It’s familiar and yet it’s different. Mirror visits the sets of KBC, which is back after a three-year hiatus

Kunal Guha (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 20, 2017)

Stepping into the sets of Kaun Banega Crorepati is — despite our familiarity with it — an extremely engaging experience. We spot the host of the show, Amitabh Bachchan, seated motionless in a corner while a production hand brushes lint off his bandhgala. He then raises his hand over his head to signal that his hair needs work. Within a few seconds, a stylist materialises out of nowhere and pats down a few stray strands. And then, it’s showtime.

This season, KBC received 1.98 crore registrations in just seven days, out of which 1,500 were shortlisted for video auditions and for personal and written tests. Sixty of these aspiring contestants will get a chance to be on the show.

To ensure that each contestant is “acclimatized” to the ‘hot seat’, every contestant is allowed to experience it during practice rounds prior to the shoot. “It is an extraordinary situation, with the lights and the music, and with Amitabh Bachchan sitting in front of you. They are even counseled after they win, spoken to, reminded of the game and asked to keep their heads and yet not lose their tongues,” says Siddhartha Basu, veteran quizmaster and the creative producer of the show.

The day’s contestant, a court clerk from Jharkhand, introduces himself to the host who enquires first about his work and later about his family. On learning that the man is accompanied by his wife, Bachchan is interested in knowing how the two met. The camera pans on the woman in question. “We had an arranged marriage,” she says, with a smile. Getting to know a contestant is the reality part of the show, even though Basu feels that this isn’t a reality show. “This is basically a knowledge game. But then it features real people — aam aadmi and aurat as contestants and that is what is special. For instance, people come on the show for different reasons. For a lot of people it is money, for some, it is validation and recognition — we have to be able to tell their stories. So, money may not matter to some but for one who has a loan of Rs 80,000, it’s a weight off their chest when it happens, and you feel that.”

The arena, which has witnessed lives taking dramatic turns over 17 years, is strategically designed to best capture the emotionally charged proceedings. While the original format has been retained, the gameplay will now be speedier (10 questions in an hour, as opposed to an hour-and-a-half). “In India, people seem to have preferred some kind of novelty in every season. So the ‘phone a friend’ is now a video call and another lifeline is the ‘jodidaar’ who can accompany a contestant on the ‘hot seat’,” says Basu.

KBC is a lot about lighting. When Bachchan makes his grand entry and introduces the contestants, the lights being beamed down are of a warm and homely hue. The DOP in charge, Sudhir Koushik, ensures that this “neutral and welcoming theme” is achieved with constant light. But, as the ‘fastest finger first’ — the first round of selection — begins, the LED panels on the walls and the floors transform into a fiery red, “as it is a colour one associates with danger and tension”. Shafts of light hit at the contestants whose “mind is being symbolically depicted through a matrix of numbers” projected on the LED pillars and wings. “Once a question is fired, along with the lights and the camera, we play a certain track to which the lights dance along. This builds a crescendo,” says Koushik of the nerve-racking piece that can reduce a thoroughly prepared contestant into a stammering wreck.

As the contestant from Jharkhand clears the first five questions in a breeze, but seems a bit iffy about the sixth, the lights suddenly fade out. “While a contestant is mulling over a question, there’s a lot of light play to indicate the thoughts running in their mind. For some questions, the answers are obvious, but when the contestant is not sure, to build drama, we go darker on the audience to get that isolation,” says Koushik.

The questions are carefully curated by a team of researchers, keeping in mind “the universality of the show, varying levels of awareness, education, occupation of the contestants”. “On Mastermind, it’s easier to set content, as you can assume a more standardised level of awareness and mastery of esoteric subjects. On KBC, each stack ideally needs to work as a sporting one for whoever is sitting on the hot seat, all the way up to the topmost question,” explains Basu, fully accepting that “level of difficulty” is subjective. The craft, explains Basu, is in the phrasing of the question so as to “be challenging in a non-bookish way”. “Then there’s the science — the process of checking, sourcing and vetting all information used, and going through editorial screening, with degrees of difficulty being assigned, before it gets fed into the contest database. After that, it’s over to the gameplay system given to us by the licensors, and crossing our fingers that contestants (and viewers) will be able to engage well with it,” explains Basu, adding that mythology questions get the highest response from home viewers. But this year, the one that received 51 lakh responses was, “At the International Court of Justice, India is contesting the death penalty given by Pakistan to which Indian national?”

As the buzzer goes off, marking the end of the episode, we ask Basu about the kind of contestants that surprise him the most. “Those who perform unpredictably, those who are spontaneous and play the game well, are inevitably the most interesting. There was a couple who eloped and wanted Amitabh Bachchan to appeal to their parents. Not all of what transpires is always known; sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.”