Aslı TUNÇ
It was a usual working day in my office at the university until our lovely Student Affairs director Ms. Sunal stepped in. “You’ve got to see this” she said in a troubled voice. She has always been extremely helpful to update me about recent Turkish TV programs which I was normally unaware of. She immediately clicked on a video link on my computer. We began to watch a TV show on Flash TV from the previous night. After fifteen minutes of staying fixated on the screen, I could hardly release my breath and utter a single word: “unbelievable!” It really was. Mrs. Sunal left my office after I promised her to write about it.
This program is called Aradakiler which means “stuck in purgatory”. The host of this reality show is Yalçın Çakır, a Turkish equivalent of Jerry Springer in the US. Mr. Çakır has a reputation to be an outrageous TV host who pushes the limits of the reality programming. He loves to entertain the public by shocking them at the same time. Not surprisingly, his target audience lives at the outskirts of the city with low education and income level. In fact those masses turned him into a public hero in quest for justice for years. He tried various reality show formats on Flash TV where he pretended to be the voice of the people who had lost their hopes on the justice system. However, everything was for higher and higher ratings in the gutter of television industry.
Aradakiler was one of the most recent TV attempts of Yalçın Çakır where his aim was finding the relatives of unidentified and unclaimed dead bodies. On Flash TV’s official website, the program is defined as a big help to decrease the numbers of unclaimed bodies in the overcrowded city morgues and increase the awareness in the society. Also the producers proudly state that they keep a psychologist to prevent possible traumas in the studio during the live show. It was all for the good of public or was it?
On the episode I watched, the image of the corpse suddenly popped up on the screen. The face of the body was zoomed in. The deceased with swollen eyes obviously had not died a very long ago. He was wrapped up in a plastic body bag that contributing to the horrifying effect. I kept saying to myself it was not a CSI movie on television. This was real. On the corner of the screen, there was a clock showing 8: 35 p.m. It was primetime where most of children were awake. While keeping the dead body’s image on the screen, the host encouraged the audiences to call in if they knew the deceased. Within minutes we heard a phone ring in the studio. It was the voice of a young girl (afterwards we learned that she was 22). “Oh my God! This is my father. I am trembling right now” she said. Even Yalçın Çakır was looking disturbed. Obviously he was not expecting such a quick reply on the live show. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Yes, I am absolutely sure” she replied. The host told her that a team from the program was on its way to take her to the studio to take a closer look at the body. “I am all alone at home. I think I am going to faint”. Her voice was hardly heard. The audiences in the studio were applauding like crazy.
