She sucks her teeth and looks awkwardly to the side. For all intents and purposes she is bored out of her mind. A brash, sight-destroying graphic flickers behind her. The phone rings and she hits the button.

"Good evening," she says, but before she can gamble on anything resembling charisma or professional presentation skills, a high-pitched squeal renders everything inaudible. She fumbles momentarily and the screech grates for eternity. Finally she finds the switch and the call is disconnected.

"OK," she whispers, looking at something to the right of the camera. "We'll go to our first selection."

There is a pause. She sniffs and sighs a sigh so full of longing that anyone would think she would rather be somewhere else.

The pause remains, it becomes 'a moment.' She is lost. Truly lost. Then the video begins, flickers, stops, begins again - this time without sound, stops, rewinds live and exclusively on TV, starts again in vaguely the right area and... we're off!

The song has been played so many times it's all out of sync, the dancers leap just a fraction out of time and the singer seems to be singing in a different language.

It's Warner Bros worst nightmare. MTV hell. No, it's just a talk show on one of Guyana's many TV stations.

"Right now the majority of television broadcasters are in the business to mint money. They don't see themselves as holders of a public franchise that belongs to the people." Media consultant Kit Nascimento was eager to talk about the state that Guyana's television has evolved into as it stands nervously on the verge of 'regulation.'

"They are businessmen," he said firmly, "who have invested in a transmitter, a satellite receiver and a couple of tape recorders. Having made that capital investment they produce nothing."

By nothing, Nascimento means nothing original, nothing local, nothing of true quality.

"The TV watchers do not care what is placed in their viewing presence," claimed Guyanese-born broadcast engineer Rudy Saul in a recent e-mail to Stabroek News. Saul is currently based in New York, engineering on Rikki Lake and international sports among other projects, and is in the process of establishing Spotlight Productions here in Guyana. He hopes it will be a state of the art production facility.

"If it looks good or bad, old or new, it does not matter. Even the producers of TV shows pay no attention to perfection and quality," he concluded.

"There are probably only two television stations in this country that claim to have the production studios capable of a reasonable range of local programming," Nascimento remarked. "GTV and VCT."

"Sharma's studios are extremely amateurish," he said.

"If you were to compare any of those facilities, including GTV's, with any of the licensed stations in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica, they would be regarded as laughable, nothing short of laughable."

"And the reason that has happened here," he continued, "is because recurrent governments have not addressed the business of broadcasting seriously and have allowed any and anything to appear on TV with or without a licence."

Enrico Woolford anchorman for Capitol News, agreed whilst showcasing the teething Spotlight facility in Georgetown earlier this month.

"We must look at the bigger picture," he observed. "We want to create an industry, to compete with foreign countries. But in order to do that we have to find creative talent to match these high standards of equipment and our technical ability."

"Just imagine what the young people, growing up in the world of computers will be able to do," he grinned, before citing Martin Carter. "They can be their own initiators rather than imitators."

But for now, Woolford, like Nascimento, recognises that the "other islands are way ahead because they see it as an industry."

Well, at least by recently moving to license Guyana's 'stations' the government is making some moves towards that attitude now, and surely the broadcasting legislation will raise the standards once the pirate satellite years are finally laid to rest.

Nascimento has firm views about the sudden licensing policy and the near future of television standards.

"Even though the government is now moving correctly to license those stations which are on the air, it is not doing anything more than licensing stations which don't deserve to be on the air.

"The truth of the matter is that for the next five years with the best will in the world, I doubt if production facilities in this country either in house or out of house will be capable of producing much more than one or two hours of quality programming a day," he concluded.

The future is looking grim for TV in Guyana. The dawn of broadcasting legislation and perhaps the necessary copyright law to halt pirating will inevitably mean a drastic change in what you might see when you switch on the television and sit down for a relaxing evening with your family.

If licences require stations to respect international copyright laws - therefore to resist the huge temptation to show Oprah, every LA ghetto/ Bollywood/Hollywood film ever made, every music video to ever drag itself onto the Billboard charts, etc, etc - somebody somewhere will have to try and produce some quality programming for the local market viewers who can't afford DirecTV or a dish of their own.

But what exactly does quality programming mean? Purely politically driven shows? More 'talk shows'? And will the legislation have any proviso for these criteria? Will sitting in front of a camera for 24 hours and chatting with your buddies simply to replace your previous 'entrepreneurial' programming qualify you for a licence?

Woolford believes that broadcasting legislation "must take into account proper copyright legislation" but remarked that it "cannot really dictate content.

"Technical standards and content standards ought to be industry regulated," he said. "Quality should be industry and market driven."

"There is a perception of legislation that it prevents broadcasters from doing bad things," Nascimento remarked. "Legislation should also require the broadcaster to do good things and that is why the whole approach to regulation utilises the terms in the 'public interest' and 'for the public convenience.'

"And what good regulation must do is to see that this means something to a broadcast licensee," he said.

"First," he elaborated, "the licensee must provide as wide a range as possible of programming and it must cover the majority of the population of Guyana.

"This must be programming that will, in the classical sense, inform, enlighten, entertain and which must satisfy the widest possible tastes, choices, interests of the community they are seeking to serve. To present news, public affairs, sports, culture - the whole range of culture - dance, music, drama, poetry, writing and education.

"To get a license an applicant must be able to show that is what his station will do," he said.

"Further, he must broadcast to the highest possible technical standards" - what do you mean by that? - "Well, drive for some level of excellence in the picture, in the sound, in the lighting, in the visual representation which at present is horrible," he complained.

"Then the highest possible level of programme content - announcing, writing, editing, balance, the need for trained and qualified presenters, interviewers and commentators.

"Finally, if you're looking for positive requirements to raise the standards of television, the licensee must be able to make a contribution to nation building, building unity, heritage and the history of the country."

Wow! And this is just to get a TV licence? Nascimento's vision of quality is clearly a huge mountain to climb when you consider even some of the better prepared shows and then compare them to the slick craft of CNN and the BBC.

"Of the current twenty-odd television stations not one," Nascimento took a breath, "not one can satisfy those criteria or make any attempt to do so." It would be difficult to disagree with the man. "We have far too many TV stations."

"We would prefer not to see a situation where the minister is the adjudicator of quality and content but we can't fool ourselves about the environment in which we live," sighed Channel 9's Grantley Waldron.

"We have always believed that you can't run an industry without having it regulated - we can't have a free for all," he said, perhaps taking a glance at broadcasts across several stations, including his own, earlier this year. "But the rules have to be patently clear and have universal application.

"We recognise the quality of programming needs to be improved," he admitted, "and we are systematically trying to upgrade the training of staff and the total package but it has to be gradual.

"All I know is that we will be left," he said firmly.

If Spotlight's chief cameraman and editor in Guyana, Nigel Abrahams, is to be believed, the quality of training, and thus the quality of production, is largely to blame.

"You just have to feel your way around and what you learn there that's what you do," he said. "The whole production process in Guyana is of a lower quality than in Haiti."

Damning words.

"You won't find it anywhere else in the world, I have to say," Martin Goolsarran said, contemplating the whole phenomenon whilst sitting in his executive office at GTV. "I probably will never get an answer - I will never know why this thing was allowed to be introduced and to develop this way."

The head of programming at GTV is probably the only TV exec in the country who isn't feeling too much pain at the moment. The state-subsidised television station will hardly be going down in the first wave of the legislation attack. In fact, GTV is clearly at a great advantage.

"My feeling is that there will be a few stations who are prepared to stay on the air and stay clean and in keeping with whatever regulations are put in place," he said.

"Right now you don't have a sense that people are gearing themselves up, equipping themselves to deal with the eventuality," he observed.

"The audience here in Guyana ever since the advent of television has been exposed to satellite quality broadcasting - it will be a big change.

"I'm not sure how they're going to react when they realise that they will not be able to see a lot of things they were seeing before," he said.

And while we probably won't be seeing riots over the issue, viewers may well be disappointed if broadcasting legislation insists on respecting copyright because to acquire satellite programmes legally and to produce quality local programming you don't only need the skills and time - you need money.

"I'm not convinced the local market will pay for whatever cost is incurred," Goolsarran said. "Advertising locally is very attractive because the rates that are available are extremely low. We have to convince advertisers to support this kind of venture."

But when an advertiser can get an ad on TV for a thousand dollars, where is the real finance for quality production going to come from?

Most media experts believe that with the broadcasting legislation not many of the stations will be in a position to guarantee themselves a licence.

"There is not a single television station, this is not an exaggeration," Nascimento said, "which could go to a broadcasting authority applying acceptable regulatory requirements for public interest programming, not one, and satisfy the authority that it has the right to a licence."

He places the television station death toll extremely high - leaving perhaps two. Goolsarran is a little more optimistic and puts the survivor count at around four or five.

"With copyright regulations will come competition for quality and demand for it from the audience," Woolford expanded. "With that you have space for advertising rates to go up."

And if there are fewer stations, ad rates can also rise. If that is the case all may not be lost for the viewers of Guyana. With dedication and money a few television stations might be able to produce a range of quality and interesting programmes. Perhaps we won't even miss ESPN and HBO, Oprah and Matt Lauer.

One thing we definitely won't miss is the girl still struggling to stay awake in a studio tucked away in somebody's attic.

"Hello," she says, "you're on to..." The feedback is back like it never went away and she stares at the camera, stunned like a deer in headlights. She remains there, staring at you, staring, just staring, as the feedback starts to make everything feel unreal.