My Color-ed TeeVee.

Last week on a horribly lazy, hot and sunny afternoon, we gathered at the mess waiting for the impending ORD day to come. It was boring so we started entertaining ourselves with the interesting afternoon programming on television.

And Triple Nine was having its re-runs!

(I realised that of late, I have been watching too-many-a-re-runs. Nevertheless.)

Before Vincent Ng with his bare torso playing basketball and his agonizingly painful English, Julian Hee and the local gay community and Aaron Aziz and his well, racial balance to local English serials, there was Wong Li-lin and Gang.
But the season we were watching was post-Wonglilin (her character got bumped off and subsequently, ratings sored.) So this season had James 'pre-Citibanker' Lye, Robin Leong and his bloody American drawl, Annabelle Francis before she married Haikel (I know. But let's move on.) and the very irritating Cheong Chia Suan - where the hell is she now, anyway?

Triple Nine was one of my favourite early'90s local English serials. Not just the bad hair, the high tight jeans and red lipsticks. But because it was so darn cheesy. Masters of the Seas, our version of Days of Our Lives, came close to second. But who can forget our foray into sci-fi television, VR-MAN?

Anyway back to 999. Someone find their scriptwriters and burn them on a stake. Take the below scenes, for example.

(Cheong Chia Suan, with her irritating, I-am-PMSing gaze, was conversing with James Lye, who was looking at Lilin's bumped-off news article and nursing post-Lilin blues.)
CheongChiaSuan: The IPPT thing... (we didnt watch the entire episode, so assume they had IPPT in the morning or something. And James Lye probably like, failed chin-up. Hey it happens.)
JamesLye: ...
CheongChiaSuan: ..do it not for yourself. Do it for her.

For those who thought that the allure of getting an IPPT Gold was 200bucks, you should be ashamed of yourself. Do it for a dead woman, for heaven's sake! And talk about dramatization. Only on local English television can something like I'bloody'PPT be morphed into a tear jerker.

Later, CheongChiaSuan and AnnabelleFrancis went on an investigation for some overacheiving schoolgirl murder case. There was this ala CSI scene where they found out that the girl could have been raped. So they were interviewing the parents and everything. The mother was probably fashioned after Margaret Chan on her 'ccccrrush you like a ccockroach' outing on Masters of the Seas. No one can replace Margaret Chan please! And after some really lame conversation between the four of them about that stupid girl, CheongChiaSuan decided to drop the bombshell.


CheongChiaSuan: We know..that this is a difficult time for you...
Mother: ...
CheongChiaSuan: ...and we understand this is not easy..
Mother/Father/Annabelle: ...
CheongChiaSuan: But we found semen in your daughter.

They should have zoomed in to the mother's face and complete it with striking violin sounds. I mean, 'we found semen' doesn't even vaguely spell 'suspense'.

Beat that, Heartlanders.