new serial at last

He is the highest paid actor on television, yet jobless by choice. Rajiv Khandelwal who has been on the look-out for a challenging serial after his exit from Kahiin To Hoga, has finally found a new television project to suit his taste.

The extraordinarily prolific 'house of thrillers', Fireworks, has roped in Khandelwal to play the lead in a new thriller. "It took us some time to convince Rajiv to do the project," says B.P.Singh Fireworks' head honcho. "He had once done a cameo for us on CID Special Bureau. This cameo made a tremendous impact. Now we've convinced him to do a one-hour weekly thriller with a supernatural touch."

B.P.Singh's CID has lasted for eight years. It returns to Sony TV in March again. "Viewers will be surprised to see Rakesh Bedi in the forensic lab, this time," says Singh. "We've continued CID for very long, but we've constantly re-invented ourselves. Last year we did a whole episode of CID in one shot. The new edition of the Guinness Book Of Records mentions this episode which lasted 111 minutes. This couldn't have been done on film because the length of a film reel is ten minutes only. We telecast that episode without a break in the feature-film slot and we were surprised to see that TV viewers had the patience to watch CID uninterrupted for two hours."

"Now our company plans to detour from the thriller genre," reveals Singh. "We're going to produce soaps too, although thrillers will remain our USP. Right now we're working on four soaps. We know Ekta Kapoor is the queen of soaps. But we'll try to do something that'll surprise soap viewers."