What was the genesis of the path breaking, super successful countdown TV show “Superhit Muqabla”? Irfan Khan, the mastermind behind the show, writes about the extraordinary journey exclusively for The Paperclip.
Written by Irfan Khan
The advent of cable TV in India brought foreign channels to Indian TV sets and the competition for content took on a whole new paradigm. Soon, Indian content channel Zee TV was launched.
As cable TV spread in big cities, the state broadcaster Doordarshan started feeling the heat. They launched a channel for the big cities called “DD Metro”, but neither did they have the budgets for the channel nor was any content commissioned for production.
DD leaned on NFDC (a government film financing corporation) to provide content from its repertoire.The content was primarily parallel films from India and other countries acquired by NFDC from film festivals. Those films were great works of art but attracted limited viewers.
Zee TV’s effervescent content comprising game shows and soap operas with urban themes seemed to be winning the race. Doordarshan started losing metro audiences during prime time. This started hurting their ad revenue too.
NFDC started approaching film makers to create content for the Metro channel. Among the first invitees were Amit Khanna, who ran a content company called ‘Plus Channel’, and Harish Thawani who was a sports content aggregator. I was a partner with Harish Thawani then.
While we explored possibilities with NFDC, we were told that we wouldn’t get any payment upfront to create the content. But, we could take time slots with no upfront fee. All ad revenue from the shows would be split 50:50 between NFDC and us.
In effect, we would have to invest our money with no guarantee of returns. It is important to note that in those days the TRPs of Metro Channel were in decimals. Amit Khanna offered to take two slots.
The content would be interviews with film personalities and another similar show. He was obviously leveraging his content creating set up which was producing ‘Plus Channel”. Harish and I did not have a running production unit.
Harish offered to take one slot and run a sports syndicated show called ‘Gillette World of Sports’. Gillette supplied this international sports capsule for free and we would edit an India-friendly version of the capsule.
nudged Harish to take an additional slot for a film music-based program. He was not sure how we could manage to get film music videos but he asked for the slot and we got it.
Amit Khanna was not sure if we could get film music videos at a reasonable price and Harish too was worried. I waited till we got in our car and Amit left. I assured Harish that I could get the videos for free. Harish was not convinced.
I gave him a snapshot of the present scenario. There were two ways to promote film music, one on Doordarshan and the other on Zee TV, and both charged high fees. Only a few songs could be promoted in a single show.
The music and film industry was suffering because of the high cost and limited exposure. Then I told him the masterplan. “What will happen when we start using the music videos as content within our show”?
I started describing the concept of a ‘Countdown Show’. “If we use a smaller portion of a song to represent the top 10 songs of the week, then the industry will be delighted”. Harish understood my theory and we drove to Nariman Point to meet the marketing head of Lintas.
The ad agency was sold on the idea and said they’d buy all the commercial time on the show. Then Harish and I thrashed out the Free Commercial Time pricing of the show with Lintas. After much calculation they agreed on an average price of a 10 second spot at Rs. 1700.
Harish came up with a killer proposition of broadcasting the show & waiting for the TRP. We proposed the agency commit to pay us Rs 1700 for every TRP we get. In effect, they would pay for only what we deliver.There was silence in the room as Lintas mulled over the proposal.
We left after a while with an in principle ‘yes, we agree’ realizing that in the last few hours we had concocted a show and sold it to the biggest media buying agency. Now we had to think of a name. One thing we agreed on immediately was to keep a Hindi English title.
The 1st word ‘Superhit’ was easy as it was frequently used to refer to successful songs & films. We wanted something dramatic for the 2nd word, like a film title. After some deliberation on the word ‘countdown’, we thought that songs fight with each other to become No. 1.
So it is about competition and a battle. We considered many words which described this and settled on ‘Muqabla’. The name had a ring to it, ‘Superhit Muqabla’. We closed on it.
We decided that before we launch the actual show, we must warm up the audience. However, we couldn’t spend on an ad campaign. We could show a promo on Metro Channel without paying anything. But the channel had a very small audience.
At that point I had started meeting the music companies to acquire the film song videos. The arrangement between film producers & music companies was that the film producer sold the music to the music company. The film producer had to provide the videos to promote the music.
Therefore, it was better to approach music companies rather than film producers.We started getting hundreds of music videos from the companies. For the countdown show these songs were useless because we were showing ‘Top Ten’ songs from the last week.
But the hundreds of videos solved our promotion problem. We created a show called ‘Hit Parade’ as a precursor to the main show. We compiled the songs into a playlist and inserted our promo between songs.
Now the audience could enjoy songs and learn about the upcoming show. Two weeks after airing ‘Hit Parade’, we started getting positive feedback from advertisers.
Next, we had to select an anchor for the show. People suggested Harish Bhimani, Daleep Tahil and Sharon Prabhakar. But we were looking for someone who could appeal to the Metro audience – a whacky personality who would break the stereotype of anchoring.
There was a rapper who had just released his video on MTV Asia channel. I contacted Baba Sehgal. He was already a big artist and his fees were high. We were not sure whether we should spend that figure. Harish was getting a great response from the advertisers.
He took the call to get Baba and increased the production budget without getting a single rupee as advance or commitment. Now everything hinged on the success of the show.
When we delivered the first show for telecast, there was an objection. DD National Network wanted money for the songs which were in the show as they were used to charging for songs. This was a big problem.
Our content acquiring model was under attack. It was a few hours before the telecast time. We presented our case with NFDC’s support. We said these were not full songs and they were packaged as news from the last week.
But the clincher was that the tape submitted had big brands advertising for the first time on Metro Channel. DD realized that it would give the Metro Channel a big boost when other advertisers saw these big brands on the show. We got the go-ahead to telecast the show.
The first show aired and the TRPs came in a few weeks later. Our show had opened with a TRP of 20. We were thrilled. Suddenly it dawned on us that the advertisers have to pay us Rs. 1700 for each TRP. The show broke even on the first episode.
NFDC was elated. Soon the word spread that Metro channel has got TRP and advertisers. The producers flocked to NFDC and all slots were booked instantly. Our TRP grew every week and reached 50 within a few months.
A slot on Metro channel became lucrative for everyone. This paved the way for Metro Channel to host popular shows like Dekh Bhai Dekh and Ramayan-Mahabharat rerun down the line.
Doordarshan managed to upstage Zee TV. This was sweet because a government-run channel had beaten the private enterprise. Zee TV came out with a clone of our show called ‘Philips Top Ten’.
BBC did a story on the success of ‘Superhit Muqabla’ and called it “the show that launched a channel”. A legend was born.
