Word: shows
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...once staid standards of Soviet television, Western music videos and a smooth transition from the great outdoors to the broadcast studio seem revolution enough on the airwaves. But the millions of Soviets who watch Molchanov's show find it spellbinding for other reasons. They tune in for a glimpse of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost: a prominent Soviet writer denouncing the "monstrous slavery" of Stalinism, scenes of rusting railway cars in an abandoned stretch of the Gulag, even rare film footage of Czar Nicholas II and the royal family...
View, broadcast on Friday night, routinely touches taboo topics and raw nerve ends. The show's reporters have interviewed young neo-Nazis, Soviet investigators on the Mafia beat and Afghan vets who brawled with police and have the bruises to show for it. Even the music carries a message, whether it be a video from the Eurythmics that uses snippets from the film 1984 or a satiric jazz ditty from the Soviet group Akvarium, complete with Stalinist-era newsreels and pictures of a booted foot atop a typewriter and a saxophone. The show's philosophy, as explained by Zakharov...
...state television system responded to Gorbachev's call for perestroika by adding four more hours of programming each day to the two national channels. You can stay up late; you can get up early. A morning show called 90 Minutes proved so popular that it soon expanded to 120 Minutes. Now collective-farm workers can turn on their sets and get an update on how the harvest is faring in the Volgograd district. For prurient relief, they can watch music videos of East German TV dancers, slinking about in peekaboo sequined costumes...
Some of the more intriguing experiments are going on in local TV studios. Good Evening, Moscow!, a daily news and commentary show on the Moscow channel, sends out a young journalist with an "express camera" to film slice-of-life vignettes on city streets. The show also cajoles officials to take the hot seat for questions called in by viewers. The Leningrad channel broadcasts the provocative cultural digest Fifth Wheel, focusing on "superfluous people" in the arts and letters, as well as the offbeat 600 Seconds news show, in which commentator Alexander Nevzorov races against a flashing digital clock...
...crop of younger TV hosts has proved a quick study in knowing what to say and show, especially at a time when things forbidden one month may be permissible the next. View host Zakharov compares it with being "a sharpshooter. You have to wait until the right moment to hit the target. But you must learn to compromise. That is part of the new tolerance...