TVB 43rd Anniversary Gala (萬千星輝賀台慶2010)

TVB’s annual anniversary “birthday party” occurred today (yesterday in HK) – it was a bit lackluster compared to years past (well, it’s actually been lackluster for the past decade and can’t compare at all to the ones from the 80s and 90s)….

Anyway, here are some of the highlights from this year’s anniversary gala that I felt were worth mentioning (good or bad):

.> It was obvious that Moses and Wayne were the biggest ‘stars’ of the anniversary gala show, as they were probably the biggest names there in the ‘fa dans & siu sangs’ category. Many of the other ‘big names’ and TVB’s current ‘favorites’ (i.e.: Charmaine, Sheren, Raymond, Steven, Myolie, Bosco, etc.) were all no shows . There was also barely any representation from anniversary series GMG (well, the 3 main leads didn’t show up at least) – it was pretty much the NR / CBML anniversary gala if you ask me (the cast from both series were the focus and pretty much overshadowed everyone else).
*** SIDENOTE: Found out some more information about the GMG thing, but gonna save it for my next post, which will be another one in my “TVB Rant” series….

.> TVB pretty much recycled some of the same ideas from last year’s anniversary gala this time around – namely having artists who are not known for singing partner up and perform songs, having the veteran green-leaf artists (the 50+ year old crowd) do a song and dance number, doing the whole ‘wet dance’ thing, etc….the only difference is that TVB shuffled things around in terms of order and also they had different artists perform in those segments from the ones who did so last year.

.> I must say that the anniversary skit that they did this time around was one of the funnier ones from this decade (though not as funny compared to the ones from the ‘old days’) – it was pretty clever how Eric Tsang did a parody of Virginia Lok and TVB’s infamous internal politics (I was cracking up because a lot of it was so true and he would irreverently poke fun at it). Oh, and for once, they didn’t make a huge mess and ‘torture’ artists with whipped cream, water, etc. (though I did feel sorry for Moses, who was pretty much the only one who ‘fell victim’ to Eric’s shenanigans….).

.> The ‘3 Gods Award Ceremony’ was interesting – I was actually expecting it to be funny, but it wasn’t really. The only thing I liked about that segment was the first part when they showed pictures of a few artists when they were young – the Kiki ones were nice and the Evergreen part was hilarious (the Evergreen / Raymond Lam pictures were quite clever –hey, who would’ve thought that Evergreen as a teenager would resemble Raymond Lam?

.> The last segment where TVB artists whom we are not used to seeing them sing were paired up with the Voice contestants for a ‘sing-off’….the 4 artists who sang were King Kong, Evergreen, Kiki, and Eric Tsang. All 4 of them did pretty good jobs, but I was most impressed with Kiki and Eric’s performances: Kiki sang like a pro – the way she carried her pitch and tone…wow, she sounded like a real singer! And Eric – well, I’ve always known that he’s a good singer because I’ve heard him several times, but he definitely did an awesome job (hey, in my opinion, he sang way better than his partner Mag Lam!!!) Evergreen was ok, but I think he could have done better – probably because his Mandarin pronunciation wasn’t that great, so it distracted me a bit from actually concentrating on his singing. As for King Kong, well, he did good, but I’m actually not surprised because I thought I had heard of him before back when I was following Taiwan entertainment in the late 90s / early 00s and if my memory serves me correctly, I think that he was a professional singer? I could be wrong, but his name just sounds familiar.

Overall, the show was a disappointment – though of course, not too surprising given TVB’s lack of star power in the past few years. My assessment: if you didn’t get to watch it, don’t worry – you didn’t miss anything!