First the good news. Dino Morea makes great visual copy. Chatting with Vir Sanghvi on Cover Story on Sunday he came across as witty, intelligent, honest and still discreet. Vir allowed Dino to blossom on camera. We therefore had one of the best star-interviews in recent months.

Now the bad news. Don’t groan. But another awards event isn’t quite what we needed. But like it or not, we got it. The Apsara awards telecast live on NDTV on Saturday and on Doordarshan the following evening, was remarkable for the star turn-out at such a fledgling event.

You’d think Karan Johar, Hrithik, Preity and Urmila had their fill of awards functions and awards this year. Barely a week after the event at IIFA they were back at it. To its credit, the Apsara awards spared the excesses on the soundtrack. The cheering and whistling sounded real. So did the awards and winners.

But apart from that very touching moment when three geneartions of actors (Shammi Kapoor, Vinod Khanna and Hrithik Roshan) gave Dilip Kumar his lifetime-achievement award (loved it, when during the audio-visual tribute Yash Chopra leaned forward to squeeze the Thespian’s arms in the next row) the television awards were hugely disappointing.

...And baffling! How could Ekta Kapoor’s stable of soap-treks be totally and absolutely precluded from the awards? It’s like hosting a musical event without Lata Mangeshkar. Or a seminar on the conquests of stardom without Amitabh Bachchan.

Not done! The effect was odd, to say the least. For all the carping about social irrelevance Ekta Kapoor’s serials continue to make an exceptional impact on viewers. Parvati’s face-off in Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and Piyush’s death on Kahiin To Hoga are still the soapiest topics of conversation among home viewers.

But a master-stroke, if you’re looking for one, was the appearance of Saif Ali Khan as the character he plays in his new film Hum Tum on Jassi Jaisi…Koi Nahin. The tie-up between the big and small screen couldn’t have been handled with more aplomb. For days Saif’s character was being talked about for his sexist cartoons. While the rest of Jassi’s family was rolling over with laughter at Karan Kapoor’s sexist cartoons, Jassi was horrified.

"This man has no respect for women!" she expostulated while everyone else guffawed.

In this way the teleplay brilliantly laid down the blueprint for a confrontational scenario between the self-righteous Jassi and the satirical Karan Kapoor.

Saif Ali Khan took a day off from his ongoing holiday in London to shoot for Jassi in Mumbai. I must say the effort was worth it. No Bollywood actor has made such a huge impact on televised fiction programming before.

Saif as Karan Kapoor interacting with ‘Jassi’ was an almost surreal experience, and one that I feel, changes the relationship between film stars and television.

Something rather strange happened on NDTV’s Mumbailine last week. While Dev Benegal spoke about his new film and his views on Mr Shekhar Kapur, scenes from Benegal’s Split Wide Open played on a corner of the screen. Hindi cuss-words flowed out of the soundtrack creating a confounding synthesis between the creator’s words in the present and his art in the past.

Such is the magic of the home-viewing medium in the post-liberalization era. Nowadays one can get to see any and every kind of private and public mores on telly.

HBO’s Sex & The City makes me slightly uneasy. It’s okay to be liberated about sex. But to be so single-mindedly fixated on it does seem unhealthy. The character speak about nothing except, ahem ahem, sex.

Last Sunday our heroine Sarah Jessica Parker had a problem. She had stopped having sex with her lover because...over to the lady. "I farted in front of my boyrfriend. I’ve to move to another city. I’m the girl who farts."

In another corner of the sex-ridden screenplay a girl discovers her "sex maniac" lover has turned to "bramhacharya" (ooh globalizations has hit us where it hurts the most!). Famished beyond reason, during yoga classes she first turns to the guy to her right. "Do you wanna f..c?" then she turns to the guy to her left…and they walk off together.

All this on some bizarre cosmpolitan level is excruciatingly funny. But Sex & The City makes one fatal error. It confuses sexual energy with a desperate horniness. How can we laugh at a woman who sweats over a man‘s private parts as he sighs, "The only thing better than having sex is not having sex."

Sex is certainly out of the closet. And the changes are evident in many other areas of out pop culture.

On Channel V’s Panga I saw two ladies in Bangalore trying to bum a pillion ride to Mysore with anyone who would stop to listen to their capricious request. After recording horror, disgust, annoyance, anger and amusement the two girls were interviewed about which male they enjoyed riling the most.

Why don’t we just drop all pretensions of television being anything but a medium that flings frivolity in our faces?

On NDTV’s The X Factor the correspondents gloated over yet another taped scam-expose involving bribery for admission into Rajasthan’s medical college. The damning tape was played so many times over, it felt like an endorsement rather than a repudiation of corruption.