ISLAMABAD – The United States has turned to oversized puppets in its newest attempt to win hearts and minds in Pakistan, funding a $20 million remake of popular children’s TV programme Sesame Street.
The US show that popularised characters like Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and the Cookie Monster is being remade for a Pakistani audience, to promote “shared values and ideas” said USAID’s education chief in Islamabad, Larry Dolan. Girl power and tolerance are among the messages to be spread by colourful puppets such as “Rani”, a science-loving 6-year-old girl with plaits who is friends with a teenage bookworm and a hard-working donkey.
The “Pakistan Children’s Television” show will broadcast 78 episodes from September, but in an impoverished country of up to 180 million people, only three million children are estimated to have access to the small screen. The show’s makers hope to reach 700,000 children and 300,000 parents in total with the help of spin-off projects — 600 live performances are planned across 90 districts, and books and multi-media versions are in the works.
Rani’s father is a flower gardener and her mother a housewife, not educated but “adamant her daughter should have every opportunity in life,” according to a written brief of the characters. The donkey longs to be a pop star, “illustrating how, through hard work all dreams are possible” says the brief, encapsulating the American dream.
Elmo — the inquisitive high-energy fluffy red puppet who is one of the main characters of the American version of the show — is the only character to make the cut in the South Asian remake. But the show will be set, not along “Sesame Street”, but around a rural street stall cafe. As Islamabad and Washington wage diplomatic battles over the war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda on Pakistan’s lawless frontier with Afghanistan, the cultural battle may be no easier to win.
Sesame Street has been in Pakistan before — televised in the early 1990s in English and later dubbed into national language Urdu. Peerzada admits the workshop has been targeted in the past by Islamist militants waging war on anything seen to smack of Western liberalism.
