Lock Upp premiere highlights: Kangana Ranaut locks horns with Payal Rohatgi, Munawar Faruqui

I had decided not to watch Kangana Ranaut’s mock-prison reality show for two reasons. One, because it features the combustive collaboration of the two most controversial women in showbiz (Ranaut and Ekta Kapoor together are like fuel and fire) and secondly, because it looks like a gender-reversed version of Bigg Boss with interchangeable non-descript contestants.

Going by the 2 ½ hour-long first episode where all the contestants were introduced, insulted and…errr…imprisoned, Lock Upp should be more fun than Bigg Boss which had begun to be a crashing bore in recent years, what with its dependency on the questionable charms of the host who half the time looks too sleepy/bored to care two hoots whether warring contestants kill one another.

Kangana too looks supremely supercilious, above all the contestants in every way. She sneers at them. Whether they fumed or fawned in the premiere episode, her disgust was vividly caught in close-up. Many of them, like Nisha Rawal, Punam Pandey and Anjali Arora whose sweetness bordered on obsequiousness and a really silly annoying fanboy called Shivum Sharma who recited shayari non-stop for Kangana, they all looked truly awestruck by Kangana’s presence. She was disgusted and she didn’t mind showing it.

However, not everyone was willing to be a fan on the show. Payal Rohatgi chose to be an ‘ear conditioner’ rather than a fan. She gave Kangana back as good she got. When the acerbic hostess warned Payal to not piggyback on her example (this, after Siddharth Kannan pointed out that Payal had once described producer Ekta Kapoor’s show Gandi Baat as porn, to which she retorted that Ms Ranaut too had her differences with Ekta in the past and, surprise, now they are doing this show together) Payal defiantly answered back, “But you also use Alia Bhatt’s name…and what have you got to do with Gangubai Kathiawadi?”

Well, ahem ahem to that.

My favourite gee-golly-wiz spot in the lengthy inaugural episode was when transwoman Saisha Shinde came face-to-face face with self-styled swami Chakrapani Maharaj who couldn’t bear to look at Shinde for 'going against Nature'. She responded by taking off her boots.

I guess all the contestants who have agreed to be on the show are in it for the insults, not to mention the zeroes on the cheque.

While the opening episode had its amusing moments (like Raveena Tandon walking in and praising the hostess so much it looked unreal), it is crystal clear that this is no country for polite soft-spoken people. In the coming weeks, I suspect there will be a lot of screaming and finger-wagging on the show.

Art, said Munawar Faruqui wisely, cannot bring about a revolution. Kangana our queenly hostess jumped in to ask ‘What about me?’

Yes, right. Lock Upp can’t even spell correctly let alone bring about a revolution. The only revolution it seems capable of is to allow Babita Phogat to wrestle with the inanity and insolence she will face in ‘jail’ for the next ten weeks without using her physical strength.

The writer is a Patna-based journalist. He's been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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