Now that he no longer has to be politically correct about the show, Amitabh Bachchan is delightfully blasé about the fact that Kaun Banega Crorepati had begun to bore him. “It was getting to be monotonous for me, doing the same thing over and over again,” says the 63-going-on-64-year-old actor. Sour grapes?

Maybe falling ill and pulling out of the show was the best option for the dignified host as the second season of KBC Dwitiya, had begun to bore the audience too. And now the dimpled new host of KBC had better watch it. It’s a foregone conclusion that those who watch the third season do so only to tune into Shah Rukh Khan’s charming antics. It’s not the show itself that’s holding audience interest and that’s dangerous territory. After all, for how many nights will loyal folks sit before their TV sets only to watch a matinee idol repeat his hour-long act every day? Despite the ‘freeze’ replacing the ‘lock’ and the respectful ‘ ji’ vanishing to make place for SRK’s casual ‘tum’ , the old format of KBC is facing an incumbency factor. It’s not SRK as much as the show itself that has lost its appeal. It was wearing out during the Dwitiya run and now it seems to be simply speeding downhill without brakes.

KBC once resurrected a fading superstar. Indications are that it’s doing just the opposite for his younger colleague.

But AB’s admission about inertia having set in comes much after he was unceremoniously replaced by a younger host. Which is how it is in the film industry. Watch a film flop and the same stars who’d lavished praise on it will start sniping at the screenplay or the editing. Although Vidya Balan hasn’t said it in so many words on record, the blind faith in Mani Sir has disappeared. What was narrated to her at the beginning had little resemblance to what was finally shot with her. And most of what was shot was also left behind on the editing table. Seriously, Vidya needs to examine her choice of roles after Parineeta and Lage Raho Munna Bhai. To be confined to an inconsequential — and irritating — wheel chair appearance in her third film and to follow it up with an almost comatose character in her fourth (Salaam-e-Ishq), smacks of a miscalculated self-assessment. Why is Vidya Balan, presented so wonderfully in Parineeta, dying to sizzle, smooch and seduce when she’s obviously no Bipasha or Priyanka?

But actors somehow have this marvellous knack of never knowing what really works. Akshaye Khanna was so excited about Salaam-e-Ishq that he assured me it would be exactly like coming out of a huge, grand Hollywood experience. Actors here don’t seem to know that first, Love Actually (which inspired Salaam-e-Ishq ) was itself not a grand experience at all; in fact, the box office abroad had largely ignored it. Secondly, actors are so self-obsessed that they tend to get excited about playing a role they haven’t done before, often assuring themselves that if they’ve personally had a hugely satisfactory experience, the audience will too. They simply fail to see the larger picture.

But Akshaye’s mistaken ideas about what makes a film work are probably in his genes. Years ago, his dad, Vinod Khanna, a handsome guy who was loved for his action roles, was over the moon about a white dhoti character he played in Feroz Khan’s Dayavan. VK was so excited about this “vastly different me” that he even put his money on that dhoti and jointly distributed Dayavan with FK. The film sank — VK in a benign white dhoti may have been a new experience for the actor but for the audience it was like watching Jackie Chan minus his stunts.

So when an actor gets excessively excited about his role, most times it’s his self-absorption at work — the film will in all probability not work at all.

By the way, with the flopping of Salaam-e-Ishq, Salman Khan has pulled off a hat trick of flops — Jaan-e-Mann and Baabul were the other two. When stars by themselves are no longer a draw, it makes their spiralling prices only more baffling. Today, a smug Amitabh Bachchan says he’s having a blast experimenting with his roles because he has moved into a character actor bracket and is no longer responsible for the commercial running of a film. So when you pay AB the top buck — or give him a Rolls Royce as Vinod Chopra recently did — you pay him for his impeccable performance, not his saleability.

But isn’t that becoming increasingly true of the so-called saleable heroes too?

Bharathi S. Pradhan is managing editor of Movie Mag International