English Entertainment
Zee Café has ‘All Eyes on New’ with a spectacular line-up of shows
MUMBAI: Drama, laughter, secrets and revelations…Zee Café, one of India’s leading general English entertainment channels, has it all as it is leaving no stone unturned to make the month of April an exciting one for its audience. With a spectacular content line-up all through the month, the channel brings an interesting bouquet of shows comprising of fiction and reality, that the audience just cannot miss!
Scandal– Season 7 (Finale) – Starting April 4, 10pm
What will Olivia Pope do now?
The seventh and monumental final season of Scandal will premiere with a brand new White House administration that includes Mellie Grant as the first female President of the United States, Cyrus Beane as the vice president, and Olivia Pope as Mellie’s chief of staff. Olivia also doubles as the head of the newly reinstated top-secret government agency B6-13, with Jake Ballard working by her side. Will Mellie be successful in making her dreams come true? Will Olivia find love?
Discover a new cuisine every week on The Chefs’ Line – Season 1 – 9pm
Premiered in February, the Australian reality competitive cooking show, The Chefs’ Line pits passionate home chefs against professional chefs. Featuring a new cuisine every week, the show is a visual delight for all the foodies out there. The coming weeks will witness the chefs try their skills at Lebanese, Thai, Spanish, French, Japanese and Mexican food! Remains to be seen who will win the hearts of the judges, Dan Hong, Melissa Leong and Mark Olive with their culinary skills. Which side are you on?
Will & Grace – Season 1 – 8pm
How they became the most fabulous foursome on TV
Find out how it all started as Zee Café brings back the Emmy-winning show, Will & Grace, with the most fabulous foursome on television – Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally reprising their famous roles as Will, Grace, Jack and Karen. The first season begins when Grace gets an unexpected marriage proposal and her best friend Will deals with his own feelings about her proposal.
Two and a Half Men – Season 7 – 11.55 pm
Charlie Sheen and his new live-in fiancée!
Television’s top-rated comedy is growing up and Zee Café brings it to you totally uncut and uncensored! Charlie Sheen as a veteran bachelor may finally be reined in by his new live-in fiancée. On the seventh season premiere, Charlie must decide between his fiancée, Chelsea, and his old flame, Mia. Rock superstar Eddie Van Halen makes a cameo appearance as himself. Charlie discovers that Chelsea hasn’t been completely honest about her finances. What happens next?
Everybody Loves Raymond – Season 6 – 8.30pm
The sixth season begins with first-grader Michael as he shocks the Barone clan with an unpleasant story he wrote about them. Ray tries to liven things up in the bedroom when he buys a sex game but, of course, the whole family finds out about it. Debra’s divorced parents come for Thanksgiving dinner, and her dad brings his new girlfriend, which shocks everyone. Robert gets involved with a woman he meets at a sports bar, but she thinks he is Ray Barone, the sportswriter, and Robert is afraid to tell her the truth.
The Big Bang Theory – Season 11 – Sunday, 7.30pm (Along with the US)
Season 11 begins with Amy giving Sheldon an answer to his marriage proposal. Meanwhile, Howard and Bernadette struggle with some unexpected news. Leonard and Wolowitz are furious after they learn Sheldon went to work with the military behind their backs. Also, while Bernadette is on bed rest, she asks Raj to do some digging when she suspects Ruchi is trying to steal her job. Sheldon and Amy try to eliminate stress from wedding planning by applying math to the process. Also, Koothrappali breaks up with Wolowitz after realizing his best friend is damaging his confidence.
The Late Late Show with James Corden– 11pm
Each week night, The Late Late Show with James Corden throws a late-night after-party with a mix of celebrity guests, edgy musical acts, games and sketches. Corden differentiates his show by offering viewers a peek behind the scenes into the green room, bringing all his guests out at once and lending his musical and acting talents to various sketches. Additionally, bandleader Reggie Watts and the house band provide original, improvised music throughout the show.
What’s more? Viewers don’t have to wait for their favourite shows to come to India as Zee Café brings them Along with the US. While The Big Bang Theory Season 11 is already being premiered with the US, shows like Supergirl Season 3, Lethal Weapon Season 2, Gotham Season 4 and Valor Season 1 will also be showed as a part of the property!
The channel will also air other shows like Fameless, Melissa & Joey, Criminal Minds, Originals and much more. With its unmissable content offerings, Zee Café promises to make this April an interesting one. Happy binging!
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.
