The Turkish word for a TV series or
soap opera is ‘dizi’ – and ‘dizzy’ is probably a good word to describe the
effects that Turkish TV series are having these days in this part of the world.
For a start they are huge business in Turkey itself. There is a series for every niche market in the country. From
the working class lives of ‘Coronation St’ and ‘East Enders’, through the
decadent wealthy suburbia of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and the James Bond machismo
of ‘Valley of the Wolves’, there is a local show with appeal for every sector
of Turkish society.
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| Sultan Süleiman and his desperate housewives |
So seriously do Turks follow the
labyrinthine twists and turns of their on-screen heroes and heroines that some
have difficulty separating the actor from his or her role. It was reported that
one avid fan had slipped a note into the hand of Selçuk Yöntem, the thespian
playing middle-aged Adnan Ziyagil in ‘Forbidden Love’, warning him that his
young wife Bihter was cheating on him. Beren Saat, the real-life persona of
beautiful Bihter, is adored by thousands of adolescent male Turks, whose tender
hearts have been dealt a bitter blow by her recent engagement to local pop star
Kenan Doğulu.
But it’s not just Turks who are
going dizzy over the dizis. Waheed
Samy, general manager of Egypt-based
Memphis Tours, was reported as saying he believed that Turkish TV series ‘are
responsible for a 50% increase in the number of tourists to Turkey.’ ‘Forbidden
Love’, based loosely on a 1900 novel known in Turkish as ‘Aşk-ı Memnu’, was one
of the first Turkish series to be dubbed into Arabic. It reportedly attracted
85 million viewers at the peak of its popularity, setting off a trend that has
grown into a multi-million dollar industry with far-reaching effects in the
Arab world. One journalist referred to the phenomenon recently as ‘the Turkish
TV series spring’ – a reference to the more violent events taking place in
public squares of the same countries.
Abdullah Çelik, a spokesman for the
Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, was quoted
as saying that revenue from the sale of local TV series abroad had reached $65
million by the end of 2010 – up from zero in 2006. Monetary figures were not
available for 2011, but he went on to say that 10,500 hours of TV series had
been sold abroad that year. Not a small thing in times of global economic
recession.
Of course, it
is not merely the economic effects of this ‘soft power’ revolution that is
attracting attention. A recent article on Euro
News reported interviews with young people from Arab countries explaining
the appeal of these Turkish shows:
“(What you see in this series is) you
can be Muslim and you can be modern. They show that part of life (that) some of
the Arabic people (are) deprived of – technology, nice living, modern life.
They show the part of life that we don’t have in some of our countries,” said
Auhood, an Iraqi tourist.
“It (the series) shows all the Muslim
people can be open minded, open life, they can have modern life style,” added
Asma, from Egypt.
It could be said that the possibility of Islamic culture
coexisting comfortably with modern democracy as portrayed in these programmes
is doing more to undermine autocracy and inequality in Arab countries than all
the munitions supplied by the arms industries of the major world powers.
Still, it seems not everyone in Turkey is happy with the direction
the Turkish film industry is taking. An Istanbul
MP said she believed
that these series hurt the image of Turkey abroad by glorifying corruption and
immorality. The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself, entered the
debate in the past week with pointed criticism of the enormously popular
‘Muhteşem Yüzyıl’, set in the 16th century Ottoman Golden Age of
Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. His beef seemed to be that the real Suleiman
spent much of his life in the saddle, leading his victorious armies to
conquests throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe, even to the gates of
the Hapsburg capital, Vienna. The screen version of the illustrious Padishah,
known to Turks as ’The Lawgiver’, seems to have a preference for other mounts
in the inner sanctum of Topkapı palace’s harem.
Well, you can see the PM’s point, and, as a keen amateur
historian, I have some sympathy for the argument that says young Turkish kids
are getting a distorted picture of the Ottoman Empire at the peak of its power
– an image perhaps more in line with that of Western Orientalists, who
portrayed the ‘Grand Turk’ and his ‘Divan’ as dissolute, debauched and
degenerate, ready to avail themselves of sexual opportunities in whatever form
they came most conveniently to hand.
Conversely, not everyone is as devoted to the search for historical
truth as we may be ourselves. I watched, in a cinema not so long ago, another
recent product of the Turkish film industry, ‘Çanakkale’. Çanakkale, as my
readers will know, is a town on the Dardanelles Straits that lent its name to
the First World War fiasco we in the West know as the Gallipoli Campaign. The
‘Çanakkale War’ is dear to Turkish hearts, being the only theatre of the ‘Great
War’ where Ottoman forces achieved significant success. The details and
myths are well known to every Turkish child, and the film reinforces them all – from the heroic exploits of artillery corporal Seyit, single-handedly lugging 12
inch shells for the shore-based batteries, to the fob watch of Colonel Mustafa
Kemal (later Atatürk) which saved the future president from a shrapnel fragment
in the heart.
The thing is, though, I have yet to meet anyone (and I mean Turks
here) who actually liked the film. Sad to say, bayonet charges, sinking Royal
Navy battleships, and life in the trenches may be true-life events, but they
don’t capture the hearts and minds of cinema-goers and couch potatoes. We don’t
get to know anyone in the film, and consequently we don’t engage with it.
Steven Spielberg understood this, which is why he didn’t call that film ‘The
Normandy Invasion’ – but invented a GI private by the name of James Ryan,
thereby generating a touching story with human interest, and probably making a good
deal of money into the bargain.
Furthermore, there may well have been younger generations of viewers
for whom ‘Saving Private Ryan’ brought to life an important historical event
that might otherwise have remained remote and meaningless to them. There may
even have been some who left the theatre with an urge to learn more about the
war their grandfathers fought in all those years before. For the rest, it was a
couple of hours of entertainment; incidentally presenting to the world out
there an American view of themselves they would like us all to believe. And why
not? Cinema as nationalist propaganda is not to be underestimated. Just ask the
Greeks.
Huh? Run that by me again. How did the Greeks get into this? Well,
apparently the board of their state-run TV channel ERT just last week fired
their general manager over a
documentary focusing on the effects of Turkish TV series on Greek society. It
seems that series such as ‘The Magnificent Century’, ‘The Bitter Age’ (‘Acı
Hayat’) and ‘The Tulip Age’ (‘Lale Devri’) have gained a large following on the
other side of the Aegean – and this is disturbing divines of the Orthodox
Church and ultra-nationalists of the so-called 'Golden Dawn' movement. The ERT
board evidently bowed to political pressure and Mr Kostas Spyropoulos’s head
rolled.
So what’s the answer? I’ve never been a big TV watcher, so
personally, I probably wouldn’t care much if all the series, soap operas and
made-for-TV dramatisations of great classics disappeared from the air waves.
Nevertheless, I recognise that I represent a tiny minority of the world’s
population, most of whom are mesmerised by what they see on the idiot box. For
that reason if no other, it seems to me that Turks should be pretty happy about
how Turkish television is forging a new image for their nation on the world
stage.
My step-daughter, Perin, for her doctoral dissertation,
came up with an interesting term ‘Wild-Westernisation’, to describe the
uncontrolled processes by which the Republic of Turkey has been assimilated and
is assimilating itself, into the modern world. Turkey has long suffered from a
poor image abroad, as a result of forces largely beyond its own control. It’s
my feeling that there is currently a parallel reverse process going on which we
might term ‘Wild-Turkification’, whereby a new image for the country is being
shaped by media events like ‘Muhteşem Yüzyıl’ and the ‘Eurovision Song Quest’.
I think, if I were representing the country at a political level, I would be
inclined to go with the flow, and bathe in the reflected glory, now that those
uncontrollable forces have taken a turn for the better.
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