Those who’ve been watching HKTV series and ‘following’
news about them will probably recognize the logo in the above picture….yep,
that’s HKTV’s logo alright! But instead
of the Chinese characters for “HKTV” (香港電視), the characters in the
conversation bubble logo read 王維基百科 (“Wong
Wai Kay-Pedia” which is obviously a play on Wikipedia).
Not sure how many people knew this, but yes, in the short
time that HKTV has been in existence, there is already a book written about the
station and its founder Ricky Wong. The
book actually came out last year (published in July 2014, right in time for the
annual HK Book Fair). I already knew of the book's existence back then because I saw
the HKTV promos for it in the news, but unfortunately I was never able to
find it on the usual websites where I normally buy all my Chinese books. Well, on my recent trip to HK, I found the
book in one of the bookstores (as I knew I would) so I of course bought it and
am finally starting to read it right now.
Just as a means of summary – the book is a collaborative
effort by 12 of HKTV’s scriptwriters and recounts their experiences working for
HKTV and Ricky Wong for the 2 year time span from when HKTV officially “started”
in 2012 up to the book’s publication in 2014.
There are 14 chapters to the book, with each chapter further divided up
into individually titled sections (each section is only 2 to 3 pages with quite
a bit of spacing between each sentence, so pretty easy read from a format point
of view). Also, staying true to HKTV’s
insistence on ‘Hong Kong flavor’, the book is actually ‘written’ in Cantonese (meaning
that non-Hong Kongers who are used to reading traditional written Chinese might
struggle a little bit with some of the odd-looking characters that are unique
to Cantonese) – but shouldn’t be too much of a problem, since majority of the characters are similar enough to figure out the meaning even without knowing the Cantonese characters.
In terms of content….just glancing through the titles of
each chapter and sub-section already piqued my interest in some of the content
covered in the book – there’s some ‘history’ in there (i.e. how CTI became
HKTV), tidbits about the production process and various HKTV series, funny
moments / stories / anecdotes, etc….there’s even coverage of the licensing
decision (both the free-to-air license decision and the subsequent issue with
the mobile license) as well as the HKTV protest that occurred after the license
rejection (we get to hear from inside HKTV how everyone felt when the decision came down). It’s almost like a ‘recap’ of
what HKTV and its staff has gone through these past couple years. There’s also a ‘Forward’ written by Ricky Wong
(his is separated into 2 parts – before he read the book and after he read it)
as well as writer / columnist / radio broadcaster Chip Tsao (陶傑).
I’m definitely looking forward to reading the book! Of course, I’ll share my thoughts on the book
once I’m done with it so those who are interested please keep an eye out for
subsequent blog posts.
More to come, so stay tuned! :-)