English Entertainment
Greymatter collaborates with Star Sports, Smaash to produce Heroes
MUMBAI: Come 14 November and India will witness one of its most celebrated icons Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar play his 200th and final test match against the West Indies.
Even as everyone – from brands to hotels to television channels – is busy planning the best possible farewell for the little master, one channel has hit upon a unique way to mark the occasion.
The channel in question – Star Sports 3 (Hindi) – will debut a new chat show, Heroes, on the very same day, featuring 13 top cricketers from across the globe, starting with none other than Sachin.
Heroes, which is more in Hindi and less in English, has been created by Greymatter Entertainment (GME) in collaboration with Star Sports and Smaash located at Lower Parel, Mumbai.
Speaking about Heroes, GME owner Rahul Sarangi says: “It is a unique chat show, where the world’s top cricketers will be seen chatting informally with kids in the age group of 7-14 years. As for Sachin, he is the biggest icon that India has ever had. He has given us more smiles than any other icon.”
Apart from Sachin, the 13-episode series will feature Suresh Raina, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Ravindra Jadeja, Shikhar Dhawan and Kumara Sangakara among other cricketers.
Explaining the thought process behind Heroes, Sarangi says: “It is simple; it is an entertainment chat show, and yet inspiring. This is also in sync with Star Sports’ new campaign ‘I believe’. The show is for kids to find the heroes within themselves.”
Elaborating on the show being in sync with ‘I believe’, Sarangi says: “If you see cricketers today, they come from small towns, having big dreams. The reason they had bigger dreams was because they grew up watching Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid in their younger days. So, through this show, we give these kids an opportunity to come closer to their heroes and understand what they do when off the field.”
Sarangi informs that around 60 kids are part of the show and pose candid questions to the cricketers. Apparently, six to seven cameras were used during the shoot, with three edit machines to edit the show. Since the makers needed a very informal environment, the series was shot inside Smaash.
According to Sarangi, Heroes is about inspirational stories of cricketers, minus any gyaan. “Since it is a ‘No gossip’ show, cricketers are without guard: talking everything under the sun,” he says, pointing out that they will be showcased in a completely different avatar. The show has been moderated by Roshni Chopra.
He substantiates: “Virat Kohli will be seen teaching kids how to dance, Sangakara will teach violin and Raina will be seen cooking. And yet, all of them will talk about their childhood and what made them the heroes that they are today. It is through the inspirational figure that the kids will get to hear inspirational stories.”
Sarangi goes on to reveal that Sachin will be seen teaching kids how to play spin against Shane Warne. “Smaash, which has a 3D facility, will show Warne balling. During the episode, Sachin will be seen teaching the kids how to bat on such kind of spin ball delivery,” he illustrates.
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It is a unique chat show, where the worlds top cricketers will be seen chatting informally with kids in the age group of 7-14 years says Rahul Sarangi
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Rubbishing any suggestions of the show being scripted, Sarangi adds: “Considering the show is not scripted, it is the kids who come up with the questions. It is just filtered by the channel and also us, to ensure that the questions aren’t repetitive. We keep the house open for questions. We don’t feed any questions.”
About the collaboration, he says: “It was a concept well thought by Star Sports. The channel wanted to do a chat show. They approached us with the brief, after which together we brain stormed and came up with the concept.”
Sarangi explains that the cricketers featured on Heroes were decided together by all three parties involved. “The next step was to convince them to be part of the show, considering all of them are popular players, it was difficult to get their time,” he says.
The cricketers spent approximately five hours on the sets for the shoot. “We shot one hour of content to come up with a 24 minute episode,” he says, adding it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for the kids. “They are not a studio audience. Here, they sit so close to the cricketer that they can touch him and also interact with him like they were sitting with him in their living room.”
A considerable amount of time went into the making of Heroes. “A thorough research was conducted to understand what is palatable to the audience, what would be fun for the kids and yet make sense to our audiences watching the show. Even designing the look and feel of every episode took sufficient amount of time,” says Sarangi.
How confident are the makers about the show? “These days shows are made on conviction,” replies Sarangi, adding “We had two kids’ managers to look into the needs of the kids. Since we were shooting with kids, we had to take care of the hygiene and many other issues relating to shooting.”
It’s an in-house creative team that worked on the show. “Almost 40 people sat on production, post production, editing, research etc for the show. We don’t believe in taking freelancers for shows like this,” Sarangi rounds off.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
