A lot has been said about Mediacorp‘s Celebrate TV50 Countdown show, most of which has been negative and touching on how the programme was Chinese and Mandarin-dominated.
The gist of the feedback is represented by Wild Rice founder Ivan Heng‘s post on Facebook, which at last count has obtained over 3,000 shares.
On Jan. 5, Mediacorp responded to the complaints.
Said Mediacorp TV’s senior vice president of English entertainment productions Remesh Kumar, “(Mediacorp) is mindful of sensitivities when producing a show for a broad audience.”
He then went on to display how the programme was multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, including naming the artist lineup (Asnida Daud, Brian Richmond, Dick Lee, Taufik Batisah and Sylvia Ratonel amongst them) and pointing out that the show was five hours long instead of the usual 1.5 hour so as to include a larger, more international variety.
Mr. Kumar also explained that the reason why many Channel 8 artists had been featured in the lineup was because more airtime was given to Mediacorp’s Mandarin productions hence the large pool of Mandarin-speaking artists, who had also been the one that chose to speak Mandarin on the show.
The statement was not all defensive, though. Mediacorp said it understood that more could have been done to engage Channel 5 audiences and said discussion over several initiatives — like a better balance of language content and the use of subtitling — is in place.
Mr. Kumar did mention however, that subtitling means that much of the show would have to be scripted, losing spontaneity.
Photo: Wang Lee Hom, one of the international artistes that performed at the Celebrate TV50 Countdown; TODAY
