Bishaash

Plot summary

Zara Rahman (Shama Rahman), a young, head-strong, inquisitive British woman of Bangladeshi origin discovers she has inherited co-ownership of an antique shop in Dhaka after the death of her grandfather. Determined to find out more, she packs up her life in London and travels to Bangladesh. She finds out the shop is also home to a team of detectives with supernatural powers and meets young supernatural investigator Abir Zaman (Babu Md. Shaidul Islam Molla) and is thrown into his world of supernatural mystery, magic and adventure.

Overview

Bishaash is south Asia's first ever supernatural detective series. and the first ever serial drama shot between Bangladesh and London, England. There are 24 paired episodes, each lasting 25 minutes.

The series features dialogue in Bengali and English, with most of the speech in Bangla to attract a mainstream audience, it also includes functional English lines. Initially all of the dialogue in the series is in Bangla, but with English subtitles. However, episode by episode, more and more English dialogue is introduced.

The series was part of Mott MacDonald's £50 million nine-year programme since 2007 aimed at teaching many of the poorest people in Bangladesh what project director John Shotton describes as "vocational English". One of their project partners is broadcaster BBC World Service. The series was made by the BBC World Service Trust for audiences in Bangladesh. The drama had a partner programme BBC Janala Mojay Mojay Shekha (BBC Window Learning with Fun), an educational game show which builds on the English used in the drama in order to help teach the language.

Both programmes were part of English in Action, an initiative launched and funded by UKaid from the Department for International Development (DfID) to support the economic development of Bangladesh by raising the English-language skills of 25 million people across the country. by 2017. Bishaash helps viewers learn English by weaving basic lines of the language into the Bangla-scripted stories. BBC Janala provides daily three-minute audio lessons to the people who want to improve their English language skills in order to get a better job and access to the global economy. Calls to BBC Janala increased significantly from 8,700 per day to 58,300 after Bishaash and BBC Janala Mojay Mojay Shekha began transmitting on national network television.

The storylines have a supernatural twist which includes themes of family tradition, love, evil and danger. It uses special effects and the supernatural theme has no religious or political associations.

Production

Writers, directors and producers were recruited from the UK. Production staff from the UK as well as local crew were used. Location manager Charlie Thompson recruited a local team from the domestic industry with basic industry experience or basic skill sets in the right areas and trained them to meet the required standards, broaden their skill bases and enable them to use them in the international arena. Half a dozen locals went through a formal training programme organised by Thompson that included seminars and on-the-job learning.

Bishaash is set in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Brick Lane, London. It was filmed in a variety of locations in and around Dhaka and a village was built in the forest region of Gazipur. It was shot on XDCAM and was edited in Bangladesh using Final Cut Pro.

Main

Recurring

Guest

Broadcast

Bishaash was broadcast weekly on Bangladesh Television and Bangladesh Television World from 16 October 2010, and regularly attracted audiences of around 14 million viewers each episode It was followed back-to-back with an episode of BBC Janala Mojay Mojay Shekha. and reached audiences of 20.3 million.

The series was given for free to Zee TV and was aired weekly from 6 March 2011 on Zee Network's Zee Café. The popularity of the series led to a rebroadcast.