Reality show Bigg Boss, season two, has an unsavoury mix of participants that include jailbirds, alleged wife-beaters and such like.
It was day one in the house of Bigg Boss when Rahul Mahajan (still bearing the scars of a short-lived marriage, drug abuse and wife-beating accusations) asked Monica Bedi (infamous for her liaison with underworld don Abu Salem) about her jail escapades. “Were you in Tihar?” asked Mahajan, repeating the question at least three times, “You know, Delhi’s T-I-H-A-R?” Bedi pretended not to have understood the question.
Just then, Raja Choudhry (whose claim to fame, besides having produced some Bhojpuri flicks, include misbehaving with an electronic media journalist who was inquiring into his ex-wife’s allegations that he was an alcoholic and a wife-beater) drawled, “Which jail were you in?” Bedi, knowing that there was no escape, answered nonchalantly, “Oh, I was in jails in Hyderabad and Bhopal.”
Welcome to the house of Bigg Boss, season two, where 14 participants — including models, item girls, ex-Rajya Sabha MPs, wife-beaters, small-screen actors and talent-show winners — are fighting it out in a bid to survive 84 days and win Rs 75 lakh, on a set specially constructed in Lonavala by production designer and art director Sameer Chanda.
Last year’s winner Rahul Roy, who didn’t exactly garner too much mileage from the show, except for having won Rs 50 lakh, has already cast his vote for Bedi. “She’s seen so much in her life, winning Bigg Boss will be a cakewalk for her,” he said on the show’s first episode, which reportedly attracted 43.5 lakh viewers and recorded a TRP of 1.4.
Why, even the ad rates are reportedly climbing to the Rs 1.25 lakh per 30 seconds figure, while associate sponsors are readily offering anywhere between Rs 2.5 to Rs 2.8 crore. In fact, supporters of one political party rioted when their leader was dropped from the show — because, they allege, he is a Dalit.
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Obviously a lot of money — and eyeballs — are getting attracted to a show whose participants, ironically, come with their fair share of controversial stories, allegations, court cases and FIRs…
Er, not exactly heroes, are they? “Yes, but they are newsmakers, and this time we took a conscious decision to stay away from celebrities and get newsmakers into the house,” defends Ashvini Yardi, programming head of Colors, the channel which is showcasing Bigg Boss seven nights a week from 10:00 to 11:00 pm.
Not many are convinced. Deepak Parashar, one of the participants in season one, retorts, “I was shocked at the list of housemates this year, especially since I’m associated with the show because of my participation last year.” He’s caught some glimpses of the show, aghast that people with criminal records being watched by millions of viewers. “The list,” he says, “is dangerous and desperate.”
Bobby Darling, another participant, who had openly voiced her need to win the money from the show last year for a sex-change operation, feels that the aim of the show is obviously to hit hard on the minds of participants.
“You can’t read, write, watch TV or even keep track of the time in the house, and then you get such controversial participants. There’s bound to be friction, which in turn will obviously generate TRPs,” she says.
She could be right. The international version, Big Brother, came under scrutiny by the British Psychological Society, because it felt that on Big Brother “vulnerable people are deliberately stressed”, and that the show relied on “manipulation, coercion and misinformation to get responses from participants”. It even spawned books like Daniel Jones’s Psychology of Big Brother.
Clinical psychiatrist and therapist Seema Hingorrany, who has been attached with Bigg Boss for both the seasons, laughs when we ask her about the controversial format and the equally controversial participants on the show this year. “Yes,” she agrees, “most participants aren’t exactly heroes and have been written off by the media. That’s why they are here, to clear their tarnished image.”
However, she defends the list of housemates. “Audiences,” she says, “are a sadistic lot. After all, they want to see these controversial housemates up, close and personal, lashing out at each other. But for the housemates, it’s a golden chance to clear their position.” At any given point in time she, or members of her staff, are present on the sets to monitor behavioural patterns.
The inmates can’t see them, because they’re on the other side of one-way glass walls. What’s more, Hingorrany was having regular sessions with individual participants — “From some written tests to studying them, we did everything” — even as the channel came up with suggestions of some of these participants.
Despite taking all the precautions, Hingorrany admits that she’s equally responsible for the list of housemates that have walked onto Bigg Boss this year. “It makes me nervous,” she admits. “I hope we have taken the right decision, especially given the mindsets and behavioural patterns of some of the participants.”
The show has already started unfolding some stories: in one of the episodes, Bedi spoke about how Mumbai landlords uniformly refused to rent her a home, Raja spoke about not being allowed to meet his daughter, and Mahajan briefly touched upon his father’s untimely death. But Parashar warns that living this experience is very difficult. “By the time I came out, I was devastated and shattered. It took me three months to come out of the trauma, to face the fact that other housemates were so condescending and had stripped my character so badly behind by back,” he says.
“It’s a programme that tests you,” reasons Yardi. “With no access to time, and cut off from the world, you have to live in another time zone altogether and fight out your frustrations.” Darling points out, “When there’s nothing to do in the house, frustration builds up so much that you want to lash at your neighbour.” Having watched some of the episodes, he quips, “Either people will murder in that house, or hurt someone else so badly that it’ll be worse than murder.”
Imagine, this when the game has just begun.