Bollywood Britain - Video Killed The Filmi Star

The 1970s saw the rise of commercial cinema and one of Bollywood's biggest ever hits."Sholay", the very first "curry Western", introduced superstar Amitabh Bachchan to the world and in this programme Nikki Bedi looks at some of Bollywood's biggest stars. There were to be many more less successful "currified" versions of Western films though. India has historically had very lax copyright controls and whatever musical or film style is popular in the West, Bollywood can create its own unique version, from Michael Jackson dance moves to Celine Dion and the song from Titanic. The cheap availability of the video cassette and the cheap production values of the films being made meant that, in the UK, audiences stopped going to the cinemas of Southall, Bradford and Wolverhampton and started to stay in. In this programme, Nikki looks at where the art of Hindi film strayed from its "super hit" formula of real life stories and real life heroes and took to portraying the richer lifestyles and locations of the ex-pats in the audiences. Meanwhile the UK audience was finding new ways of expressing itself with the rise of the Asian Underground sound and Asian talent finally breaking into Western TV and film. It took films like "Dil Se" and the emerging talents of a new breed of director and musical director to get British Asians back into the big screen of Bollywood. Guests including Slumdog composer AR Rahman, director Shekhar Kapur, lyricist Javed Akhtar, actor Ben Kingsley, Playback singers Asha Bhosle and Kavita Krishnamurthy Subramanium, superstars Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan, Nitin Sawhney, Tjinder Singh of Cornershop and Trickbaby talk about the films which kept a global audience coming back for more.