Chams Alik: Tunisia’s Forgotten TV Show That Still Feels Radical Today

I was born in 2002, 12-years after the internet arrived in Tunisia, and 15-years into a dictatorship. I grew up loving three things: my mother’s wardrobe, information, and my uncle Mokhtar’s videotapes, which he brought back from France every summer for us to watch on his terrace.

It always struck me how connected he was to technology, and how a fragment of footage could preserve a story, sometimes even your own, starting with the shock of seeing how young your parents had once been. I could see it, remember their youth with them, even the parts I didn’t know were already passed onto myself and my siblings. That, to me, is what it means to do history: to trace the ordinary, to hold it close, and ask it what it knows of us.

22-years later and I still find myself digging for bits of the past, for tangible matters of the collective that feel deeply personal. I scroll through YouTube, the kingdom of my heart, the map of neo-memory. I’m looking for an Amina Fakhet concert from 2005 to share on Instagram as a micro act of reparation for all the Tunisian pop culture that was dismissed, sidelined, or simply never archived with the care it deserved back in the days.

Instead, I stumbled on something else: a grainy beach video from Hammamet. Sawssen Maalej, a Tunisian actress, is there, teasing strangers on their holidays. “Bonjour monsieur,” she can sarcastically be heard saying to a passerby. “Sorry, I don’t speak French,” the tourist replies. She turns to the camera, deadpan: “The tourist just said he’s amazed by how good the hotel services are. He said, ‘Wallah, I’ve never seen client service like this.’”

The video is titled The Premises of Summer. And in the lightest, most effortless way, it offered a fresh satire of state-media, which had the upper hand over most versions of reality in circulation back then. To them, everything was neat, everything was good and everyone was happy in the best of all possible worlds when real life was anything but that.

One thing led to another, and from there, I fell down a rabbit hole of content from the late noughts which, in one way or another, all seem to paint a different image of Tunisia than the one I remember usually seeing on screen. Away from all the illusions of perfection that official media stations worked so hard to maintain, a new kind of content began to surface. Clips filmed on early mobile phones started to tell a different story, one where the country’s cracks showed and where people joked about shortages and laughed into cameras that doubled as confessionals.

The video I had just seen Maalej featured in was part of a larger series, titled Chams Alik, which was a cult TV program that once aired on Canal+ Horizons, a satellite channel broadcasting across the African continent and the Middle East. It was a paid service, but every day, Tunisians could catch thirty minutes of it for free. It was there, especially through shows like Chams Alik, that so many found something to hold onto: a voice and a version of Tunisia that felt both familiar and free. Or at least free-er than usual.

The series was born by a pool on a warm afternoon in the late ’90s. Producer Nejib Belkadhi was with future cast members: Moustique, Amel Smaoui, and Imen Métisse. On a video call, his cat Faouzi in his arms, he recalled how it all began. He had just wrapped a show with Mourad Zeghidi (now a political prisoner jailed for his opinions) when Canal+ Horizons approached him.

“No compromise. Give me a blank slate to work with,” he remembers saying at the meeting table with his future business partners. “I wanted something freeform,” he told me. “No concept. I just wanted it to be social, sarcastic, with full creative freedom for the cast,” he added.

In how they looked, how they spoke, and what they cared about, Chams Alik mirrored how Tunisia’s youth saw themselves, their society, and their place within it all. A show where a group of young adults traveled across regions, interviewing people on a range of themes tied to different topics, satire and irreverence were used as a means to an end all draped in a in a language that truly belonged to them — darija — in sharp contrast to the sanitized narratives broadcasted by national TV, which operated under close monitoring and relied, almost solely, on Modern Standard Arabic.

What made Chams Alik stand out even more was its format. It felt like an early version of the vlog. It blended interviews with both ordinary people and public figures, and wove in storytelling, curated playlists, and short comedy sketches. The result was a living portrait of a generation unafraid to question, laugh, and speak its truth.

“It was madness! I don’t think I’ve said it enough, this show was his baby,” Amel, one of the first cast members and current TV programming director tells me in a voice note. The day before, we spoke over a video call. She sat by that same mosaic-lined pool, light dancing on the surface. “This wasn’t just a TV show,” she said. “It was our oxygen tank. Everything else was in stiff, literary Arabic. We were suffocating. Chams Alik let us breathe.”

But in Ben Ali’s Tunisia, every breath came at a cost. The regime’s censors hovered over each episode. The team submitted their work weekly, never knowing what would, or could, survive. Amel remembers an episode about unemployment that was instantly killed. “They told us, ‘We don’t talk about that.’ So we changed it. We made it about how one espresso can last you all day at a café.”

That coffee wasn’t really about coffee. It was a coded symbol, a subtle nod to those living in precarity at the time. In Tunisia, cafés are not simple leisure spots; they operate as liminal spaces, holding zones where unemployed men, predominantly from working or popular classes, congregate. Often excluded from the formal economy, stretching a single espresso across an afternoon becomes a ritual of endurance and invisibility where sitting and waiting for the day to go by reflects a deeper systemic issue of exclusion.oli

The cold dregs at the bottom of cups, the haze of cigarette smoke, the dim television flickering in the corner, together form a tableau of suspended lives. It’s not just about passing time; it’s about the experience of social marginalization and economic exclusion. The café thus embodies the silent violence of unemployment, a forced stasis imposed by socioeconomic conditions where idleness is not chosen but rather inflicted.

And here’s the joke that isn’t funny: back in the year 2000, Tunisia’s unemployment rate was at about 14.94%. In 2023, it reached 15.11%. Two different decades, two different regimes, and the coffee still costs less than the time it takes to drink it.

For two incandescent seasons, they pulled it off. Against a backdrop of coercion and the monotony of official speeches, Chams Alik gave a generation its first real gulp of air. And then it stopped. Not because it failed, but because it had to. The channel disappeared as censorship grew, ironically, in direct proportion to the show’s popularity.

Looking back, it became clear that we had never truly valued this footage for what it was. Not because it was not worth it, but because the conditions would not let us. Censorship flattened what could have reached further, hit harder, and left a bigger mark. The moments that survived on tape feel like relics now, fragments of something bigger, fuller, that could not be fully seen for what they were at the time. And maybe that is why they matter so much today: they are the scraps we can still hold on, proof that it did indeed happen.

And here’s the thing: we can find other examples of such defiance in Tunisia as well as in the rest of the Arab world. Other experiments, other audacities, other little televised revolutions that pushed against the limits of their time. In Tunisia, the online cartoon Lahiir i3ich—  a local remake of the French series Lascar — became a cult series precisely because it leaned into what many dismissed as “trashy” darija, a street register never heard on official channels yet instantly legible to its audience much like in Chams Alik’s case.

And that energy carried into this era, especially over the last ten years. Bassem Youssef is arguably one of the most famous examples of such a phenomenon. A heart surgeon by training, he began recording short satirical clips in his Cairo apartment during the early days of the Arab Spring, using nothing more than a camera and his own wit. Quickly striking a nerve within the Egyptian microcosm, he, almost single handedly, drew millions of viewers hungry for a language that could puncture the pomposity of state TV.

His DIY setup became the seed of Al-Bernameg (“The Program”), the region’s first true political satire show, often compared to The Daily Show in the United States, but operated under far greater risk. For a brief moment, his trajectory embodied the internet’s promise: one person, speaking in humor, could destabilize the machinery of propaganda. Unfortunately, his show suffered a similar fate to Chams Alik’s: celebrated by audiences, but ultimately shut down under mounting political pressure.

There is something humbling, and maybe a little sobering, in realizing how much of what we call “new” is recycled. Not imitation, but reincarnation. The instinct to document, to mock, to remix power from the margins, has always been there. Chams Alik was doing it then. We are doing it now. We did not invent this grammar, we somehow inherited it. And if we have forgotten where it came from, then maybe it’s time to remember with blasts from the pasts like Chams Alik, and other footage of the kind provided.