The Basus of TV quizzing

One of my many vivid quizzing memories is being stumped — momentarily — by a picture of Ryan Gosling, Hollywood royalty, much-leered-at pin-up and meme superstar. The question asked me to connect three images: Gosling, a screenshot from Ocean’s Eleven (featuring Don Cheadle) and finally, Albert Camus. After a considerable amount of head-scratching, my teammates and I managed to crack it. The answer was The United States of Leland, a loose cinematic adaptation of Camus’s novel The Stranger, starring Gosling and Cheadle. The quizmaster, speaking in the allusive manner that trivia-miners often end up adopting, said, “Team Kharagpur pushing the boulder uphill before cracking it” (a reference to The Myth of Sisyphus, another Camus work).

It was true, however: we had gone through six quizzes in 48 hours at that point, straight after a 30-hour train journey. Just sitting on stage felt like moving a mountain. I did not know then, that there existed a classic quiz book that had taken this Sisyphean metaphor literally, and created a popular format from scratch. What’s more, the book (and its redoubtable author) indirectly ushered in the era of televised quizzing in India.

Scaling new peaks

The book in question is Quiz Mountain, a 1996 work by Partha Basu that was considered to be a Bible of sorts by quizzers of a certain generation. Quiz Mountain compiled selections from Partha’s column of the same name, which appeared in The Illustrated Weekly of India back in the early ’80s. The column would begin with the simplest questions, called ‘Levelground’ (1 point each), and then proceed to two successive sections, called ‘Uphill’ (2 points) and ‘Summit’ (3 points).

For instance, in Partha’s quiz on ‘First Lines, And Last’, readers were tested on their knowledge of famous first and last lines in literature. A Levelground question would be as simple as “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism” (Manifesto of the Communist Party). An Uphill question would be much more of a curveball: “It was the winter of a great nation’s discontent. An air of melancholia hung like a chill over London. Rarely, if ever, had Britain’s capital ushered in a New Year in a mood so bleak, so morose” (Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight). A Summit question could only be cracked by a true connoisseur: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad, and this was his patrimony.” Giving away the answer to this question, Partha quips, “If you are over 45, you should get this. Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche. If you are under 45, read it.”

I met the now 78-year-old Partha last week. As is generally the case when two quizzers (irrespective of age, gender or football team loyalties) meet, the conversation flailed about eagerly, like a toy helicopter with a busted remote. But we did manage to talk about the circumstances that led to the airing of Quiz Time, India’s first televised quiz show, in 1985.

The mountain comes to Mohammad

“Interactive audience quizzing events, like the kind popular at IIT these days, took off in Kolkata in the late ’70s. I think the first ever quiz was the CKPC (Christ the King Parish Church) quiz. There was another at the Grail Club. Neil O’Brien’s DI (Dalhousie Institute) Quiz was when the quantum leap for quizzing happened, because of his strong personality... he was very committed to quizzing,” Partha said. At that time, Delhi and Mumbai were not on the quizzing map at all. Chennai and Bengaluru had small groups of dedicated quizzers, but not much by way of organised quizzing. O’Brien’s professional handling of the DI Quiz set it apart.

“In those days, we quizzed for fun,” Partha said. “There was hardly any prize money. The adrenaline rush that we got from winning was why we played.” Slowly, corporates started realising the popularity of these quizzes: the Bata Quiz was the first to offer money and other gifts to the winners, Partha reminisced (“I ended up with a lot of Bata shoes”). Partha and his teammates were collectively known as Motley Crew: apart from Partha, there was the formidable Saranya Jayakumar (called India’s first woman quizmaster by The Hindu in 2012), Kabir Sen and Dayita Datta (currently vice-principal at Welham’s Girls’ School).

“We decided to segment our expertise,” Partha explained. “There was very little overlap. My specialities were films, sports — and the weird stuff, which nobody else would know. Sen’s strengths were current affairs and rock music: there was nothing in rock that Sen didn’t know of.” Motley Crew’s rivalry with the DI Quartet, led by Neil and his son Andy, is legendary in quizzing circles: but Partha insists that their equation with the O’Briens wouldn’t even qualify as ‘rivalry’ in the modern-day sense of the word (“There was no rivalry, no back-stabbing, nothing, just fun. There was a lot of mutual respect.”)

When The Telegraph (Kolkata) was launched in 1982, MJ Akbar became its first editor. Partha would write book reviews for the newly-minted paper, as did Pritish Nandy. Later, when Nandy became the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, he commissioned unusually cerebral columns like Mindsport by Mukul Sharma, which featured all manner of brain-teasers. Continuing in the same vein, he asked Partha (“over six drinks”) to start a quiz column. The two things Nandy was clear about were that “it had to be a bloody difficult quiz” and that “the questions had to be more interesting than the answers”. And so, Quiz Mountain was born.

A camera and a question mark

In 1985, Ashok Raina from ITV asked Partha to shoot a pilot for a televised quiz show. “Raina got hold of a few producers, including Ishwari Bajpai, who were ready to shoot a pilot with me,” Partha said. “We began at nine in the morning and kept at it till one in the night. Nothing worked. It was a total fiasco, a murder.” The producers wanted a buzzer and a screen. Partha wanted a basket out of which he would fish out questions. “They had given me a table. But the basket was too low, and I had to bend down each time to reach for the next question,” Partha said. “If someone would see the pilot footage today, they’d see me disappearing every now and then.” However would they get the pilot done?

Something had to give. Eventually, the producers convinced Partha that while he was a great quizmaster, they were probably better off with someone else hosting the show. That’s where Siddhartha Basu came in. I asked Siddhartha about the beginnings of the show. This is what he told me:

“Some former colleagues were making a pilot of a show called Safecracker, which was being hosted by venerable quizmaster Partha Basu, in which the scorer was none other than Sagarika Ghose, then a student at St Stephen’s. They knew I used to MC by default during my brief stint as an events manager at the Taj, so they called me to Kamani Auditorium down the road at 10 minutes’ notice, to do a quick rah-rah intro of the show, host and contestants. I did, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. About a month later they got back to me saying the sponsors, DD et al wanted me to host. So, I quit my job at the Taj, and hosted 52 episodes of the show. That was Quiz Time.”

According to Partha, Siddhartha was initially apprehensive about the audience reactions. “He said, ‘What if someone challenges the answers?’ I told him not to worry about it, that I’d supply the questions.” The fears were far from unfounded, as the following months and years proved. Siddhartha explained: “I had no conversance whatsoever with the quiz world at college, as my passion was theatre, though I was aware of quite an active quizzing circle at college, with the likes of Shashi Tharoor, Ram Guha, Venkat Ramani, to name a few. When I first hosted Quiz Time, I used whatever was given to me by the team, which I would copy edit and sort, but being the face of the show, faced the flak for all the errors and ambiguities, which used to hit the newspapers with discomfiting regularity, in the letters columns or columns of critics like the doughty Amita Malik, who was otherwise most appreciative.”

Today, Quiz Time is remembered as the moment TV quizzing announced its arrival in India. Siddhartha went on to produce several blockbuster quiz shows, including Mastermind India (which he also hosted) and Kaun Banega Crorepati. His latest, a Sunday morning show called News Wiz, produced for Headlines Today, will see schoolkids being quizzed on current affairs. In the first season of Mastermind India, Partha reached the semi-final, but no further. Dayita Datta, his former teammate, won.

What Siddhartha and Partha agree upon is this: being a TV quizmaster isn’t always about an encyclopaedic range of knowledge. In Siddhartha’s words, “To have a flair as a host of a quiz event or show, you need more than the mind of a polymath. You need the skills of a compère, stagecraft, a sense of drama. Charisma, too, plays an important role.”

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