How the new voice of Afghan youth has made conservatives hopping mad

With his spiky hair, ripped jeans and beaming grin, the music show presenter Shakeb Isaar makes an unlikely corrupter of youth.

With his spiky hair, ripped jeans and beaming grin, the music show presenter Shakeb Isaar makes an unlikely corrupter of youth.

The front man for daily youth show Hop has become Afghanistan's first celebrity television presenter. Everywhere he goes he is mobbed by crowds, although the fan mail is punctuated with death threats from al-Qa'ida.

Shakeb, 22, is one of the talents driving a television revolution in a land where viewers were used to nothing more exciting than folk singers and speeches by government ministers.

The channel behind this revolution is Tolo TV, the country's first private station, which went live in Kabul in October with a mix of entertainment and investigative journalism the like of which Afghans had never seen before.

The formula has been a success; the station has beaten its state rival in the ratings war to grab 80 per cent of the viewers. But it has also provoked fury among conservatives.

The station is the brainchild of three sons of an Afghan diplomat who grew up in Australia. Saad Mohseni, a former investment banker now living in Kabul, said: "We wanted to do what we could to reunite the country."

The output on the station is eclectic. On a cooking programme guests stress useful tips, such as always wash your hands. There are a number of sports shown, including women's tennis, which was denounced as pornographic by the conservatives.A satire programme is planned that will include a sketch on Charles' marriage to Camilla - Afghans were baffled that the prince didn't marry a woman younger than him.

There's even an art house movie night, featuring such films as The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa's classic tale of a village terrorised by bandits.

"Japan had a civil war like us," Mr Mohseni said. "Films like this have resonance in Afghanistan. We showed the Bosnian war film No Man's Land a few days ago."

However, the show that has made the most fuss is Hop. The shows are popular with a young generation hungry for entertainment. Thousands of them vote by SMS every week for their favourite singer on Hop's sister programme, Top 10.

By Western standards it's pretty tame. Any hint of cleavage or gyrations by the Bollywood and Uzbek dancers is cut and the station would not dare show Afghan women dancing.

However, Hop has been condemned by the conservative establishment. Fazl-e Hadi Shinwari, the chief justice, branded Shakeb a corrupter of youth.

The presenter does not feel intimidated. "That's nothing," he said. "The Taliban and al-Qa'ida have said they will kill me. But I don't care. This is the new Afghanistan and they are not a part of it."

Mr Mohseni believes the conservatives feel threatened by a youth culture they don't understand. He said: "Look at the demographics of this country, it has one of the youngest populations in the world. The old conservatives fear becoming irrelevant. A few years down the line and they will have lost most of their power."

The station is particularly proud of its investigative journalism, which is starting to ask questions of Afghanistan's elite.

The channel has aired programmes on paedophilia, the power of the warlords, illegal logging, miners stealing from a state-run emerald mine and the return of the Taliban.

Tolo TV's investigators got their first real scalps this month when two junior ministers were jailed for corruption in a scandal over ripping off pilgrims to the Haj after the station had doggedly followed the story.

Mr Mohseni said the journalists love nothing better than making waves. "It takes courage to do this kind of thing," he said. "We have to be careful."

The risk is real enough for the Tolo TV studio to be behind a blast barrier and to employ a small army of armed guards.

Jahid Mohseni, who works as a lawyer in Australia, said the station enjoys the furore over its youth shows. But it is the journalism that they are really proud of.

He said: "The style in Afghanistan has been to go to minister's press conferences and listen attentively, but we want to cover the real stories - the ones that other people won't."