AMEEN SAYANI's BINACA GEETMALA
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INTERESTING FACTS & FIGURES
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The first broadcast of Geetmala was on 3rd December 1952 from Radio
Ceylon (now Srilankan Broadcasting Corporation)

It used to be a 30 min programme every Wednesday at 8 pm, in which 7
popular songs were played.

The first song played in the first episode was "tu ganja ki mauj"
from Baiju Bawra.

The duration of the programme was increased to 1 hour on 6th January
1954 and 16 songs were played in countdown format according to
increasing popularity.

During its span from 1952 to 1994, there were 2081 episodes of this
programme, one of the longest running radio programmes.

Initially, the signature tune of Binaca Geetmala was taken from the O
P Nayyar composition in the film Aasman (1952) "po po po baaja bole".
This was changed in the year 1970.

Apart from the weekly episodes, there used to be an annual Geetmala
on the last week of the year in which 16 most popular songs of the
year were played in countdown format. From 1957 onwards, 32 songs
were played distributed over 2 episodes.

In the annual episodes of 1972, 1973, 1977 & 1979, 38, 37, 42 & 35
songs were included respectively.

In 1966, a new feature was introduced - if a song was played in
atleast 18 episodes, it was declared "Sartaaj Song" and retired from
the countdown.

The first "Sartaaj Song" in the history of Binaca Geetmala was "chhoo
lene do naazuk hothon ko" from Kajal. It was played in the programme
of 23rd March 1966.

800th episode on 30th Oct 1968, 1000th episode on 25 Oct 1972, 1500th
episode o 20 Oct 1982, 2000th episode on 14 Sep 1992. The last
episode (2081st) was broadcast on 4th April 1994.

The 6th Jan 1982's episode was a special tribute episode dedicated to
the departed singers, music directors & lyricists.

Binaca Geetmala used to be recorded at Bombay and the tape sent to
Ceylon for broadcast.

There were instances when the programme could not be broadcast due to
non-reachability of the tape from Bombay or any other reason. In
those cases, previous episodes or special episodes were broadcast.
This happened around 80-85 times in these 41 years.

Ameen Sayani's voice was missing in around 30 episodes in these 41
years, when other popular announcers of Radio Ceylon like Manohar
Mahajan, Shiv Kumar Saroj, Vijay Kishore Dubey and Brij Bhushan
presented the programme in their own style.

For the first time a non-film song was included in the countdown on
12 Aug 1981 and the song was "disco deewane" by Nazia Hassan.


In 1989, Hasan Jehangir's non-film song "hawa hawa ae hawa" was
judged the Number-1 song in the episodes of 24th & 31st August.

Binaca Geetmala became Cibaca Geetmala on 21st May 1986. It was
1672nd episode.

From 27th Oct 1988, the day of brodacast was changed from Wednesday
to Thursday. This was due to the increasing populaity of
Doordarshan's Chitrahaar.

From 6th Nov 1989, the day & timing was again changed to Monday 9 pm.

From 6th April 1989, the number of songs were reduced from 16 to 14.

From the end of 1992, the programme was parallely broadcast from the
24 Vividh Bharati stations on Monday 8 pm.

The last regular episode was broadcast on 21st Mar 1994. The last
song played was "jaadoo teri nazar" from Darr.

On 28th March & 4th April 1994, there were 2 final episodes in which
Ameen sayani played hit songs of all previous years.

On 18th Feb 2001, Geetmala was again started from Vividh Bharati and
it was called Colgate Cibaca Geetmala. But it was finally called off
within 2 years due to some Service Tax issue.

COMPILED FROM ANIL BHARGAV'S ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN LISTENERS' BULLETIN.