English Entertainment
“Too many reality shows shock merely for the sake of it and for the ratings” – Tania Zaetta, Television host, actress
‘The Ultimate Aussie Girl’, ‘Action Girl’, ‘Dare Diva’. These are some the nicknames given to television hostess and actor Tania Zaetta. Zaetta has been a regular on screens and a media favourite around the world for the past nine years.
In India, Zaetta has become a known name over the past few years for co-anchoring the reality show Who Dares Wins along with ex Australian cricketer Mike Whitney on AXN. Not one to hold back, Zaetta has done quite a few stunts herself like jumping off a 17-storey building, swimming with a Great White Shark, climbing under flying helicopters.
Zaetta is here again, promoting Extreme Dhamaka,the Indianised version of Who Dares Wins. It will commence airing from 3 December every Wednesday at 9 pm. The schedule saw the vivacious beauty visit six cities along with Whitney and the winners of AXN’s Hot ‘n’ Wild contest Deepica Sarma and Salil Acharya. Indiantelevision.com’s correspondent Ashwin Pinto caught up with the effervescent model-anchor on the sidelines of a media briefing.
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First off, what did you learn from hosting Extreme Dhamaka in India? In fact, I learnt more in one month of touring the country than I did all these years travelling the globe. I must say that I also enjoyed the variations in the food between North and South India as also about the different religions and ways of life. It was also a learning experience for Deepica and Salil. I told them “Forget whatever you have learnt about television so far. Throw that book out of the window because this is going to be a whole different ball game altogether. We do not have any scripted lines because this is reality. You do not know what the participants will say. It is ad libbed all the way.” |
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When and how did your journey into television start? |
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Were you nervous when you first appeared in front of thousands of people? The only time I was nervous was because the crowd was going berserk. I hosted one of Who Dares Wins challenges at an Australian Football League ground. The final was being played and 80,000 people were present chanting my name. It was like being at the centre during the Olympics. |
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You have been hosting Who Dares Wins with Mike Whitney for several years. Is it a challenge to keep the routine fresh? Since it is live, there is a huge challenge for the production team. There are no retakes. I cannot ask someone who has just finished riding through a burning bus on a motorbike to do it all over again because one camera was slightly out of focus. Another challenge for the stunt co-ordinators is that they are dealing with untrained people. Usually they interact with stunts people. So in our case they have to make sure that the message is properly communicated to the layman who may be a computer nerd. |
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What, in your opinion, is the single biggest reason for the success of the show? If they say no to a challenge without even trying it, there is no problem. After all, I probably would not attempt it either and I am sure that most people at home wouldn’t, especially when you have something that involves a level of danger. It was also one of the first reality shows to have appeared on the horizon. A lot of stuff that you see today has replicated our format. |
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What is the most dangerous dare one can perform? |
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Could you talk about some of the other shows you have hosted? This consists of a panel of women talking about topical events. It is a big daytime show. Then I have been with Blue Planet a travel show. I also do a sitcom called Pizza in Australia. I play a struggling upcoming model who dreams of making it big as a film star. |
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Does your anchoring style keep changing depending on the mood of the show? None of the shows I have done are straightforward. If I was hosting a fashion show, I would be wearing the latest accessories which would be most inappropriate for Extreme Dhamaka where I might be trying to convince someone to roll around in the mud. |
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Television is one of the most stressful jobs one can be in. How do you manage to sustain your level of motivation with the long hours? Sure, it is hard work. I recently moved from Australia to London. This way I can cut some of the travelling time out. I also did this to figure out what it was like be me rather than being the me that everybody else wanted me to be. I just wanted to go out there and be me. In India, one of the major rewards was the crowd. In a city like Chandigarh, where the heat was touching 40 degrees, they turned out in thousands. That makes the 15-hour days, the sweat all worthwhile. |
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What do you think about the general quality of reality television at the moment? Putting people together to see who will cheat and lie (read Temptation Island) in manipulative ways to win a prize is something I am repelled by. A kid might watch a show and then say “Hey, it is perfectly good for me to grow up and then cheat on my husband.” That is the reason why I will never host certain kinds of shows. People say, “How can you talk this when you also host reality shows?” I have had many offers over the years to host these kinds of shows once I became a recognisable face. However I do not want to put my name next to them. I am not surprised that there have been lawsuits put forth by participants. The worst part is that the audience who are utterly fascinated and do not realise that there is genuine anguish being felt by the participants and television should never stoop to that level. So what kind of television engages you? |
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What kind of a person are you and does that reflect what the average Australian is like? There are other qualities that I would hope make me different from the average Australian because that is my personality. I have a genuine love for people. I love hearing people’s stories. I love talking. I love travelling. Wherever I go, I never do anything by halves. When I came to India, I read books about the country, tried to understand the culture and the myriad ways of life that are prevalent. Is acting something you are also pursuing along with anchoring? I prefer hosting, though. It is my calling. It is my niche in the market place. It comes very easy to me. I slip in front of the camera and talk without thinking. Whereas, with acting, you are pretending to be somebody else the whole time. I prefer to be me and that happens when you are a presenter. |
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Is it difficult for you not to get caught up in all the media hype with magazines and publications voting you the best on the basis of your looks? |
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You have now come out with a kickboxing video. What is it about that sport that holds special appeal for you? What does the future hold for Tania? It is a big thing to find that a network wants to acknowledge all the work you have done and think that you are worthy of following around for a month with a camera crew. There are a lot of big magazine covers, magazine spreads, swimwear, calendars coming up too… |
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UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
