After six years off the air, humour - of a sort - is back on Afghan TV. Rory McCarthy tuned in.
Kabul television these days is an acquired taste. Peak viewing is on a Friday night, at the end of the weekly holiday when most people are at home desperate to savour the delights that their new-found freedom has to offer.
The build-up to the evening's main television event is a little slow. A succession of male singers appears on the screen. Each has his hair long and thickly oiled, and most are dressed in broad-collared, open-necked checked shirts and leather jackets as they croon Farsi and Pashtu love-ballads or songs about Afghanistan in the spring. And there is little disguising the fact that these are tapes salvaged from Kabul's golden age in the 1970s. Those were the days when many women wore miniskirts and couples walked hand in hand through the streets.
Then the Soviets invaded, the Islamist mojahedin emerged and Afghanistan tumbled into two decades of civil war that culminated in the relentless repression by the Taliban. They promptly banned television, along, as we now all know, with music, dancing, kite flying, miniskirts and a raft of other entertainment deemed "un-Islamic".
Islam still plays a fundamental role in Kabul life even now a more moderate government is in charge. So, after several hours of singing we cross to the cleric at Kabul's main mosque who delivers the Friday sermon, a long and intense 30-minute essay on the failings of man. Finally at 9 p.m. comes the main event, a chaotic quiz and satirical comedy called The Riddle Show that marks the first return of humour to Afghan television in six years.
The set is another white-on-pink relic of 30 years ago. An inverted question mark hangs at the back over the heads of the two quizmasters who are firing questions at two young students, one a boy, the other a girl. This is the general knowledge round. What happened at the Bonn conference in December? Hamid Karzai was selected to lead Afghanistan, the boy answers correctly.
We move on at dizzying pace to another slick-haired crooner singing a song made famous by Afghanistan's late, great musical hero, the singer Ahmadzai. The crowd, largely made up of young students and their teachers, many of them women, is in raptures.
There are more rounds of questions, mime performances for the contestants and peculiar prizes. Eventually both emerge the winners and leave with gifts of large plastic water jugs. Next up is a four-man comedy routine and soon the crowd is roaring again as the sketch descends into slapstick banter.
The Riddle Show, perhaps the most original piece of programming on Kabul television, is the work of director Mohammad Usman Azimi. From his desk in a narrow, blue office in the half-destroyed ruins of the television station, he has created the show that captures the excitement and frustrations of the new Kabul.
He has dozens of young Afghans queuing at his door desperate to be presenters, and crowds outside begging for tickets for the next performance.
"There's no point us showing people ordinary things in their lives, they just won't bother watching. So we turn everything into a comedy and it's become very popular," he says.
For 20 years Azimi worked at Kabul Television until the Taliban seized the capital in September, 1996. The television department was closed down and he was transferred to Radio Sharia, which broadcast little more than hardline religious sermons and the latest edicts from the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue. "None of us were interested in working then," he says.
Now he is in charge of 19 television shows, many of them broadcasts for children. "Writing the comedy is the hardest by far. It is much harder to get the actors to do it the way we want." Afghan humour is often farcical and bleak, perhaps not surprisingly after so many years of war and hunger when daily deprivation, serious injury and death became commonplace.
Azimi's own inspiration comes from watching old videos of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy which were among the few hundred tapes that survived Taliban rule.
But his show faces fierce competition. Within days of the demise of the Taliban, Kabul's entrepreneurs began producing improvised satellite dishes made out of sheet metal from tin cans. Now they litter houses and high-rises across the city and most people with the money to buy a television can also afford to tune in to dozens of satellite channels from across the world. "We have so many technical problems and our machines are so old that it is hard for us to make good quality programmes to compete," says Azimi.
Foreign television may be popular but it lacks the Kabul touch. Azimi is trying to get Afghans to laugh at their own situation. "My favourite sketch was about the traffic lights in Kabul. We had someone who needed to take a friend to the hospital but we had him stopping at so many traffic lights on the way that he never got there. In the end his friend died." The humour is as dark as ever but it rings true. Kabul's streets were deserted this time last year. Now they are crowded and chaotic and crossing the city has become an unexpected daily bind.
Azimi insists no subject is taboo for satire in the new Afghanistan and explains how they covered sensitive issues such as drug smuggling, which is now rife. "We can make jokes about anything now," he says. Almost anything. "We just don't make jokes about politics. Or religion.
"Afghans have been fighting for 23 years and they really need comedy now. They haven't been given much chance to laugh."
- (Guardian Service)