English Entertainment
Mira Nair speaks up on “A Suitable Boy”
MUMBAI: It was a best-seller when it was released a score and more years ago. Now, Vikram Seth’s "A Suitable Boy" is catching the attention in Britain as it airs as a six-part series on BBC One during primetime. Directed by Mira Nair, it has a cast of 110 Asian actors and at the time of writing, four episodes of the show had been aired.
Nair, who is known to be pretty blunt when she speaks, has expressed that she wished she had the same production budget for A Suitable Boy as the makers of The Crown did.
According to published reports, the BBC invested pounds sterling 16 million (Rs 160 crore) on the six part series, making it about 2.67 million pounds (Rs 26-odd crore) an episode. As against that, The Crown had a budget of close to 10 million pounds an episode and about a 100 million pounds for the season.
Speaking to the Economist last week, Nair said: “The show has the magnificence and sweep of The Crown. Let me tell with my 30 years of experiencing of making films about my part of the world for the world, you never get the budget of The Crown. You get what you get and you have to be so assured and have an amazing team so that we can achieve that sweep. Every moment of A Suitable Boy is shot on location in forts, crumbling palaces, old havelis and refurbished bridges..we did all this to create a sense of that layering of history. We did that more with our experience our sensibility, our taste, and much less with oodles of money.”
She further added that she hoped that the BBC and media in England would reflect the diversity of its own people. “I have yearned for Goodness Gracious Me for over 20 years. It had such brilliant writing for television, yet it is not there anymore. And it’s not as if it is not there, but the talent exists in the British Asian scene. I don’t see it being fostered. Now, my British Asian friends are saying to now that the BBC has spent its wad on A Suitable Boy, they’ll say there’s no room for anymore this year. That’s the thinking that should sort of go away.”
Nair also disclosed that three years were spent on adapting it, after experienced script writer Andrew Davies worked with author Seth to churnout the adaptation of the 1400-odd page book into a tight screenplay.
“I got into the party much later. They did a fabulous job distilling the massive tome. I wanted it to be less Pride and Prejudice and more the world that I wanted to evoke at that time..to shift the balance. I wanted to integrate the politics so it reflects the India of now to integrate the politics of now,” she expressed. “The search for lover, the search for who we are, the search for who we would spend our lives with, those are universal searches. The story is timely but the politics of it is also remarkably timely. Remember at that time the Hindu Muslim community were so syncretic in their song, in their culture, their language, in their friendships and that is so sadly and in a targeted fashion being obliterated slowly and surely in the fabric of our Indian society.”
A Suitable Boy will air on Netflix later this year. It boasts a stellar cast: Tabu, Ishan Khattar, Tanya Maniktala, Rasika Duggal, Mahira Kakkar, Ram Kapoor, Gagan dev Riar, Vivek Gomber, Vivaan Shah, Shahana Goswami, Mikhail Sen, Namit Das, Randip Hooda, Amir Bhashir, Ranvir Shorey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Vinay Pathak and Manoj Pahwa.
The series follows the story of four families held together by Mrs Rupa Mehra’s desire to find a good match for her daughter Lata in 1951-52. Interwoven is the story of a newly-independent India with all the pulls and pressures of its first general election and Hindu-Muslim religious strife.
It was shot on location in Lucknow, Maheshwar and Kanpur. Aradhna Seth’s Lookout Point was the production partner. Andrew Davies and Vikram Seth share the writing credits while the Hindi, Urdu and Awadhi dialogues are by Hriday Lani. The series is being distributed by Viniyard Films and the BBC.
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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.
