Broadcaster's dream going down the tube

Robert Chua had just finished showing his lunch guest how he had moved the pottery lions and life-sized bronze herons around the garden of his house in Kadoorie Avenue, Kowloon. Fung shui dictated that the lions needed to be facing outwards, and the bird bending to reach down for food had appeared to be bowing to a force outside the walls of the garden, Mr Chua said.

The visitor, a Westerner, remarked that in his culture it was bad luck to keep seasonal decorations up after the 12th night following Christmas Day. Mr Chua and his wife Peggy intently counted on their fingers and realised 12 days had passed since December 25. Their maid was promptly dispatched around the house to take down every Christmas decoration.

Their caution is understandable: luck, at least good luck, has been conspicuously absent from the Chuas' life of late. Yesterday, as the couple celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary, they faced the prospect of the very public collapse of the satellite TV channel they founded four years ago, China Entertainment TV (CETV), into which they had sunk US$6 million (about HK$46.4 million) of their own money.

In October, Mr Chua announced that a consortium of four mainland companies had agreed to take an 80 per cent stake in CETV, which broadcasts a diet of Mandarin-language entertainment and Western programmes dubbed in Chinese through China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

The deal swiftly unravelled as it became apparent China Asia TV-Arts Centre, which had agreed to take a 30 per cent stake, could not or would not stump up the cash. As an incentive, Mr Chua had agreed to make the channel debt-free, so he cut CETV's existing credit lines and paid off loans made by investors in the channel.

Without a single dollar from the consortium coming into CETV, Mr Chua laid off half of his 180-strong workforce on New Year's Eve. The rest will lose their jobs at the end of this month and the channel will go off the air unless someone agrees to play the part of CETV's white knight between now and February 1.

Now 51 years old, Mr Chua has spent all of his working life in TV and light entertainment - firstly in Australia, his native Singapore and, since 1967, his adopted home Hong Kong.