QOTD: Shilpa wins, do you care?

PAGING ISSUES: Has Shilpa Shetty's Big Brother win had brought Page 3 to Page 1?

        

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After much drama, some chicken curry and a raging debate on racism, actress Shilpa Shetty has emerged a bigger celebrity from UK reality show Big Brother, than she was when it started three weeks ago.

She has now got a famous publicist, has signed the rights of her story to British tabloid The Sun and if she plays her cards right, lucrative deals will come pouring in. Though all this might mean the world to Shilpa, how relevant is it to us?

That was the debate on the show Face The Nation on Monday, with experts discussing whether Shilpa Shetty's Big Brother win had brought Page 3 to Page 1. The show was conducted by Anuradha SenGupta and on the panel were Editor of DNA Gautam Adhikari, Chief Executive Officer of Future Brands Santosh Desai and actor Rahul Roy who won the Indian version of the Endemol reality show, Big Boss, last weekend.

Considering the cynicism that seeps in when a star is part of a show like Big Brother, what makes a star take on such shows?

“The reason why I joined Big Boss was because I have been reclusive person. I wanted to test myself and see whether I could in an environment with 12 different people. I didn’t go into the house thinking of what I would be put through. In the beginning, it was just a professional assignment for me,” said Rahul Roy.

So as an actor who has been out of the public arena for some time, the show represented a test for him/her, a way to earn money and to get media space.

From the media’s point of view, the story on Shilpa winning Big Brother would probably feature on the front page of Indian newspapers.

“Yes, it probably will be on the front page tomorrow. Television does drive this to a great extent. We, newspapers, face a lot of competition from other newspapers and we try to outguess each other. But that does not mean that the whole of Page 1 has become Page 3,” said Gautam Adhikari.

So is it just competition that has made Shilpa Shetty big news and not the fact that the controversy surrounding her has captured popular imagination?

“Of course, if people watch you, people want that. But the point is that a newspaper can give a lot more but we have to take a look at what you (television) are putting out. We don’t follow television but we have to take a look at the leading stories on it,” said Adhikari.

The controversy, a marketing gimmick?

A statement that the Channel 4 producer made was that they thought that the Celebrity Big Brother show with Shilpa Shetty was in danger. “In danger of being the most boring Big Brother that we had had in many years, we were thinking, ‘Oh dear, what can we do?’,” the statement said.