While Tabassum’s demeanour was generally playful, she could also switch to a more authoritative personality with ease, asking her interviewees pointed questions. When Anil Kapoor spoke about doing small roles to attract the attention of a big producer because his father did not have enough faith in his talent to bankroll one of his films, Tabassum immediately cross-questioned him about Woh 7 Din (1983), which Kapoor’s father produced. Her questions were forthright and yet never made guests defensive.
Her interviews are also a time capsule of the past. In an interaction with lyricist Anand Bakshi in the early Eighties, Tabassum asked why the current songs didn’t have a shelf life anymore. With great precision, Bakshi explained why the older songs were better, belonging more integrally to films that had greater emotional depth and romance, as opposed to films of the 70s and 80s which became more western and action-driven, drifting away from emotionality. Perhaps the honesty her interviews elicited also had something to do with the relaxed mindset of those times, when stars were not excessively cautious about their image. Ashok Kumar spoke candidly about his gradual distancing from his children. K.N.Singh was frank about how the newer generation of actors were more shrewd and calculating when it came to their career choices.
Irfan remembers Tabassum’s “lateefay” (jokes) and her chirpy demeanor. While he admits that he wasn’t an avid Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan viewer when it first aired, he now watches snippets of her interviews on her YouTube channel. “In a world where entertainment journalism was always largely populated by either a gossip-style reporting or PR-driven promotional coverage, shows such as Tabassum’s created a space where we got to know what someone like Shrilam Lagoo thought about differences between theater and cinema, what Manmohan Krishna’s childhood was like, what Jeevan thought about his style of acting and so on. If not for these shows, we wouldn’t know how these actors talked and behaved when they were not acting for cinema.” What remains memorable about Tabassum’s show even now, he says, was her ability to humanise film stars.