MUMBAI: Surya TV, part of the Sun Network, will be the official TV channel for the mega event called Ammayodoppam Oru Thara Sandhya, organised by the Malayalam Cine Artists Association (AMMA) in Kerala.

The show, part of a fund-raising exercise, is scheduled to be held on 4 April 2003 and is being exclusively marketed by New Age Entertainment. It will be held in a football stadium in Calicut with a seating capacity of more than 50,000 people.

Surya TV, the Malayalam channel, will air the five hour non-stop extravaganza on 12 and 13 April 2003. The channel is confident that the event will boost its TRP ratings. For this purpose, the channel has also scheduled 10 half hour curtain raisers that will start airing from 1 April 2003, leading to the show. Each curtain raiser will have interviews with superstars on their family life and a sneak preview of the show, adds a press release.

According to the release, the entire Malayalam film industry has signed an agreement and confirmed their participation in this event. The agreement has been signed by the AMMA president Innocent and AMMA secretary superstar Mammooty, who has been bestowed with the Padmashree award.

The release further states that the agreement debars the stars from performing or appearing in any other show before this mega event. Bollywood superstars will also be present to extend support.

The event will see the coming together of mega stars like Mamooty, Mohan Lal, Suresh Gopi, Dileep, Murali, Jayaram, Innocent, Nedumudi Venu, TP Madhavan and Jagathy Sreekumar to name a few and popular singers like K J Yesudas, Jayachandran, M G Srikumar, Biju Narayanan, Vidhu Pratap, S Janaki, Chitra, P Susheela and Sujatha.

A similar exercise had been undertaken by the Tamil Cine Artist Association wherein the events were held in Singapore and Malaysia. All the Tamil film stars , right from Rajnikanth, Kamalhasan and Vijaykant had participated. This created a record in the TRP charts for Sun TV.