The Real Story behind Bigg Boss 4

The house is an imposing 12,000 sq. ft. structure, in which 14 "housemates" compete to avoid being evicted. It took Shyam Bhatia, a Mumbai-based architect, close to eight months to build this temporary residence at a cost of Rs 2 crore.

The nerve centre of the set is the Master Control Room, which has a panel of over 20 monitors that displays what every camera in the house captures.

For close to three months, some 200 crew members have been working on three shifts of eight hours daily.

At any given point in time, a story editor follows two stories. There could be more than two conversations happening but it is the decision of the story editors to follow what he or she thinks viewers will find captivating.

From eight a.m. till midnight, the daily producer has the task of going through 50 different stories, selecting the best ones, and crunching them into a 50-minute episode.

Other than the 40 cameras that track housemates within the house there is a "camera gully," a dark hallway that encircles the house and all its rooms.

Adjacent to the house is a 1,400 sq. ft. chalet that is home to Bollywood star Salman Khan, host of the show; Khan stays there every weekend when he visits to shoot. The entire set, which also includes the area where a live audience sits, and technical control rooms, is situated in an industrial shed spread over an area of two acres.

The contract for bringing in an audience is outsourced to a Mumbai-based audience agency.

The cost of producing Bigg Boss 4 - inclusive of payments to host Salman Khan, who has been contracted for 28 of the 96 episodes - works out to roughly Rs 150 crore.