NEW DELHI : Zee Music today announced the launch of its brand new programme on Bollywood, B News, which promises to get the ‘under belly of Bollywood” for the viewers for the first time. B News, is all about the glamour, the scandals, the fights, the love stories, the make ups, the break ups, the tensions, the laughter, the tears and the fears, that makes every celebrity in the world of glitz and glamour, the ‘different’ people that they are! People who are not like the rest of us . People who do not talk the normal talk, or walk the normal walk, like other ordinary citizens,” an official of Zee TV said.
B News promise also to be a “show that will perhaps open the doors to the paparazzi”. It will “capture the uncaptured moments of Bollywood”, Irshwin Balvani, Business Head of Zee Music said.
However, it will be a largely diluted version of what the paparazzi does the world around. On asked how close to the under belly of Bollywood the channel would get, and if they are planning the sort of kiss-‘n-tell work that has become a hazard to celebrities, Balvani retracted and said that “we would leave their private lives to themselves”. Paparazzi can do two kinds of work, he averred: one that harms the celebrities and the other that brings out the humans in them, “the same way they are much normal people as we are”, Balvani held.
Asked how they will be different from other channels and newspapers that also cover Bollywood, Balvani said that they would have a lot of features unlike in the other media, where they only serve news. Gossip? Yes, gossip too, Balvani said, saucy, but not raunchy; “gossip that is fact-based, not something cooked up by someone”. If that seems anachronistic, so be it. Will that satiate the kind of appetite that B News is trying to whip up? The assembled media persons remained sceptical and B News did not have too many clear cut answers, and did not divulge any of the specific programmes that the new programme will host.
“We are launching the programme from December 1 and shooting has started two months ago,” Balvani revealed. The show will be co-hosted by Zee Music’s old hand Vikas Bhalla and “sultry, sexy, saucy” Nethra Raghuraman, both of who were present at the press meet. What was the criterion for the choice of hosts? Balvani said that Bhalla had been with Zee Music for the past one and half years. “In choosing the female partner for Vikas, we gave primacy to a person who could speak.
“Nethra has been a model but more importantly, she has done a few films and knows how Bollywood functions and will be able to articulate well.” It seems that Zee Music is keeping its programming aspect on B News guarded. But given the fact – which Balvani admitted to – that Indian sensibilities did not allow much raunchy programming, not even too much of real-life scandal, there could more hype than substance in the new programme.
