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CRITICAL DISPATCH
Money
madness
 Mixed
messages and a rapid fire consumer maturation mark this year's Ramadan
TV
BY TAREK
ATIA
There have already been some
telling moments on TV this month. One was a few nights ago on Hala
Sarhan's new talk show, Gana Al-Hawa, on Rotana, the music channel.
Sarhan has moved over from the helm of Dream to the top job at Rotana,
and she's taken her Oprah-like talk show concept with her.
Strangely enough, however, this
seems to be a kindler, gentler Hala Sarhan -- more thoughtful, less
abrasive. She had Riyad El-Hamshari, the veteran composer, on as a
guest, and she kindly prodded him into singing a song of his called
"Amrikani".
"This is not an Indian film,
nor is it European," El-Hamshari crooned, "It's Amrikani..."
The main guest -- singer Samira
Said -- asked El-Hamshari if he had written the song before or after the
Iraq War. El-Hamshari laughed and said he had actually written it 14
years earlier...
 Which
just goes to prove: that some people have seen it coming for a while
now. El-Hamshari may have been before his time, but today, America's
socio-cultural influence has become extremely obvious to all.
And in case some poor soul hadn't
yet noticed, here was this year's crop of Ramadan TV series to ram it
down our throats... albeit, in a somewhat different way.
The rise of the Egyptian American
That's right, this year's
headline drama -- Nabila Ebied's Al-Amma Nour (Aunti Nour) is all about
an Egyptian-American. Ebeid has come back to Sayeda Zeinab after living
in America for several decades. She's  come
back with modern, moderate ideas, and an annoying "Okay",
"Of course", "What happened?"
and "No" in every phrase. She also does things like urge her
brother, played by Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra, to treat his kids
differently, to allow, for instance, his daughter to date in the open.
Ebeid is meant to represent reason and pragmatisim, an ability to merge
Egyptian values with a modern American
gloss.
Through her character, everyone
else in the drama is revealed to be absurd, clinging on to
superstitions, silly ideas and unprogressive ways of thinking and
talking.
 But
there is more than one message being delivered via this fantasy world.
On another show, Al-Banat, one of the characters is a hard-working lab assistant
whose colleague is always chiding her for being so conscientious.
"Order is the key to success," the diligent girl says.
"That's why Egyptians living abroad do so well."
Surprisingly, her colleague makes
fun of her. "Yeah, we've heard all that before," she says.
"We're bored stiff with that song." Meaning -- despite
Egyptian TV's stringent efforts, it's not going to be easy to get
everybody to change their ways.
Money, money, money
Of course that's the real bottom
line -- cash is king on Ramadan TV. It's the ultimate staging ground for
consumerism, where everything is for  sale
-- and even strangely non consumer items like cement and steel get a
huge share of the ad time. But on the dramas themselves, money --
whether the characters have too much or too little of it -- is the
primary theme. It's what
everybody is talking about, and what everyone is obsessed with getting.
It defines the relationships between characters, and guides every story
to its logical conclusion.
In Abyad fi Abyad (All White) a
forlorn Mamdouh Abdel-Aleem has too much money and too much time on his
hands. But all is not well in the land of the rich, for Aleem's
character is always talking about the anguish of having been  deprived
of so much love by his rich parents all his life.
Messages like that are so obvious
as to be painful, and every night, on every show, there are lessons to
be devoured by the bucketful after a hearty iftar.
The problem, however, is that
because so much of the acting is mediocre, and not much is happening
plot-wise on any particular show, one tends to doubt that any clear
messages will actually come through.
 Will
die hard viewers really emerge from these dramas with a firm belief in the old
"Money can't buy you love" cliche? Or will they take home the
unsubtle hint that having lived abroad puts you at an advantage over
your fellow citizens, who aught to catch up quick, or at least pretend
they understand if they know what's best for their future?
Then again, there's the most
important message of all -- that as Egyptians, we're really all right
deep down, it's just that some of us can't see it clearly through all
the poverty and the dust. For even Nabila Ebeid, El-Amma Nour from
America who has seen and done it all -- says to her brother Abdel-Rahman
Abu Zahra in one episode, "In America, love isn't real, because it
has lost all of its beautiful meanings. Here, it still retains
everything that's good and natural."
As the month progresses, messages
like that are certainly going to become clearer. But although we will
hear them on every show, what they really reveal is a confusing world
where identity itself has become just another commodity to be bought and
sold like ghee.
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