In Continuum.

Go ahead, go ahead and cringe as hard as you can. The image of this man in today's context is probably going to evoke a strange uncomfortable sensation that'd crawl up your spine and into your head. Every single time this particular character appears on the television screen with his bright yellow boots, his puffy hair, his overly long fingernail and giant mole, you feel a sudden urge to break something in the living room. It is not uncommon to feel such an unexplained rage, because such a physiological phenomenon can be experienced all around Singapore for the most part, especially amongst the generation of television viewers who has been through this part of our somewhat embarrassing media history. However, if you dig deep enough, you might be able to find some records of yet another even more embarrassing history in the media of Singapore that they went to great length to cover up. We all know about VR Man, and how James Lye ultimately became Singapore's very first superhero. Virtual Reality Man lasted for a few seasons before it called it quits. For as long as it managed to stay on television, though, he managed to save a kidnapped girl from a white van and, well, I don't remember much anymore.

But there is a difference between VR Man and the man pictured above. VR Man was a television show that was so bad, that Mediacorp decided to erase all traces of it from the face of this planet. You cannot find any pictures or information related to this particular television show, because it tanked so hard that it sank into the bottom of the Mediacorp archives and disappeared. However, it was one of those shows that it was so bad - it was good. The man pictured above, however, has been trying desperately for the past decade to be funny. You know, the kind of television show that never seems to go ahead no matter how poor the ratings may be. There is still an audience for that man and his show, and seasons after seasons have been churned out on television for that small crowd alone. There is even a musical based on the television show, and I really do wonder what happened to that whole shebang, despite all the promotions around the country. Phua Chu Kang, despite its prominence in the television industry, is really the source of much annoyance and discomfort amongst many viewers. His presence makes people cringe, and it isn't just because of the way he speaks. It is everything that he represents - the worst of local television making.

If you are a foreigner and you decide to catch channel 8 material, you are going to find that they are rather similar to one another and, honestly speaking, predictable and trashy. They are not very well produced television shows, but they are getting the viewership because there aren't a lot of other options for viewers without cable. But if you have bad impressions of channel 8, you really only need to switch to channel 5 to know how bad their television shows are. I haven't watched Fighting Spiders before, but I have heard good to decent reviews about that show. When you throw nostalgia and child actors into the same show, not much can go wrong for the most part to appeal to the local audience. However, on the other side of the coin, you have the so-called "blockbuster drama" that is the Red Thread, with every single preview of the episodes looking like a carbon copy of the previous one. You can guess the story line of the show without actually watching it, and it's not like even the most avid fans of local televisions are enjoying that show either. I can bet that if you ask fifty people on the streets today, less than one quarter of it are going to be fans of the show. No, make it less than ten, because that is how bad the show is.

But to me, Phua Chu Kang is the show that truly annoys me to no end. Actually, it isn't so much about the show itself, but the character of the show who has lived on past the season finale, and has been having a constant presence in the media despite everything else. When you have a terrible television show, you just kind of wait for it to implode upon itself and it will fizzle out sooner or later, right. Phua Chu Kang isn't a good show at all - it is a bad show. It is filled with the kind of comedy that'd only appeal to five year olds, the kind of lame attempts at telling a joke that completely falls flat altogether. It is possible to sit through an entire episode without laughing a single time, and that is because of how stale the entire production can feel. The worst part about it all is how the show recycles all their jokes, over and over again. As much as "dun puay puay" is a sort of catch phrase, saying it ten thousand times in a season is enough for it to lose its effect. It's like Michael Scott from The Office, and the character's famous line "that's what she said". He says it a lot, but he doesn't say it often at all. You sometimes go an entire episode without it, and it's not like you can hear it very often in season five at all. All I am saying is that even a comedy show needs character development. You don't revolve around for eight seasons and expect the characters to remain the same throughout. Well, that is exactly the case for this show.

Canned laughter, people coming in and out of rooms, and actors who can't seem to catch the comedy timing quite right. Those are just some of the issues the show has, but it's not like the wider audience in Singapore bothers to much about these details anyway. They want a show to hang their head on when they get home, the kind of show that doesn't require you to use a lot of brain power. This is the kind of shows zombies watch to entertain themselves, but it's not something a lot of people realizes anyway. It is amazing how the media deems this character to be a character everybody loves, and yet you really only show a clip of the show for the younger generation, such as myself, to show my sense of resentment. The worst part is that he never seems to be going away, because he is literally everywhere. Every time the government decides to promote some kind of campaign, you'd probably see his face on the television screen, and probably singing something that is supposed to be catchy, yet stupid. If you have a chance to take the Circle Line, you are probably going to see his face plastered everywhere on the train and on the television screens.

That is the worst part of my day perhaps, seeing that man singing something about moving into the train and allowing people in the train to get off first. Then there's this bit about giving up the reserved seats to the aged, the handicapped and the needy, or something like that. His voice annoys me, and don't even get me started on the accent. It just makes me wonder how the authorities still use this character as a way to formulate a campaign in the country, when the people aren't exactly excited about the character anymore. His importance, if he had any importance at all, remains very much in the 90s, and it is not the kind of humor that is relevant in today's context at all. His jokes were the kind of jokes that primary school children said to each other during recess, and I am not sure how that translated to "he will appeal to the masses!" to the authorities. It doesn't make any sense, because you really only need to observe the reactions of people my age to know that he isn't, in any way, demanded by the public anymore. You can argue that other than him, we do not have any other so-called "funny people" anymore. That is sad, though, because we are always going to be stuck with this decade-old media personality who, in fact, isn't all that funny at all.

I don't know if you remember, but there was a season of the Amazing Race when the teams had to come down to Singapore. One of the stops was in a HDB estate in Choa Chu Kang or something like that, and the teams had to find their way to the particular unit based on some clues, or something like that. I remember the television channels heavily publicizing the fact that Singapore was being featured on the show, and that everybody should catch the familiar landmarks on American TV. So me, being a sucker of hype, watched that particular episode, and almost fell out of my chair when the resident of that particular HDB unit answered the door - it was Phua Chu Kang. Of all the people living in a HDB unit in Singapore, it had to be Phu Chu Kang answering the door, what a coincidence. But in all seriousness, you should have seen the faces of those contestants during the episode when they came through the front door. The confusion on their faces was priceless, and the way that I decided to turn off the television was also priceless. I remember moaning really loudly at the fact that the contestants had to try to decipher his thick Singaporean accent, or rather an amped up and exaggerated version of that. It was embarrassing, and worse because it was broadcasted to the entire world to see.

It's just strange to see, at times, the way the media here refuses to move on, and to improve. I suppose when you are the media in a monopolistic society, the lack of competition tends to make you feel as if you have absolute power in everything. When you do not have any competitions, you pretty much do whatever you want with the media, and you never actually improve at all. If you take a show from ten years ago and compare it to the shows we have today, you are probably going to find that they are one and the same. There is hardly any evolution in the way the shows are structured in Singapore, and one reason is because the powers at be believes that what was relevant ten years ago is still very much relevant today. That is not to say that such a thing is impossible, though. But in the case of Phua Chu Kang, people are obviously sick and tired of this public personality. It's not really because Singapore does not have talents to create genuinely good story lines, or funny characters that do not rely on slapstick jokes to push up the ratings. I am sure the actor playing this character is pretty damn sick of it as well. But what say does he have, or we have? He is paid the money, and we are fed the shows. That is the way it works in this country, and also the reason why the media is always in a constant state of retardation.