They cavort and pout for the camera, inviting you with every breath to make that call. There’s the young woman whose spiked heels threaten to puncture the leather chesterfield sofa she is perched upon, a trio that dance and sway suggestively to each song and one lady whose make-up and dress are so overdone they make Anna Nicole Smith look decent by comparison.

No, these are not (0900) numbers; but examples of Song Request shows being broadcast by a multitude of satellite channels. Each has its own trademark show featuring a scantily clad girl or girls, ready it seems to do just about anything that crosses your mind from dancing and singing for your entertainment to blowing you a few kisses. The adverts for these shows are no less controversial — one was so outrageous that it didn’t last long on the airwaves, featuring as it did a woman in a slip of a red dress doing a good imitation of a dance number at a striptease club.

The lack of creativity in the shows being broadcast extends beyond these candyfloss programs, the disease having reached epidemic proportions on some stations. The trend these days seems to go in two directions.

Either to blindly copy game shows from the West such as “The Weakest Link”, “Family Fortunes” or “Who wants to be a millionaire” to name but a few, or, to come up with derivatives of these games. The most popular among these, for the time being, is Millionaire, which has sprouted a number of game shows from “Greed”, “The Trap” to Millionaire under the pseudonym “For whom the millions?”. Then you have an evening session of discussion programs, most of which feature young men, trying to tackle serious issues with all the skills of a buffalo treading water. Oprah they definitely are not!

Meanwhile, keeping the housewives busy in the ‘morning’ is the job of another group of ladies engrossed in shows that start at 8 a.m. and end somewhere around 2 in the afternoon. The shows feature cooking, sports, gardening, children’s issues, fashion trends, as well as a host of other ‘segments’ that can last as long as 45 minutes — all named after some derivation of ‘Good Morning’: You have ‘Alam Al Sabah’ or ‘Sabah El Ward’ or the more casual ‘ Sabaho’. These shows are no less interested in your calls and will make every effort to answer your queries during any of the segments. Are there really housewives out there prepared to sit through a single show that lasts upward of six hours?

With the launch of the (700) numbers, the STC has merely added fuel to the fire. Many are fooled into thinking that the phone calls will be at a reasonable rate and thus go ahead and make those calls — to the song request shows, cookery segments or the game show millionaire. With the actual rate being SR7 per minute, little do they realize that in three months, the only fortune they will have amassed is their phone bill. Would that the STC raise its head from the miles of ditches that it keeps digging up time and time again and perhaps do something about this catastrophe.

As for those satellite and terrestrial channels — think of all the good they are doing in promoting tourism to the countries from which they broadcast — or so I’ve been told. So all you ladies out there do your patriotic duty and shake that booty!