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COVER
STORY: GAME SHOWS
'Gunny'
Bags of Aspiration
In
Chennai, Sun TV's ready with Koteeswaran. The Tamil series gives
away Rs 1 crore to anybody who can answer 14 straight questions posed
by Sarath Kumar, "the Anil Kapoor of Tamil cinema". Kalanidhi
Maran, Sun's managing director, is already toying with the idea of Kannada,
Malayalam and Telugu versions of Koteeswaran. Even tiny SABe TV
is betting on a game show, Jab Khelo Sab Khelo, aimed at housewives
and hosted by Shekhar Suman.
Between
them Star, Zee, Sun and Sony plan to give away Rs 65 crore in prize money
over the next year. No wonder KBC, even after four months, still has two
lakh aspiring millionaires calling in every day. "The telephone department
doesn't have the capacity to take more calls," explains a KBC crew
member, "otherwise the figure can be doubled, trebled, quadrupled."
For selection, SDCK in contrast relies on postcards and received two million
of them before it chose the lucky 21 for its first episode. At Sun, they
don't talk numbers but only refer to the "dozen gunny bags of mail
from people who want to take part".
Quiz shows
are supposed to be wholesome info-entertainment. Before KBC-its initial
TRP ratings touched 15 but it's now slipped to the comfort zone of 10-nobody
thought of them as audience allurements. About the biggest quiz on TV
was the Bournvita Quiz Contest (BQC). Sweet schoolchildren, general knowledge,
health-food brand: BQC had everything to make for cute television. It
also had an abysmal TRP rating of 0.4.
Then came
KBC; and Enid Blyton yielded place to J.K. Rowling. The 50 most watched
cable and satellite TV programmes in the first week of October, as tabulated
by research agency tam, include 14 programmes on Star, 11 on Sony and
eight on Zee. The first nine slots go to Star TV, the top four being episodes
of KBC, indicating its ad value. SDCK is, therefore, crucial to Zee's
fightback against the Star onslaught.
For years
the frontrunner, Subhash Chandra's flagship channel was taken by surprise
when the Rupert Murdoch-owned Star Plus unleashed KBC, the Rs 15 lakh
per minute advertisement rate of which adds up to Rs 195 crore for the
130 episodes of the first year. What Star Plus really achieved was to
undermine Zee TV. The channel is estimated to have contributed 80 per
cent of the Rs 577 crore revenue for 1999-2000-for the first half of 2000-2001,
the figure is Rs 296 crore-that Zee Telefilms earned. This was threatened
by KBC.
With the
money potential of quiz shows fairly clear, Chandra had to react and defend
his top channel against the attack from a rival with deep pockets. Today
Chandra chuckles, "I wish to thank Star and Amitabh Bachchan for
allowing me to raise my ad rates."
There's
some truth here. For its most popular soap operas-Amanat, Ashirwaad,
Basera-Zee charges advertisers Rs 80,000 per 10 seconds. For SDCK,
the rate is Rs 2.5 lakh per 10 seconds. Over a year, and given the projected
10 minutes of advertising for each of the 156 episodes, SDCK could earn
Zee Rs 234 crore. Even the 15 minutes of commercials that are due to come
attached to every one-hour episode of Koteeswaran will bring Sun TV Rs
27 lakh, a good 33 per cent more than the usual peak-hour earnings.
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