From Dhoop Kinare to Ankahi: 5 Pakistani PTV dramas that reached UAE homes on VHS

Dubai: You may never have watched a single episode. You will still know the names, because they have been said in your presence a thousand times.

Somebody in your family has compared a real person to Sana Murad. Somebody has declared that nothing today comes close to Dhoop Kinare, usually while watching something today.

And none of it arrived here by satellite. There wasn't any. Whatever aired on PTV in Karachi came to Sharjah and Abu Dhabi on videocassette, recorded in Pakistan, carried over in someone's suitcase, then passed from family to family until the tracking wobbled and the picture went soft. By the fourth household it looked terrible and nobody cared.

Which is why these five stuck. Not only the writing. The watching of them was a group event.

Episodes: 13 Written by: Haseena Moin Directed by: Sahira Kazmi Starring: Marina Khan, Rahat Kazmi

The one every argument comes back to. Two doctors in a Karachi hospital, one severe and one chaotic, and thirteen episodes of neither of them admitting anything.

Marina Khan and Rahat Kazmi became the on-screen couple of their generation, which is to say they were Fawad and Mahira twenty-four years early.

The detail people go quiet about is the score. It used a Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem sung by Nayyara Noor, and that is the reason a hospital drama from 1987 still gets people emotional at dinner.

Written by: Haseena Moin Directed by: Shahzad Khalil Starring: Shehnaz Sheikh, Marina Khan, Behroze Sabzwari

Two sisters lose their parents and their house in one stroke, and set about getting the house back.

It was the first time Pakistani television showed young women working, running businesses and earning their own way, and it managed it without ever making a speech about it.

Also much funnier than its reputation suggests, which is the thing people forget when they call it a landmark.

Written by: Haseena Moin Starring: Shehnaz Sheikh, Javed Sheikh, Behroze Sabzwari, Qazi Wajid

Sana Murad: broke, unqualified, undeterred, and constantly talking her way into jobs she has no business holding.

Shehnaz Sheikh turned the character into national shorthand. Say her name in a Pakistani household and everyone knows exactly which relative you mean.

Bollywood noticed too. Chal Mere Bhai, released in 2000, took the storyline more or less wholesale.

Created by: Shoaib Mansoor

Three friends join the army, and the series follows them from cadet training onwards.

Later, bigger, shot on location rather than in a studio, and the one people get most heated about defending. Shoaib Mansoor made it before Khuda Kay Liye and Bol, and you can see where the ambition started.

If you were a child, this one is yours rather than your parents'.

A genie comes to Earth to get his eyesight fixed and everything goes sideways. Zakoota Jin frightened an entire generation and remains the single most reliable way to make a Pakistani millennial in this country shout.

The cast were invited to perform for Princess Diana during her 1996 visit to Pakistan, which sounds invented and is not.

Haseena Moin wrote Ankahi, Tanhaiyaan and Dhoop Kinare.

She was writing women with jobs, opinions and the right of refusal at a point when very little television anywhere was doing it. Her heroines argued, ran offices, and said no to men while the script backed them.

She died in March 2021, and the obituaries in Pakistan ran at the length usually reserved for heads of state.

Most of these sit on official YouTube channels, free, uploaded by the broadcasters. Picture quality is variable and subtitles are patchy.

Start with Dhoop Kinare. Thirteen episodes, which is shorter than a season of almost anything you are currently watching.

Better still, watch it with whoever has been telling you about it for twenty years.