The last few weeks we have been busy, watching two soaps. The first was "To grow with love", about a fat Hong Kong woman trying to snag a husband. Our heroine was called Fat Tina (the Chinese have an interesting quirk in that if someone is fat, they are referred to as Fat
The other soap was Dicey Business, a romp set in and around a Casino in the Philippines*. This 35 episode epic featured TVB favourites Bobby Au Yeung and Jessica Hsuan, both of whom put in very good performances. Indeed, they were so good that whenever they weren't on screen I kind of lost interest. All the same this story is so packed with treachery, violence, familial strife, addiction, and steamboat meals, that I can highly recommended it.
Both soaps are available in that Chinese video shop by the Oaks Satay Noodle House.
* Usually, HK soaps involve a digression where characters end up in another country.** Normally it's Taiwan, which provides a convenient hideout for those insalubrious characters who have committed a crime and need to lie lowt. However both soaps I've reviewed in this post have relocated their sojourning from Taiwan to the Philippines, which suggests that either TVB's script writers have become bored with Taiwan, or the Philippines Tourist Board is paying them more money.
** The most flagrant example of this was an ATV soap we watched where a couple of characters decide, of a whim, to go to Australia for a bit. This led to most of an episode being spent by these characters hanging around on an outback ranch getting massages and stuff. Needless to say this was completely tangential to the plot. I was half-expecting directions of how to get there and how much flights would cost. Whatever Australia's Tourist Board spent on that little soap-o-mercial, it was well worth it.
Posted by stuart at April 25, 2007 4:48 PM