A month or so back, I had blogged about yede thumbi haaduvenu, a talent hunt show for young singers on ETV Kannada. I was full of praise for the event. About the format. About the way SPB comperes it. About the judging. Organization. And all that. I think I had written that post towards the end of last season. The new season has just begun. And I have a crib. It is not a minor one.
The format has changed. Last time around, it was a “normal knockout”, with round of 16, quarters, semis, final, etc. Each round would have four contestants of which two would progress to the next round and two would get eliminated. It was a nice and clean system – considering that any non-knockout format for a TV show isn’t a good idea.
Now, they have some sort of a serial knockout. Each episode has four kids, of which two get knocked out. The two who survive compete the following week, with two new people. Two out of these four qualify further. And so on.
This might have been an excellent format – if only the players were robots. If only the players didn’t have that human element called “form”. The format as it is right now is heavily biased in favour of kids who join the program in later rounds. Maybe they have been seeded there based on qualification placings. Nevertheless, it is wrong, and puts the kids who join early at too much of a disadvantage.
Kids who join early need to be at their top form for a larger number of episodes than those that join later. Sustaining an above-average performance over a larger stretch of time takes much more effort. You will also need to keep in mind that the pressure to perform in such events is huge. For the kids who join later, however, all it takes is for them to get lucky and produce terrific form for a handful of episodes and they are through.
I suppose the producers of this event simply didnt’ realize that there is something called uncertainty. They would’ve looked at the format and said “this seems simpler for spectators and anyways the best will have to beat everyone else so this is ok”. I’m sure it the people who came up with this format are a bunch of fools who have no clue about either mathematics or about human tendency. I go back to one of my recent posts and call for the so-called “creative” or “qualitative” industry to cash in on the ibanking bust and take in some quants.
I’m reminded of one of the world chess championship (FIDE) cycles in the late 90s. They had a strenuous knockout tournament for a month to decide the challenger. And the winner of this tournament (Anand) then played the reigning champion Karpov who had been directly “seeded into the finals”. Anand got walloped by Karpov. And he had said something like “this is not fair. I have run the full marathon and in the last 100 meters this guy joins the race. what sort of a contest is this”
The current format of yede thumbi haaduvenu is no different. Now, if only the producers were to have some sense.