Khulud Abu Homos, OSN's vice president of programming, gave us a preview of what changes we can expect when Who Wants to be a Millionaire? begins on its new home.
“This will be the first time the show has done auditions,” she says. “We go to key cities [Amman, Cairo and Dubai] and audition.
“We’re also associating the show with encouraging reading. We have the lowest level of reading here in the Middle East, so we’re running a campaign to say, ‘Culture is not about educational certificates, it’s about reading.’
“We’re going to be opening a digital school library in each of the countries we’re auditioning in. This is something very close to our hearts, so we’ll be opening three libraries.
"We're also pushing to introduce more descriptive audio for blind viewers. There are about seven million blind viewers in the Middle East and they can't watch any Arabic content with descriptive audio, so we're investing in that for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
“We’re leading a campaign to enforce descriptive audio for new local productions alongside George. We’re starting by converting our kids’ content, and also offering our kids’ content for free to schools as part of the campaign.”
Abu Homos also gave us a scoop about the identity of one of the show’s first contestants.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard the story of Mariam Malak,” says Homos. “She’s an Egyptian girl who had always been top of her class, scored almost perfect marks right through school, then she failed all her exams, scored zero even. She’s claiming there was a mix up with the papers.
“Well, she came along to the Cairo auditions as a way of proving herself, and we’re thrilled that she’s been selected as a contestant in one of the first episodes.”
cnewbould@thenational.ae
