"We haven't finalised yet but the options are between a cricketer, two mainstream Bollywood actors and an actress. One of these four will be starring in the next season of Swayamvar," Nikhil Madhok of Imagine TV told reporters. The first season of the show had item girl Rakhi and the second had Rahul choose their respective life partners. While Rakhi just had an engagement at the end of it, Rahul went all the way to tie the knot with Kolkata-based model Dimpy Ganguly.
"We are keen that whoever participates in the next Swayamvar does get married eventually. We don't want it to be like Rakhi's, who didn't get married in the end," said Madhok. This format of reality show has proved to be one of the most popular on TV and Madhok says it is all because the concept of marriage has a huge mass appeal.
"Before we launched the Swayamvar we realised that whenever there is a marriage point in the show, people find it appealing. So we took the concept of marriage from daily soaps and turned it into reality TV, and the shows were very popular," said Madhok. Indian television has recently seen a surge in daily soaps set in rural India, as a result of which the channel has come up with new reality show 'Desi Girl', which has eight Mumbai-bred celebs living in a Punjab village.
"We spotted a trend towards rural programming, what with various channels running soaps set in villages. We thought of coming up with a rural reality show and see how that works out," said Madhok. 'Desi Girl' is an Indian adaptation of the US reality series 'The Simple Life' which had socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie doing manual, low-paying jobs such as cleaning rooms, doing farm work.
The channel was approached by the BBC for the Indian version of the show, which has television and film stars including Monica Bedi, Sambhavna Seth, Kashmera Shah, Roshni Chopra, Anmol Singh, Rucha Gujarati, Ishitta Arun and Aushima Sawhney living the lives of a village belle.
"We first worked with BBC last year on a show called 'Pati Patni Aur Woh'. After its success they came to us with this concept. 'Desi Girl' is inspired by 'The Simple Life', but we have worked on it a lot. There were just two of them in the US show and there was no elimination.
"Only the setting is similar in 'Desi Girl'. Here the contestants are having to live with real villagers. They also have to impress them to win the show as it is the villagers who are going to vote for them," said Madhok.