MediaCorp’s Statement on Celebrate TV50 Countdown show

In the 5 January statement, a contrite Remesh Kumar, Senior Vice President of English Entertainment Productions, acknowledged:

We could have done more to engage Channel 5 audiences, and will continue striving to get the right balance of language content for such future shows … MediaCorp will do its best to serve TV audiences better.

The acknowledgement and apology, though surprising coming from a Government-Linked Company, is welcome. It contrasts markedly with MediaCorp’s statement on its Channel 5 Facebook wall on 2 January which read:

… the show was conceived as a multi-lingual, multi-cultural show to reflect Singapore’s multi-cultural heritage (and) a fair mix of English and Mandarin content was featured in the dual channel telecast—with seamless programme transitions in both languages—to keep different audiences captivated.

To counter Heng’s complaint that the show was quite “cheena”, Kumar’s statement, like the original Facebook posting, mentions several Tamil, Malay and English-speaking celebrities who were among 180 local artists who participated in it.

What is odd about the press release, however, was the rationale provided for the disproportionate air time given to Mandarin-speaking artists. Kumar explains it is due to MediaCorp having:

 … a 30-year history of producing Mandarin dramas, longer than for any other language.

I want to focus on the veracity of the statement first before proceeding on to the logic behind the justification.

Several people I have spoken to, who are 60 years of age or older, dispute the claim that Mandarin drama has a longer history than those of the other languages.  Local Tamil dramas started almost as soon as Radio Television Singapore was formed in 1963 and Malay dramas started soon after.

MediaCorp’s own interactive timeline of its history, in the section titled “Productions”, states:

On 24 July 1982, “Seletar Robbery”, the first locally produced Chinese language television drama, was aired.

Curiously, the interactive timeline only starts detailing the history of productions from the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation era, which starts in 1980. The very first entry in this section is Seletar Robbery which gives the false impression that Malay and Tamil drama production only started after this. The interactive timeline is unworthy of an organisation claiming it is proud of its history. It needs fixing if MediaCorp is to allay assertions of lazy research, or worse, of whitewashing the achievements of Tamil and Malay programs from its history.

In the meanwhile, one has to look elsewhere to piece together MediaCorp’s history.

The Tribute.sg website, which honors local artists, profiles Bani Buang, who headed the RTS Malay Drama Unit and is cited as being responsible for the “1970s Malay television series Sandiwara”.  The website also lists artist N. Palanivelu who is shown acting in a Tamil drama (which, interestingly, featured Indian actors playing Chinese characters). The following photo captioned, “N Palanivelu in a TV drama. C. 1970s)”, is found there:

Perhaps MediaCorp’s Kumar erred in penning his statement. Certainly, it would be unbecoming of someone in charge of a show commemorating 50 years of broadcasting to not have researched its history.

His response begs the question, why is drama production arbitrarily used as the basis for determining how much air time Mandarin would get on the Countdown show when there are many other types of entertainment shows that have also been produced in the various languages and have had equally long histories? And, why is the history of drama production relevant to the matter? The real issue is why a show which contained so much Mandarin was shown on Channel 5.

Despite much discussion online and MediaCorp having issued two statements to address the controversy, the Media Development Authority, which regulates broadcasting, has yet to chime in on this issue.

I wrote previously about the unequal funding amounts given by MDA and MediaCorp for the various ethnic-based productions with Tamil and Malay drama productions receiving as much as 70 percent less funding per hour than Mandarin productions. Hopefully, the rationale used to explain this phenomena makes more sense than MediaCorp’s justification for the disproportionate use of Mandarin in its Celebrate TV50 Countdown show.

This article was first published in http://maskedcrusader.blogspot.sg.