Siddhartha Basu is in Doha to host a quiz contest. PICTURE: Thajudheen
By Ramesh Mathew/Staff Reporter
Siddhartha Basu, renowned Indian quiz show host and television producer-director with a career spanning over three decades, feels he became a quiz buff several years ago “by accident”.
Basu, in Doha to host the Indian Women’s Association Qatar’s annual inter-school quiz competition today at Birla Public School, tries to put in as much freshness, novelty and innovation as possible into every show he hosts.
“It was by sheer accident that I became a quiz buff after watching some shows during my youth,” said the popular quiz master, recalling his evolution into a television anchor, hosting several widely received programmes in the Indian sub-continent.
Basu recalled that while he was in his early teens, an astrologer told his banker father that he would become a “prominent figure in a rare field” sometime later in life. He thought that he would become a nuclear scientist or a neurosurgeon, both of which were “rarer indeed”, he quipped.
One needs to be a little more than a conventional anchor to be successful as a quiz host, especially while catering to an audience through a mass medium such as TV, he feels.
Acknowledging his success as an anchor to his beginning as a student of theatre and as a performer in his youth, Basu said his involvement in the area has helped him considerably in keeping viewers engaged throughout a show.
“While delivering an infotainment show, one needs to take the audience into full confidence and should find joy in sharing his knowledge and information,” said the ace anchor while sharing some tips on how to run a television programme.
What a host needs to bear most in mind is that the audience matters more than the competitors themselves and the success of each show depends as much on the response it receives from the viewers/listeners as it does on the contestants.
When asked about singling out shows that gave him maximum satisfaction as a TV host, the theatre artiste-turned-anchor felt each of those widely received programmes had a different set of audience and hence opinions may have varied among viewers.
“For those attuned to Quiz Time shows of the mid-80s, it could be perhaps their favourite quiz event while others who followed the Mastermind series may consider it as their most preferred show,” added Basu.
In a widely appreciated show such as Kaun Banega Crorepati, which was conceived and produced by his company and anchored by popular Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan, the fortunes of many of the contestants shot up considerably.
“Viewers saw for themselves the transformation happening in many lives as Lady Luck smiled on many contestants.” Each programme, he said, is made to suit the tastes, likes and interests of the contestants involved and the composition of the audience is also taken into consideration in a big way so that they could be engaged completely.
Queried if Quiz Time on the Indian national television network, Doordarshan, was the most widely followed show of its kind ever on a television channel in the sub-continent, Basu said those days there were no clear-cut methods, attempts and standards to analyse the success of shows and no viewership audits were carried out.
“If my memory is right, the Sunday 9pm show (Quiz Time) was perhaps the only English item on the DD network those days,” he recollected, while also disclosing that one of the two contestants of a team (IIT Delhi) that went on to reach the final of the inaugural edition of 1985 is now Reserve Bank of India’s governor Raghuram Rajan.
Gulf Times is the media sponsor of the annual inter-school quiz competition.
