, are entertainment oriented. It telecasts T.V dramas, music programmes, shows, english programmes, English, Urdu, Punjabi, Pushto or Sindi feature films.
One rational to distinguish the programmes from one another is based on the format or presentation style of programmes. Thus we talk about dramas in contrast to musical programmes and separate discussion programmes from documentaries, as well as, talks from stage shows. There are three broad approaches to classify television programmes:
i) From production format point of view: Dramas, pannel discussion and documentaries are different formats of programmes because their presentation and treatment style differ from each other.
ii) From contents point of view, contents are based on the overall aim of the programme. Contents reflect whether a particualr programme is meant to
provide entertainment, information or education. Consequently the programmes are called entertainment programmes or educational programmes etc.
iii) From the audience/ viewers/clientele point of view. This type of programme classification is quite common and in wide practice in the broadcasting organizations and literature. Under this type of classification programmes are prepared keeping the specific sub-groups of audience in view. The audiences may be children, women, students, disabled persons or the youth.
Television programmes are made in different formats and presentation styles. Talk-shows, music and dramas are some of the popular formats. Choice and selection of programme format is related to certain factors such as the programme contents, the theme, objectives, the audience, and broadcast lirpe. Every programme, whether intended to give informaton, education or entertainment, is produced under some established and acceptable format.