The Singlish that we take for granted today was once frowned upon in our broadcasting media. When only Queen’s English was good enough for our English broadcasting platforms and every broadcaster was trained to approximate that in all their deliveries, local patois-inflected English took on a shade of forbidden pleasure… until Dick Lee boldly brought it out into the open on a variety special titled “We’re Ten!”, a show held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of SBC!
At that time, Dick had already featured this brand of Singlish on his earlier album “Life in The Lion City” which was well received. Beauty World, the Singlish musical which he co-wrote with Michael Chiang was already a big hit with a new generation of audience who were lapping up everything Singlish in a belated embrace of our own unique identity.
I wanted to present something different in the celebration show to mark a milestone for the station. It was also my last television production before I left the station to set up M&M, so I was ready to take the risk and face the consequences. To get approval from the top, I downplayed this Singlish lesson idea and proposed it as a short comedic introduction to the second song in Dick Lee’s performance segment that evening.
The audience loved the segment and it became one of the most talked-about items of the show. While no broadcaster rushed to embrace Singlish as a new medium the very next day, it did open new and different options of presentations of English variety shows for the station.
Although this may be seen as an accomplishment of sorts, I think my bigger satisfaction at that period was to convince a Baba to sing a Mandarin song on national TV. Dick would go on to record an entire Cantonese album and a few mandarin songs later in his career. However, at that time, Mandarin was a foreign language to him. Thankfully, fashion designer Yang Derong helped to translate the English lyrics into Chinese and I was at the studio to guide his mandarin diction during the recording of the song. Talk about the blind leading the blind!! So, in its full amateurish glory, here is Dick’s debut Mandarin song performance in one of my Chinese variety shows recorded in 1989.
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19 сен 2024
