The work day all but shut down at 5pm on Wednesday. Urgent emails were ignored, orders unsent, and office workers even took a break from Facebooking to tune in to the big moment.
For 30 minutes Thailand stopped what it was doing to tune in live as Phakin “Tono” Kumvilaisak opened up to the media about his failed relationship with Pattaratida “Tangmo” Patcharaveerapong, two days after she was hospitalized for overdosing on sleeping pills.
Within hours, the Tono/Tangmo drama suddenly became, by far, the year’s biggest phenomenon in the entertainment industry, bulldozing over all the other mini-scandals unfolding in the preceding week.
Attempted suicide is a sensitive topic, but any argument this was a private matter was a moot point after an associate at Tangmo’s side uploaded the entire hospital episode to Instagram and Tono held a stage-crafted news conference held at the headquarters of his employer, media conglomerate GMM Grammy.
Here’s what it looked like in images collected by television program NineEntertain:
