Dubai Diaries: Down TV memory lane

As we grew older and out of cartoons (though that is arguable), we were lucky enough to catch some classic comedies like Small Wonder (funny family drama revolving around a child-robot), and Charles In Charge (where a rather hunky Scott Baio plays nanny to three kids while navigating his own problems; it has to be said here that his friend Buddy Lembeck - played by Willie Aames - was one of the greatest comic characters ever created for TV). In my late teens I also loved the series Out Of This World - a comic take on a teenage girl who develops superpowers thanks to her alien dad.

Long-running American soap The Bold and The Beautiful made a big splash when it first debuted on Channel 33 in the ‘80s. We would manage sneak peeks while our mom watched the series and then get told off because it wasn’t ‘suitable’ for kids. As a school friend hilariously put it once - ‘it’s a bunch of impossibly beautiful people standing around doing mostly nothing for 20 minutes’. I guess the novelty wore off for my mom as well and she switched to more entertaining stuff after a while.

I however was quite intrigued by the ‘B&theB’ as it was popularly referred to, and once given the nod of adult approval, followed it for quite a few years. It was the same with Beverly Hills, 90210. As teenagers in the early ‘90s who were about the same age as the kids in BH, we devoured each weekly episode of teen drama, fights, love and other issues, and felt a gap in our lives when we couldn’t watch (or were prevented by our moms from watching) due to exams.

Cable TV came to the UAE after a while and the variety of programmes to watch increased by leaps and bounds. By then I was away at college and a girls’ hostel in India where we would assemble in the ‘visitors hall’ to watch an ancient television broadcasting only two local channels, and grumble when our favourite Bollywood songs were cut short in a popular program called Chitrahaar.

I was kept abreast of the happenings on my favourite Hollywood series by friends who still lived in Dubai (letter-writing was common back then; one of my best friends even wrote me a separate sheet only to detail what transpired on 90210 since I left). On weekly visits to relatives, I would sometimes manage to catch The Bold and The Beautiful on cable and shudder at the direction it was taking.

Today the choices viewers have are immense. With streaming channels like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, ZEE5 and more, gone are the days when programming began in the afternoon and ended at midnight. So as I pick up my remote and shake off my ‘tv nostalgia’, I ask, what are you watching today?