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Desi Please

The “Bloop” screen - An interesting take on censorship in Pakistan

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You have been “blooped”
(img: via The Road to the Horizon blog)

Among my earliest memories of watching TV growing up in Mumbai was the fact that we had only two channels on TV which we christened Doordarshan 1 and 2, which we had to get via an antenna on the top of our building. The “bloop” screen was a frequent visitor on our screen back in those days, I’m talking early 1980s. The “bloop” screen is apparently still very much alive and kicking in neighboring Pakistan.

Peter Casier, a Belgian, works for the UN on humanitarian missions and blogs about his travels. This is a take from his recent travels in Pakistan. Peter talks about he got the “bloop” screen on a random basis and it confused the heck out of him.

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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