A Broadcast Guru and a Storyteller

Condolence letters from MM Lee Kuan Yew and SM Goh Chok Tong

(With thanks to The Straits Times)
Sep 6, 2010
IN MEMORIAM: S. CHANDRAMOHAN
A broadcast guru and a storyteller
By Chan Heng Wing

IT WAS the afternoon of Aug 9, 1965. The man sitting under the glare of Klieg lights in a small TV studio, surrounded by Singaporean and foreign reporters, had just choked on his words as he tried to keep back his tears.

In the end, he could not and asked if the recording could stop for a moment, while he collected himself. This was then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's historic press conference after the separation of Singapore from Malaysia was announced.

The man sitting behind the TV control panel directing the press conference was S. Chandramohan, one of the first television producers employed by the Department of Broadcasting in 1963, when television arrived in Singapore. Behind him stood the two persons in charge of the Central Productions Unit: P. S. Raman and Wong-Lee Siok Tin.

A decision had to be made whether to leave the image of the Prime Minister breaking down when the interview was telecast that evening or to edit it out. Mr Lee had left the studio saying that he would leave the decision to the professionals. The professionals took the decision - and the rest is history.

Minister Mentor Lee, in his condolence letter to Chandramohan's wife last week, said that Chandra made the right decision. He added that while the family had lost a husband and a father, he had lost 'an expert aide on how to present my views on radio and TV'.

It was a fine judgment call that day in 1965. The image that Singaporeans had of their Prime Minister was of someone tough and hard-headed. For Chandra to have championed the idea of retaining the image of Mr Lee in tears was a political judgment that has had a lasting impact on our country's collective memory.

For Singaporeans to be able to witness the angst of a man who had fought all his life for an idea and to see that idea shattered, helps put into context everything that has happened since Separation. Broadcasting that sequence uncut was a good call that has resounded through history.

Chandra spent more than 40 years in broadcasting, shaping and changing much of what we know as news and current affairs. The Department of Broadcasting he joined in 1963 had missions different from today's fast-paced world of digital information. Broadcasting was not then just a commercial enterprise dedicated to delivering eyeballs.

Radio and television had to help the Government convey strength and solidarity, because there were those around us who were convinced we would not survive. They had to convey hope, because there were those among us who despaired of our future on our own. And they had to convey daring, for only a courageous citizenry would rally around the new state.

Chandra was at the heart of all this, first as the executive producer in the Central Productions Unit, then as its controller and later as director of news and current affairs.

The Central Productions Unit was set up in Radio Singapore to help the Government put across its message. One of the first was Mr Lee's series of Battle For Merger radio talks, when he detailed the PAP's long tussle with the Communist Party of Malaya. Then, before there was television, radio covered his journeys to Afro-Asian countries explaining the reason for Malaysia's formation, and his marathon tour of all the constituencies in Singapore to rally the ground behind merger with Malaya. And such being the surprising twists of history, Mr Lee later had to use radio and television to explain how we were going to survive as an independent country, outside Malaysia.

In the early years when the messages were stark, Chandra looked for new ideas to convey the story of Singapore. While early current affairs broadcasts of the 1960s and 1970s were dominated by politically messaged programmes like What Others Say (a compendium of news commentaries to counter the radical messages emanating from some Malay-language papers in Malaysia) and It's Happening In Singapore (a pictorial news digest illustrating the messages of political leaders), Chandra began to champion the production of documentary films and an arts programme called Arts Review.

For the documentaries, he and his production team garnered many international awards, including Germany's Transtel Prize. This was the beginning of the many awards that Singapore television producers have won since.

He began a series of school debates, and later debates among the institutes of higher learning, on which we first saw such well known personalities today as Vivian Balakrishnan, Lee Tzu Yang, Tsao Yuan and Moses Lee, among others. The final of one school debate featured the motion: 'That Singapore is not a democracy because there is only one party in Parliament'. This was 40 years ago and considered very risque at that time.

At the height of the debate over whether Singapore should have a Mass Rapid Transit system, Chandra's unit staged a TV debate between the American MRT consultants, Wilbur Smith and Associates, and the MRT Review team led by Harvard University's Professor Kenneth Hansen, who advocated an all-bus system. It was the first time Singaporeans were exposed to the pros and cons of the MRT. The panel that questioned these consultants included a young civil servant who had been sent to work in SBS, the bus company - Mah Bow Tan.

The one quality that his producers appreciated in Chandra was his appetite for new ideas. For example, when the idea of doing portraits of various Singaporean artists was mooted, he warmly embraced it and portraits of Zubir Said, Chen Wen Hsi, Ng Eng Teng, Rathi Karthigesu and Sylvia McCulley were telecast to great acclaim.

Over the years, many generations of producers worked with and were inspired by Chandra. I joined Radio and TV Singapore (RTS) in 1971 and was privileged to work with colleagues such as Ananda Perera, Loong May Lin, Karim Namazie, Joan Chee, Arun Mahizhnan, Myrna Thomas, Choo Lian Liang, Yeong Yoon Ying, Zainab Rahim and Anwar Rashid, as well as seasoned broadcasters like Foong Choon Hon, Haji Rahman and T. S. Mohanam, to name just a few in the Central Productions Unit.

We were a small group who believed we were making a contribution to nation-building by informing, educating and entertaining Singaporeans. We would have heated debates with each other and particularly with Chandra over how to interpret issues. We would break out in peals of laughter but usually hushed up when the controller came along.

Chandra would walk briskly down the corridors of the then new TV Centre, snapping his fingers as he moved from editing rooms, where he oversaw the cutting process (for we used 16mm film then) and viewed the rushes that had been processed at Cathay Keris film studios, to the recording studios, where he listened to speeches and interviews.

I admired his ability to cut through long rambling interviews to spot the segment that contained the gem of a quote, his ability to shift a light by a few inches and thereby give the subject in a scene a completely different highlight, and the determination with which he pursued the right series of words for a commentary.

In the end, Chandra was always the intellectual and the artist whose interests were in film and theatre. The University of Singapore Society had an active drama circle then and he produced slightly wacky plays like Eh! and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for them. He was an early chairman of the Singapore Film Society when non-commercial films were hard to come by here. At RTS, he pushed us to use our spare hours to watch great documentaries and films so as to discover for ourselves the fine art of telling a story on film. For that was what he said he was - a storyteller.

Over the years, Chandra led the production teams that presented the Prime Minister's National Day Message, the National Day Rally Speech, as well as numerous forums and speeches by political leaders. He worked with all three prime ministers of Singapore and his counsel on television presentation was always listened to. Working with him, TV producers learnt how to work with people who were appearing on camera, getting them to relax and helping them to put their messages across.

TV has always tried to capture the moment. Political communication is the art of holding that moment and making it meaningful so the audience would be motivated to take a certain course of action. In our early years, the aim of the broadcaster and the print journalist was to help convey the complex challenges facing the young nation.

When Chandra assigned me in 1979 to produce documentaries on the Vietnamese boat people trying to land on our shores, his perceptiveness cut through the standard line emanating from the Western media at that time, which was that the countries that turned away the refugees were heartless.

Chandra understood that from Singapore's perspective, we had to realise that we would suffer the same fate as the Vietnamese boat people if we were not strong enough to resist the forces that could be marshalled against us, and that we had to fight for the principle that no state should interfere in the affairs of another.

As the 1970s progressed into the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium, new generations worked with Chandra. He was always alert to the challenge posed by the rapid changes in the media spawned by technology. But for him, the aim of broadcast journalism remained always the same: It was to put across a message in a compelling fashion so listeners or viewers understood the meaning and significance of events.

Chandramohan showed us precisely how in his 40 years of broadcasting.

The writer, a former broadcast journalist and diplomat, is currently managing director (international relations) at Temasek Holdings.