In 1980, the government restructured Radio and Television Singapore (RTS) to become the statutory board Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). This was in a bid “to free the Department of Broadcasting, Ministry of Culture, from administrative and financial constraints so that the organisation can expand and develop into a lively radio and television station”.1

From the very beginning, local television was tasked with the triple mission of informing, educating, and entertaining. In the RTS era, drama programmes primarily functioned as a means of social education through dramatic storytelling, and their entertainment value was relatively low. Following the establishment of SBC, local Chinese television drama began to shift its emphasis towards entertainment.

Chinese Drama Division

To increase viewership and attract advertisers, SBC started recruiting television talents, mainly from Hong Kong,2 to collaborate with local teams to increase the quantity and quality of its programmes. In 1982, SBC officially established the Chinese Drama Division, hiring scriptwriters and full-time actors. That same year, the one-episode drama Seletar Robbery paved the way for more local productions. The following year, in 1983, SBC released a number of television series,3 including the six-episode The Army Series, a military-themed drama filmed with the support of the Singapore Armed Forces.

The Army Series, booklet, 1983. Courtesy of Su Zhangkai.

In 1984, the release of The Awakening, a four-part series consisting of 53 episodes, propelled locally-produced television series to new heights. It saw the involvement of Hong Kong television veterans, with Lai Shui-ching as executive producer and Leung Lap-yan (1948–2020) and Jiang Long as writers. The epic drama series spanned the period from British colonisation and the Japanese occupation to post-war reconstruction, independence, and Singapore’s economic take-off, highlighting the experiences of the Chinese who sailed south to settle in Singapore. That year, SBC also released its first locally-produced martial arts drama The Pursuit.

The Awakening, booklet, 1984. Courtesy of Su Zhangkai.
The Pursuit, DVD, 1984. Courtesy of Su Zhangkai.

From 1985 onwards, SBC produced multiple drama series with more than 20 episodes every year, marking a shift towards an era of mass production in local television. In 1986, the 510-episode long-form drama Neighbours was released, airing for two years. Its theme song “Voices from the Heart” is still widely performed and enjoyed by Singaporeans. The Coffeeshop, released in the same year, later became the first local drama series to hit one million viewers.4

The dubbing unit

In 1979, RTS set up a dubbing unit in response to the Speak Mandarin Campaign. Its initial function was to translate Hong Kong television dramas into Mandarin. After the establishment of SBC the following year, the dubbing unit proved invaluable as many of the recruited actors had a less than desirable proficiency in Mandarin. Seletar Robbery was the first local drama to be dubbed. As the volume of production increased, the dubbing of local programmes became the focus of the unit’s work. It was not until the late 1990s that local television series featured the original voices of the cast. 5

Seeing as Chinese television dramas were so well-received locally, SBC decided to dub some of its more popular Chinese series into English to widen their reach. The first Chinese serial dubbed in English was Samsui Women, followed by The Army Series, The Coffeeshop, On the Fringe, Against the Wind, Crime and Passion, and others. This not only allowed the Chinese who did not understand Mandarin, but also fellow non-Chinese Singaporeans, to enjoy locally-produced television drama series.6

In the 1990s, Singapore television series were not just popular locally, but seen as a form of soft power. Besides being exported overseas to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, the United States, and Canada, among others, these series also gained a huge following in China.7

Variety shows

Apart from dramas, variety shows were another mainstay in Chinese programming. Live from Studio One series, which began with Live from Studio One Friday8 in May 1981, was considered the vanguard of variety shows in the 1980s. Due to positive viewer response, Live from Studio One Monday and Live from Studio One Wednesday were added. At the end of 1983, the show aired every day of the week from Monday to Friday, and was collectively renamed Live from Studio One at 8:30 p.m.. In 1987, it merged with Family Hour in the evening slot and was renamed Studio One Presents.9 The series did not end until 1991, when Variety Tonight10 took over.

Variety shows in this period also included games, trivia, and skits, in addition to song and dance. Wang Sha (1925–1998) and Ye Feng (1932–1995), who were popular in the 1970s for their dialect comedies, continued to bring laughter to Singaporeans through their participation in these Chinese variety shows in Mandarin in the 1980s. At the same time, a new generation of comedy stars such as Hua Liang (1953–1995) and Zhao Jin rose to prominence, alongside emerging talents like Jack Neo and Moses Lim. These performers aimed to educate their audience while entertaining them through skits and comedy.

The production of Chinese television programmes in the SBC era not only increased in quantity, but improved in quality as well. With limited television channels in the 1980s, locally-produced Chinese programmes that aired during primetime slots mostly made the top ten in ratings, with viewership easily starting from 500,000 to 600,000 and peaking at over a million. These Chinese-language programmes were the main driver of SBC’s viewership ratings and, more importantly, allowed viewers to engage with local stories and topics on the small screen. These stories reflected the shared values of citizens in a country that had diverse ethnicities, languages, religions, and cultures.