British TV show visually alters scenes that were shot in Singapore because they weren’t Singapore enough

Cold Feet is this British dramedy revolving around the lives of three couples from Manchester, exploring the different stages of their romantic relationships. Despite the show not achieving a familiar name at all to the general Singapore public (unlike the original The Office, Doctor Who or Mr. Bean), Cold Feet’s one of the must successful British series — there’s been six seasons so far since it’s first episode in 1998. 

Anyway, the show’s most recent season had one of their main characters played by James Nesbitt (The Hobbit trilogy, Match Point) move to Singapore. To ensure authenticity, the cast and crew even filmed their scenes in Singapore. It even had cameos by local stars such as Tan Kheng Hua.

There was just one problem though — the Singapore scenes didn’t look… Singapore enough. Whatever that means.

According to RadioTimes, the production crew found that the scenes they shot in Singapore looked like “Englishtown”, because of the English signs and caucasian tourists. In fact, it fooled the production team enough to initially believe that the scenes were shot in Manchester.

To ‘fix’ it, post-production house Molinare had to visually alter elements in the scenes such as changing the English signs to Chinese (despite none of it existing IRL because we’re an English-speaking country), removing the British tourists and adding specific landmarks into the background. 

Funnily enough, Molinare exec Daniel Mark Millar even informed the crowd at London’s Visual Effect Festival recently that there’s an actual ‘Englishtown’ in Singapore. 

“You know, we have a Chinatown in London, they have an Englishtown in Singapore,” Millar said, as quoted by RadioTimes.

PSA: No, you twit, Singapore does NOT have a place called Englishtown. Also, we’re pretty sure that most British audiences can distinguish what looks like Singapore — and it’s pretty annoying to know that most outsiders still equate Singapore with Chinese elements. Damn toffs. 



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