Islamabad: With plot lines telling the everyday stories of country folk, the long-running radio drama ‘Across The Border’ would strike a chord with any devotee of The Archers.
But while the popular radio soap may be the brainchild of a former BBC journalist from Surrey, its setting is a long way from the English countryside.
With a mixture of lively drama and public information messages, the soap, called ‘Da Pulay Poray’ in Pashto and broadcast to millions in the Afghan south and east, has a huge following.
Set in one of the world’s last haunts of the polio virus, it is now at the front line of trying to eradicate the disease.
Efforts to finally stamp it out are hampered by widespread conspiracy theories about polio vaccine drops. Scriptwriters for the soap are trying to defeat stubbornly held notions in Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt ranging from fears that polio drops are plot to sterilise Muslims to the bizarre theory that they are George Bush’s urine.
“When people say what’s your biggest achievement, I say, well it’s making good storylines about polio because it’s not really the most captivating and interesting subject at first sight,” the show’s creator John Butt, 67, told The Sunday Telegraph.
Butt, who has lived in the region for nearly 50 years, worked for the BBC’s Pashto service in the Nineties and after creating another popular soap called ‘New Home, New Life’, he then set up his own production house, Pact Radio, in Jalalabad in 2004.
With a passion for Pashto radio and a mission to find “traditional solutions for modern problems” his soaps have in the past tackled women’s rights, militancy, the rule of law and health.
“You can actually bring up issues in a soap opera that you can’t bring up in day-to-day journalism,” he said.
Recent plot lines have seen characters debate polio vaccination and question hearsay that drops are harmful.
“Pashtuns will just believe anything you tell them and that’s the whole problem actually. They believe rumour and that’s the problem with polio. If someone says its Bush’s urine, OK it’s Bush’s urine. It’s a very infuriating country but then at the same time you feel that you are doing some good.”
—The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2018
