The Fear of Live TV in Iran

In Iran, live television is a precious commodity and the term ‘live broadcast’ connotes only a slim handful of events: football and volleyball matches, official press conferences, live footage of holy sites during the evening call to prayer, and the occasional live talk show, something like Ehsan Alikhani’s Honeymoon program.

For Iranian state television, live broadcast is a fraught endeavor. The chances of something unexpectedly un-Islamic or otherwise controversial are high, and as a result, the state broadcaster, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) has done its best to avoid the treacherous realm of live.

“Live broadcast is troublesome,” says a former IRIB announcer. “Believe me, they would not even broadcast football if they could get away with it. For Iranian [state] TV live broadcast is scary.”

IRIB broadcasts 22 channels packed with different programs, but their combined viewership falls behind that of Honeymoon, which recounts strange stories from people’ lives. Two other programs by Reza Rashidpour, Glass Triangle and Glass Night, feature movie stars as guests and have broken records in viewership.

But in the realm of state broadcasting, which follows its own ‘red lines’ of self-censorship, a program’s popularity can also be its downfall. Management have canceled many shows despite their popularity, and some anchors have been banned from appearing on air. “Seven”, a program about cinema, has remained on air, but lost its anchor and has become a boring and unexciting exercise.

One football program, ‘Ninety,’ persisted and kept its anchor even though he had many enemies who wanted to get rid of him. But the reason was not that the officials were in love with it. It makes money by attracting commercials more than any other program.

Twenty-four years ago IRIB joined the world and started live—or at least “slightly-delayed”—broadcasting from the 1990 World Cup. Before that Iranian TV had never broadcast a live sporting match, neither a World Cup game or a national league game.

That occasion is remembered by Iranians primarily as a bitter memory because during the Brazil-Scotland match in Italy, a devastating earthquake destroyed the Roodbar region in northern Iran.

This first-ever live broadcast is remembered for a less tragic reason as well. IRIB had sent two sports announcers to Italy to report on the match and older football fans still remember the broken sound transmissions. They were called back to Iran before the finals and, according to a sports writer had not set foot in the stadium and were broadcasting from their hotel. One of them has always maintained that he has done no such thing but the evidence tells a different story.

The announcers of that historic live matched mangled the pronunciation of players’ names, and seemed to have presciently anticipated each play. The reason was quite simple: They had seen the moves before because the match was broadcast with delay.

In the 1980s some domestic football games were recorded with two cameras and were broadcast “live” with a significant amount of delay. IRIB had only two channels at the time, and except for the news very few programs were live. Sometimes it tried to broadcast live travels by government officials but well into the 1990s the pictures were often jumpy, colors ran together and the quality of sound was extremely low.

“There were live programs called ‘face-to-face’,” says Farhad Mehrabi who was the director of Azadi Stadium mobile unit. “But there were always troubles. For example, a storm could interrupt the program. Now an SNG [satellite news gathering] unit can prevent such problems.”

Not all problems, of course. Just a month ago before the start of the World Cup games, an interview with a member of the Iranian National was garbled by the noise of the rain and was taken off the air.

The longest live broadcast in the 1980s was the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. The announcer, who later emigrated to England, had a distinctive diction and one sentence of his became well-known: “Ah, they brought in the Imam,” by which he meant Khomeini’s coffin.

In the second half of the 1980s, IRIB broadcast games with a half-hour delay. Jahangir Kosary who was an sports announcer at the time says that “the tape was not immediately aired. They added the soundtrack before broadcasting it.”

Mehrabi’s recalls that the sound was recorded on the spot and “it took them more than half an hour to prepare it. The tape for the first half of the match was sent to the studio, followed by the second half.” Just like the movie Cinema Paradiso in which a boy pedaling a bicycle transports the first reel of the film from one movie house to another.

There were some improvements in the 1990s. It might seem unbelievable now, but at that time the Iranian state TV was unable to show the critical moments of a game in slow motion. The game was broadcast in normal time and no scene was repeated, except when a goal was scored.

Now at least six cameras capture the games played by Iran Pro League. Azadi Stadium is equipped with a very fine Spidercam which is constantly fixed after a high-flying ball knocks it off. The quality of broadcast from the stadium is good—and only from this stadium; do not expect the same from other cities. The games are broadcast with a very small delay, about five to eight seconds.

These football games produce a great deal of money for IRIB through commercials but live broadcasting is still an enormous task for Iranian state TV.

What is so scary about live broadcasts? The spectators’ chants? Their unpredictable moves? A former TV anchor puts it this way: “Live broadcast creates anxiety in IRIB from top to bottom. You would understand the terror of the officials when you know that every broadcast must pass through the filter of five ‘broadcast supervisors’ each of whom inspects one aspect of the program and order corrections before it is broadcast. This should explain the horror.”

Saman Ranjbar, citizen journalist

This piece was written by an Iranian citizen journalist inside the country, who for security reasons prefers to write under a pseudonym.