It's drama time

An international conference on media communications held recently in Timbuktu ended with a grim outlook and a passionate plea for action concerning TV viewing habits in the Arab World.

The conference warned against dangers of an unprecedented increase in drama series on Arab TV satellites.

For three days, scholars from 23 countries embarked on studying presentations, DVDs and research reports, listened to testimonies from various experts and issued a strong-worded recommendation specifying that drama consumption in the Arab World is reaching highly toxic levels, affecting established behavioral codes and shaking up entire patterns of social and human relationships.

One speaker after another elaborated at length on the serious effects caused by what some experts called "APOWD" syndrome: Arab Psychotic Obsession with Drama.

The participants cited a wealth of disturbing reports on how Arab audiences react towards drama in strange ways never recorded before since the invention of television in the Fifties.

Stories were shared about wives getting beaten mercilessly by their husbands when they wondered how come their partners are not "romantic" as the main actor in a certain drama series, and about the alarming number of marriages ending in divorce when furious husbands disliked their wives' attention to certain foreign drama series.

The conference cited the huge numbers of newly born babies who were given the names of a romantic couple who played leading roles in an imported series - noting that the names were chosen not by the writer, as logic would have it, but by the local dubbing company as the series itself was created in a foreign language.

Social workers mentioned how in many Arab cities traffic would slow down, productivity would suffer considerably and the whole mood would change around the times of airing certain drama series.

Psychiatrists noted how Arab viewers of all ages spend their time entering endless, pointless and shameless arguments about certain events within the fictional storyline, taking sides and demanding action - from nowhere - as if all that energy will add to something or alter one line in a pre-recorded-taped-broadcast-programme.

Life schedules

Educators noted how life schedules across the Arab World revolve around airtimes of certain drama series, and how appointments, whether business, social or medical, were dictated by TV schedules.

Also, how tourism plans suddenly include trips to foreign homes and buildings that serve as filming locations in certain drama series, overcoming years of cultural mistrust.

Scholars were alarmed by such enormous gullibility and impressionability on the part of Arab viewers, to the extent that one of them questioned loudly whether Arab viewers revert to early childish capabilities and whether they actually know the difference between fiction and reality.

After hearing these reports one German scholar said: "The only explanation I can offer is that the Arab social reality is grimmer than anything we have seen - hence the tendency to escape to a rosy, fictitious world that the screen provides."

A Swiss scholar concurred, providing more details on the issue. He noted that: "Arabs are attacked by drama all around them in hard reality. So they want a lighter, softer and cleaner drama."

The conference was not all doom and gloom. One session featured smiling faces as broadcasters, producers and advertisers defended their profit margins, fat cuts and increased sales resulting from collective consumer TV obsession, especially during the month of Ramadan.

The concluding meeting with the press, signalling the end of the conference, had to be delayed as many journalists opted to watch the final episode of the drama series, Shtunk, a dubbed soap-opera about a young, beautiful couple whose hard-won marriage against tribal feuds and strict relatives is threatened when the husband falls in love with a lizard.

Ahmad Zahzah is a media consultant based in the UAE.