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You have been “blooped”
(img: via The Road to the Horizon blog)
Sometimes, hours would go by, and all was fine, and other times, the test picture would appear every couple of minutes.
After much trial and error, Peter was able to narrow down the appearance of the “bloop” screen to coincide with a “bad” scene on TV.
After a while, I figured out that the test pictures appeared each time there was a ’sensitive’ scene, where a bit of ‘flesh’ or some male/female intimacy was shown.
Later, on a visit to a TV station, Peter discovered the secret of the “bloop” screen. The bloop Nazis consisted of a bunch of local ladies sitting in an enclosed room at the TV stations. The job description for these ladies: watch one TV channel all day and “bloop” out the “bad” scenes.
Each lady was monitoring one TV channel only. Each had two screens and one big button in front of her. One screen showed the TV-signal as they picked it up from satellite or from a tape, that was the input. The lady would push her big red button when ‘bad scene’ happened. This is when the ‘BLOOP’ would appear on the output. They monitored the second screen for the TV-signal they were actually broadcasting, to ensure a BLOOP was actually transmitted.
The thought of a bunch of desi aunties stuck in a room and dictating which scenes we should watch is a throwback to days of yore, when my family watched movies on the VCR and the new (at that time) colour TV in the family room and my mother would forward the tape whenever an “inappropriate scene” - rain song, cabaret dance or hero-heroine intimacy scene, came on TV. The censorship had a personal touch to it and Peter’s story makes me wonder if we were ever victims of the “bloop” screen type censorship on national television in pre-globalization India in the 1980s. In fact, I would love to know if Doordarshan still employs this mode of censorship?
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Oh good old doordarshan, I remember the whole family getting frustrated when this came between a serial or the weekend movie. “rukawat ke liye khed hai”…
It’s weird. Even with almost 200 channels these days I still miss the little things like the “rukawat ke liye khed hai” messages.