Culture Club | What The Voice of the Stars finale says about Hongkongers
TVB’s months-long reality show The Voice of the Stars finally came to an end on Sunday night, with a tearful Fred Cheng claiming the championship armed with more than 161,000 public votes and a professional award. The crowd roared with joy, and thunderous applause erupted across the studio where the live cast took place. Even Cheng’s “si-fu”, judge and music veteran Eric Moo Kai-yin who took him under his wing from the very beginning, shed a few tears in front of the camera. It was a finale that couldn’t have been better, albeit the excessive positivity the show carried was way out of sync with the city’s cynicism.
There’s no need for me to explain how marvellous Cheng has been all the way (I’m a fan, I’m biased and I’m not ashamed of it). I’m more interested in how the finale of The Voice of the Stars might mirror the changing cultural and social landscape of Hong Kong. After all, 237,930 voted on Sunday night via a smartphone app (as opposed to the Election Committee’s 1,200 votes that decided who to lead the city). There must be some truth in it.
Known for its flat perspective of Hong Kong, Sunday’s finale featuring four finalists – all the of them previously little known TV actors - was a surprise intervention of TVB’s monocultural reality: Fred Cheng was a Hongkonger brought up in Canada, the show’s newcomer Hoffman Cheng was an ethnically Chinese Hongkonger, blondie Corinna Chamberlain was a Hongkonger born to Kiwi and Australian parents, and Ningbo native Yao Bing has just officially become a Hong Kong resident. We seldom see ethnically non-Chinese faces or hear actors speak Cantonese with an accent on TV, but suddenly the world of TVB has become shockingly liberal and accommodating.
Funnily enough, the four finalists coincidentally represented the four groups of people that made up today’s society of Hong Kong. And their final ranking decided by the 237,930 voters could somewhat reflect society’s acceptance toward these four groups:
Fred Cheng: 161,046 votes
Hoffman Cheng: 42,136 votes