On a May day in 1984, a bunch of nervous young men, coming from different backgrounds, walked into the prestigious FTI in Pune. They were to bring Doordarshan to Kerala. Young Sajan Gopalan was one among them. Those were the days when they had not seen a television set, he remembers as Doordarshan enters its 30th year in Kerala, this January 1. It was on January 1, 1985 that Kerala watched television for the first time. “It was a cultural event, streamed live from Tagore Theatre. The next day, we aired the first television news,” says Sajan. Joining him, in his memories about the first television channel, are youngsters who grew up with Doordarshan.
Aspiring director Manu Radhakrishnan remembers his childhood days when he used to get behind the television set to find out if the actors he saw on screen were behind the set. “That world of visual media that Doordarshan had opened for the girls and boys of my generation had fascinated me so much that I chose that a career,” he says. He would watch the Ramayana and pretend to be Lord Rama with a bow and arrow made of broom sticks, or be Tipu Sultan with a branch of tree for a sword. But by his 12th grade, there came into his house the ‘Cable TV’. And Doordarshan was forgotten.
“When younger channels started mushrooming all around, they had the advantage of skipping the red-tape and providing round-the-clock entertainment,” says Pradeep Kalipurayath, filmmaker-cum-television producer. But he believes it is watching the early Sunday morning Rangoli and ‘those regional movies in the afternoons’ on DD that incepted in him that language was no bar when it came to films.
For young social entrepreneur Sobha Ashwin, those Rangoli mornings meant everything once upon a time. “Chitrahars too... Those were days we could not listen to music any other way. Our older cousins wouldn’t lend their walkmans. Also, watching DD’s Hindi serials helped me learn the language.”
Having seen the same set of programmes as Sobha and Manu, is actor Govind Padmasoorya, who got his first screen presence in Doordarshan as a toddler. “That was for a Vishu special programme. Years later, as a Class X student, I appeared on another Doordarshan feature before making a foray into films. The channel played a major role in familiarising me with mythology,” he said with a touch of nostalgia, echoing the sentiments of a whole generation.
