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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 93

film-based. As one prominent report from the Ministry of Information &
Broadcasting, titled “An Indian Personality for Television,” noted, “feature
films and film-related programmes occupied the largest single chunk of
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telecast time (21.1%).” The Saturday evening Hindi-language film, the film
songs show Chitrahaar, and Showtheme, which used popular film songs and
scenes to speak to a different theme each week, always garnered high viewer
ratings. By 1984–85, these shows had established an immensely lucrative
“national audience” for Doordarshan. As Manju Singh, the producer and
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host of Showtheme, explained:

We wanted to show clips from memorable films in a thematic way and
it became a huge hit. We also connected themes to artists and these art-
ists were getting TV exposure for the first time. For example, when Hero
was released, we got Jackie Shroff to do a show on crime. At the time,
people didn’t get to see much film-related material on TV. So for Door-
darshan, Showtheme was great—they paid a fixed amount to us, and we
would pay a part of that to producers for film material. The amount
was fixed, irrespective of what movie it was or which star it was. But
then, most producers and distributors were happy. Many of them felt that
the show brought back the film’s saleability—a second release, maybe in
smaller towns. And within Doordarshan, people were very happy and
appreciative. For them, Showtheme was the perfect mix of entertainment
and information.

Showtheme was produced by Creative Unit, a Bombay-based advertising
agency, in collaboration with Network 7, a television production company
owned and managed by Manju Singh. The advertising agency was respon-
sible for bringing in film stars and obtaining permissions for the use of film
clips from producers and distributors. While trade and press reports indi-
cate that for the most part filmmakers and stars did consider Chitrahaar
and Showtheme as a form of publicity, it is also clear that the film industry’s
involvement with such shows was limited to providing content. 29
In fact, filmmakers were unhappy with the rates fixed by Doordarshan
and continually lobbied bureaucrats at the network to increase payments
for film clips and songs, pointing to the exorbitant sums that the network
was charging advertisers for film-based shows. These negotiations and,
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more broadly, the mandate to produce “quality” programming even led
Doordarshan officials to explore the possibility of financing directors with
the goal of making “socially relevant” films for television. Forging links
with the film industry was, as newspaper and trade-press articles reveal, a