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A lousy innings

No, I am not referring to India’s batting performance against Bangladesh, I am referring to the ‘extra innings’ session hosted by Charu Sharma and Mandira ‘Cricket’ Bedi. It’s a lousy program and its current quality is worse than the ‘third umpire’ that used to appear on DD (with Krish Shrikant).

When the studio came back after the first innings – the program director probably instructed the presenters to make the opening melodramatic by remaining silent for a few minutes. But instead of looking like shocked fans at a loss of words – both Charu and Mandira – looked more like lost presenters caught unawares by the camera!

While the guests on the program are good – the presenters have been pretty ineffective in involving them properly. Add to it the nervous laughs of Ms Bedi that come right when the guest is trying to make an honest comment – the direction of the show sure does look very poor!

Another lousy and artificial snippet on the World Cup telecast is the VISA advert – the ad makes little sense, the cricket veterans – Srikant, Mohinder Amarnath and Syed Kirmani – look at quite unease in acting out the overly inspiring roles they have been cast in, so do Shankar, Ehsan, Loy and VISA is completely out of the ‘blue’ (pun intended)!

I really think that this world cup has seen quite disappointing programming built around it as compared to previous years. I am not sure – but the attitude of the government to eat into the profits of private TV channels might have something to do with it.

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Comments

  1. Wondering Wanderer8:00 AM

    I for one, have been long tormented by "Extra Innings" and "Third Umpire".
    I remember tellign a friend of mine once, the ESPN-Star Cricket Broadcast is like Hyderabadi Biryani, Extra-Innings is like "Fast Food", and 3rd Umpire is what comes out next morning :-)

    Thank God that ESPN-Star has one the rights to telecast all ICC events for the next 8 years..

    ReplyDelete

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