Iran is noted for two surgical procedures one wouldn’t necessarily associate with a theocracy – sex changes and nose jobs. President Ahmadinejad has assured us that homosexuality doesn’t exist in his country. Consequently, if a man feels unsuitable urges, he is obviously a woman whom Nature has kitted out inappropriately; gender reassignment simply corrects a self-evident anomaly.
The popularity of rhinoplasty stems from the official dress code for women - those not covering their body and hair can be fined or imprisoned. When your face is the only part of you on display, the nose takes on greater prominence (as it were). A nose-job is, apparently, a prized graduation present.
The BBC has just launched a Farsi language TV channel broadcast from London via satellite to a potential audience of 100m Persian speakers in Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan, and available on the BBC Persian website to the sizable Farsi-speaking diaspora. It’s paid for by our taxes via the Foreign Office. For the last eight months I’ve been helping to devise and launch a live 50-minute daily programme called Nowbat-e Shoma , or Your Turn. Basically a single-topic phone-in show, it also encourages viewers to send emails and SMS messages (huge in Iran) and to appear live in vision on webcams.
Well, so what? There were already phone-in shows on state television in Iran and on the Voice of America TV channel. In the UK, phone-ins seem as unsuited to TV as fireworks displays are to radio. But Nowbat-e Shoma is not only a handsome, lively watch, but also seemingly unique in offering members of the public an opportunity to speak freely on sometimes risky subjects in a politically unbiased forum.
Since launch, the programme has received thousands of overwhelmingly supportive SMS messages, the vast majority from inside Iran. We’ve had to bring in a team to handle the scores of callers trying to get on air every day, and we’ve had live webcam contributions from all over the world – even from Tehran, despite the Iranian government declaring the channel illegal.
Working on Nowbat-e Shoma has been humbling in many ways. The editor fled his country after a spell in solitary confinement for writing something the government took exception to. A female team member was once flogged for attending a party featuring alcohol and pop music. Some of the team have opted not to appear on camera to protect family members living in Iran. Yet the determination to remain editorially impartial and to feature as wide a variety of views as possible has been impressive. And. my goodness, they’re bright! Most of the team – Farsi speakers from around the globe, including several fresh off the plane from Tehran – have no TV experience, but they’ve picked it up faster than I have ever seen it done.
As if all that wasn’t enough, they also tend to be disconcertingly attractive (whether or not they’ve had nose jobs – and, yes, I have asked). So that’s another area where they have most of our domestic TV production teams well and truly licked.
Originally published: 1/12/09
No comments:
Post a Comment