Director-actor Jack Neo is back in drag as his cheapskate auntie character Liang Ximei from Mandarin variety show Comedy Night.

Neo, 56, will reprise his role for new Chinese dialect variety series Happy Can Already!, which premieres on Dec 2 on Channel 8, and will air every Friday at noon.

The 10-episode series, a collaboration involving the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), Mediacorp and Neo’s J Team Productions, aims to educate seniors on government messages on topics like retirement, health and active ageing.

It is Singapore’s first dialect variety series, and will include a mix of Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew.

Around 200 seniors gathered at the official launch of Happy Can Already! at Kreta Ayer Square in Chinatown on Monday (Nov 14), where Neo appeared in character as Liang Ximei, complete with his signature wig, glasses and garish bright green blouse.

Comedy Night aired from 1996 to 2000, and made Neo a household name through his characters Liang Ximei and the elderly Liang Popo. Two spinoff series, Liang Ximei and The Return Of Liang Ximei, aired in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

Neo told The New Paper he was excited to be back on TV again, as he has been busy directing films like the Ah Boys To Men series about national servicemen, and this year’s 1950s period drama Long Long Time Ago.

“It’s a dream come true for me to do a TV series in dialect, as I always wanted to but could not because of government restrictions (on free-to-air broadcast channels),” Neo told TNP in Mandarin.

Singapore used to discourage the use of dialects, and the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched 1979 to encourage local Chinese to use Mandarin instead.

However, there has been a recent revival of dialect TV programmes like director Royston Tan’s Hokkien drama Eat Already?, which aired in September and will return for a second season next year.

“MCI approached me to do this programme, and I thought it was a great opportunity to reach out to seniors,” said Neo.

“A lot of them who can’t understand Mandarin have been left out, so with Happy Can Already! we can communicate important government messages in dialect, and through comedy and songs.”

Happy Can Already! characters include Liang Ximei’s sons Robert (Mark Lee) and Albert (Benjamin Tan), her elderly father Ah Kong (Wang Lei), Albert’s wife Mary (Chua Lee Lian) and daughter Xin Hui (child actress Toh Xin Hui, see report right).

There will also be guest appearances by Dennis Chew as his cross-dressing character Aunty Lucy, and Chen Tianwen as over-the-top singer Mr Unbelievable.

JOKES

At the show’s launch, Neo and Lee were clearly in their element, hamming it up in Hokkien and taking jabs at each other.

“Your waist and legs are thicker now… Everything is fatter,” Lee, who is 48, joked while pointing at Neo.

Neo said it has been nearly 15 years since he played Liang Ximei, so he had to slowly recall the character’s mannerisms.

Lee said expectations for Happy Can Already! will be high, since the show’s characters are so beloved.

“Comedy Night ended at the peak of its fame. It’s always difficult to revive a show the second time round while keeping things fresh, and that will be our challenge,” he said.

“Luckily, we’ve also matured and grown as actors.”

Neo also hopes Happy Can Already! will be a success.

“Our goal is to do well enough to move from the afternoon to primetime slot, and maybe get more young people to learn dialect through comedy, too.”

Your waist and legs are thicker now… Everything is fatter.

– Actor Mark Lee poking fun at Jack Neo’s Liang Ximei (above) character

He heard people shouting outside his Roberts Lane shop and went out to see what was going on.

Mr Michael Nassim, 57, owner of Emri Electronics, said after he and his six employees went out to the road, they saw a small fire at the second-storey window of the neighbouring shophouse.

Within five minutes, the fire spread to his shop.

The owner of the two-storey shophouse off Serangoon Road told The New Paper: “My wife’s office is on the second storey, and the laptops, phones and tables were damaged. The roof was also burned.”

The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said that it was alerted to the fire at 3.20pm.

They dispatched one fire engine, three Red Rhinos and three support vehicles. The fire was extinguished using two water jets within half an hour.

There were no reported injuries.

“The SCDF officers were very brave and they got the fire under control very quickly,” said Mr Nassim.

“I was in a state of shock when I saw the fire, because it was big. But now I’m concerned about business continuation.”

Building and Construction Authority (BCA) personnel had told him that the building was subject to a structural engineer’s report.

“If it’s found to be unstable, we would have to close our shop for one to three months,” he said.

LOSSES

“We run an online business selling watches, so we can find alternate premises to continue our business. Our stock wasn’t damaged, and we have fire insurance for the shop.”

But Mr Nassim said the losses he suffered may be substantial.

“The partitions, wallpaper, laptops and carpeting would cost around $25,000,” he said.

The owner of the shophouse where the fire started, Mr Abdul, 46, who declined to give his full name, said that he received a call from a staff member who was in the shop around 3pm.

He told TNP: “I rushed down, and the SCDF was already here. The fire has been put out.

“It’s just an empty room on the second storey, so I’m not sure how it started. Just the front part was damaged. I’m still in shock.”

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

Director-actor Jack Neo is back in drag as his cheapskate auntie character Liang Ximei from Mandarin variety show Comedy Night.

Neo, 56, will reprise his role for new Chinese dialect variety series Happy Can Already!, which premieres on Dec 2 on Channel 8, and will air every Friday at noon.

The 10-episode series, a collaboration involving the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), Mediacorp and Neo’s J Team Productions, aims to educate seniors on government messages on topics like retirement, health and active ageing.

It is Singapore’s first dialect variety series, and will include a mix of Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew.

Around 200 seniors gathered at the official launch of Happy Can Already! at Kreta Ayer Square in Chinatown yesterday, where Neo appeared in character as Liang Ximei, complete with his signature wig, glasses and garish bright green blouse.

Comedy Night aired from 1996 to 2000, and made Neo a household name through his characters Liang Ximei and the elderly Liang Popo. Two spinoff series, Liang Ximei and The Return Of Liang Ximei, aired in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

Neo told The New Paper he was excited to be back on TV again, as he has been busy directing films like the Ah Boys To Men series about national servicemen, and this year’s 1950s period drama Long Long Time Ago.

“It’s a dream come true for me to do a TV series in dialect, as I always wanted to but could not because of government restrictions (on free-to-air broadcast channels),” Neo told TNP in Mandarin.

Singapore used to discourage the use of dialects, and the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched 1979 to encourage local Chinese to use Mandarin instead.

However, there has been a recent revival of dialect TV programmes like director Royston Tan’s Hokkien drama Eat Already?, which aired in September and will return for a second season next year.

“MCI approached me to do this programme, and I thought it was a great opportunity to reach out to seniors,” said Neo.

“A lot of them who can’t understand Mandarin have been left out, so with Happy Can Already! we can communicate important government messages in dialect, and through comedy and songs.”

Happy Can Already! characters include Liang Ximei’s sons Robert (Mark Lee) and Albert (Benjamin Tan), her elderly father Ah Kong (Wang Lei), Albert’s wife Mary (Chua Lee Lian) and daughter Xin Hui (child actress Toh Xin Hui, see report right).

There will also be guest appearances by Dennis Chew as his cross-dressing character Aunty Lucy, and Chen Tianwen as over-the-top singer Mr Unbelievable.

JOKES

At the show’s launch, Neo and Lee were clearly in their element, hamming it up in Hokkien and taking jabs at each other.

“Your waist and legs are thicker now… Everything is fatter,” Lee, who is 48, joked while pointing at Neo.

Neo said it has been nearly 15 years since he played Liang Ximei, so he had to slowly recall the character’s mannerisms.

Lee said expectations for Happy Can Already! will be high, since the show’s characters are so beloved.

“Comedy Night ended at the peak of its fame. It’s always difficult to revive a show the second time round while keeping things fresh, and that will be our challenge,” he said.

“Luckily, we’ve also matured and grown as actors.”

Neo also hopes Happy Can Already! will be a success.

“Our goal is to do well enough to move from the afternoon to primetime slot, and maybe get more young people to learn dialect through comedy, too.”

Your waist and legs are thicker now… Everything is fatter.

– Actor Mark Lee poking fun at Jack Neo’s Liang Ximei (above) character

In less than a month, she used four credit cards to spend almost $11,000 on food, handbags, online game credits and health products.

The cards were not hers – three were stolen from her colleague’s wallet, and details of the fourth card were taken when she worked at Marina Bay Sands (MBS).

Yesterday, Lim Li Ting, 24, was jailed for 15 months for 12 charges of cheating, theft and unauthorised access to computer material.

When she worked as a levy counter staff at MBS in October 2014, she collected the levy from casino guests.

On Oct 22 that year, when Ms Chan Lai Chun, 59 handed Lim her United Overseas Bank credit card to pay the levy, Lim copied the card details on a piece of paper.

ONLINE

From Oct 22 to Nov 11, Lim spent about $4,600 on various items from online marketplace Qoo10 using Ms Chan’s credit card’s details.

After Lim started working for ComfortDelGro, she noticed her colleague’s wallet on a desk on Nov 12.

She wanted to steal from it but feared her colleague would notice that money was gone.

So she stole an OCBC Bank credit card instead.

Five days later, she took two more credit cards from the wallet.

With the cards, she spent $6,300, including about $5,300 worth of health products from Elken Singapore.

The two card owners made police reports after finding out about the unauthorised transactions.

By then, Lim had racked up almost $11,000 in purchases. (See report above.)

She was arrested on Nov 19, but only some items were recovered.

Court papers said Lim had made no more than $100 in restitution.

Yesterday, defence lawyer Ahmad Firdaus Daud, assigned by the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme, said Lim was from a poor family and had bought the items for her family.

He said her mother was in poor health, having suffered a stroke and has diabetes.

Fifty-seven other charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.

He saw the thick plumes of smoke as he was driving home on the Pan Island Expressway, just before he passed Jalan Anak Bukit Flyover at lunchtime yesterday.

Mr Roslan Samsuri, 46, a senior associate engineer at ASE Singapore, told The New Paper that he eventually saw a burning lorry about 1km after he passed the Bukit Timah Expressway exit.

Mr Roslan said: “It was tilted to one side, probably the front left wheel came off.”

He added that there was a liquid, which he believed to be oil, dripping from the lorry.

TNP understands that the lorry driver had noticed smoke coming out of his vehicle while he was driving along the expressway.

He then parked on the road shoulder and left the lorry to call for help. The lorry then caught fire and grew bigger despite the heavy rain.

“I was shocked,” said Mr Peh Choon, who was driving past the scene at around 12.45pm. “It was quite a big fire.”

HUGE FIRE

The 49-year-old, who is self-employed, said that he was driving on the lane next to the lorry but moved one lane away because the fire was so huge.

Other drivers followed suit, causing a congestion.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force was called at 12.40pm and sent a fire engine and one Red Rhino to the scene. The fire was eventually extinguished using a water jet.

There were no reported injuries, and the cause of the fire is under investigation.

The sudden death of a successful Singapore businesswoman in Hong Kong has shocked her family and friends as she had seemed well before the trip.

Ms Linda Koh, 36, who was respected and well-liked, was found unconscious in her hotel room while on a business trip there last Saturday.

She was taken to the island’s Queen Mary Hospital but died soon after, reported Shin Min Daily News.

Ms Koh was the managing director and successor of family-run local business KSP Marketing, which specialises in processing pork and other chilled or frozen meat products.

The divorcee, who was the third generation to helm the family business, leaves behind a young son and daughter.

The Chinese newspaper reported that Ms Koh had flown to Hong Kong last Wednesday for work, and had arranged to meet an old friend from her university days.

On Saturday morning, she had breakfast with friends before returning to her hotel room.

When she did not come out later, a friend got the hotel management to open the room door, and they found her unconscious.

Hong Kong police told local newspaper Oriental Daily that the room was not in a mess, and they did not rule out the possibility that Ms Koh had collapsed suddenly.

They said the autopsy report would be able to confirm the cause of death.

Shin Min reported that Ms Koh’s younger brother and ex-husband flew to Hong Kong on the night of her death to identify thebody, but were told they had to wait a few days for the autopsy to be completed.

They are expected to return to Singapore on Thursday with her body.

The Singapore consulate in Hong Kong said they were aware that a Singaporean had died there over the weekend, and were in touch with the deceased’s next-of-kin.

Her father, Mr Alan Koh, 74, told Shin Min that his eldest daughter had a history of hypertension but had seen a doctor and was taking medication.

While she was in Hong Kong, Ms Koh had called her family here every day and chatted with her children.

Mr Koh said his daughter was supposed to return to Singapore on Saturday evening. But at around 11pm, the hotel in Hong Kong called to inform the family that something had happened to her.

He thought it was just a minor illness. They were then told she was taken to hospital and had died.

One of Ms Koh’s friends told The New Paper yesterday that she was an affable woman and a vivacious boss who was always coming up with new ideas for the family business.

Mr Aydan Ang, 31, who owns a design studio, started working with her a few years ago when she wanted to re-brand the business.

STUDENT

They met four years ago when she was a student at a music school where he used to give vocal lessons and had kept in touch.

He said she was an avid cook who cared deeply for others and was always game to try new things, whether it was a business idea or a recipe.

Ms Koh used to share her recipes online under the moniker Guru Home Chef.

“She would always share her happiness, dreams and passion with her friends and family. Everyone thought highly of her. And she was very down-to-earth and very hands-on in her business,” said Mr Ang.

He said he had heard about Ms Koh’s death around 5pm on Saturday from friends.

He said: “It was very shocking. When I met her two weeks ago, she was upbeat and appeared healthy.

“I couldn’t believe it. I even left her a text after hearing the news, just to check on her. But there was no reply. One of her staff members later confirmed (that she had died).”

Another friend, Mr Amos Goh, 36, a cook, said he had known Ms Koh for about seven years and she had visited him at his restaurant about three months ago.

Calling her a loyal friend, Mr Goh said she had helped him look for employment after he lost his job previously.

He said in Mandarin: “It’s really sad to lose a friend like her.”

I couldn’t believe it. I even left her a text after hearing the news, just to check on her. But there was no reply. One of her staff members later confirmed (that she had died).

– Mr Aydan Ang on hearing about Ms Linda Koh’s death

Food costs are going up — according to the Department of Statistics, food prices have risen 2.2 per cent a year since September 2015. This would inevitably affect the price of hawker food, which most Singaporeans enjoy. According to a 2014 report on food trends by public relations firm Weber Shandwick, four in five of more than 750 Singaporean adults interviewed said they eat at hawker centres when not dining at home.

To study the differences in the cost of dining out across neighbourhoods, the IPS Social Lab conducted a survey of hawker food prices across the island. In July 2016, we recorded the cost of a selected menu of seven hawker food items (chicken rice, chicken biryani, nasi goreng, rice with two vegetable dishes and one meat option, rice with one vegetable dish and two meat options, iced milo and black coffee with sugar) in over 80 locations across 26 neighbourhoods) from Pasir Ris to Jurong West.

We then averaged the cost of each item for each neighbourhood and summed them up to achieve a total price index for hawker food. In some districts, such as Tanglin and Orchard, insufficient data points, or scarcity of hawker centres, meant that we had to exclude them from the rankings. This was the list we came up with (Table 1), with 1 being the least expensive, and 26 being the most expensive.

Table 1: Neighbourhood hawker food from least to most expensive

We found that the aggregate price of the seven food items varied up to 20 per cent between areas (e.g., hawker food in Marine Parade costs 20 per cent more than in Bukit Merah, at the two extremes). This means that on average, a person eating out in Marine Parade would pay an extra dollar for the same meal as someone who orders a meal that costs S$5 in Bukit Merah, assuming the food items in our basket of goods represent a typical meal.

While the relative price difference between neighbourhoods is moderate, we found that hawker centres in many older estates, such as Bukit Merah, Queenstown and Toa Payoh, offer the cheapest meals. Data from Statistics Singapore show these estates tend to have larger proportions of senior residents, single-member households, divorced and/or separated individuals, and rental flats. In these estates, cheaper food prices could boil down to a simple case of demand and supply, where hawkers charge what they think their clientele are able to afford. In contrast, Bishan has relatively fewer senior residents and Marine Parade has a higher proportion of residents living in private condominiums and landed estates.

One reason for higher hawker food prices could be rising labour costs brought about in part by tighter controls on the supply of foreign workers. While there are efforts to improve productivity elsewhere in the services sector and the food business, such as through vending machines and cashless payments, this is not easily transferable to hawker business.

Stall rental is less of a factor, according to an analysis of the drivers of food prices conducted in 2014 by the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources. As then-Second Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Grace Fu noted during a Committee of Supply debate in 2015, rentals only comprise about 12 per cent of a hawker’s costs while about half of running costs went to raw materials.

The findings from our study suggest that the number of hawker centres in an area and the general cost of living there could also affect hawker food prices. For instance, hawker food prices in newer estates, or in estates with few hawker centres, tend to be higher. Sembawang and Woodlands, located in the north of Singapore, have relatively fewer hawker centres and higher hawker food prices. Residents in older, more established estates, like Bukit Merah, Queenstown and Toa Payoh, have more hawker centres to choose from

What can be done to ensure widespread availability of hawker food with costs kept affordable? A social enterprise model, where hawker centres operate on a not-for-profit basis, is one option. Two of the 20 new hawker centres that the National Environment Agency (NEA) has said it will build in areas which have fewer hawker options have opened in Hougang and Bukit Panjang. Rentals are kept affordable for vendors, food prices are capped, and profits are ploughed back into the hawker centre for training and assistance to stallholders, and food coupons to low-income residents, for instance. Operators further help hawkers to defray costs, for example, by buying meat in bulk from wholesalers.

Extending this model to coffeeshops in HDB void decks — which are now privately run — is another option. The HDB could encourage this in residential areas that have a high proportion of senior citizens who may find it hard to travel longer distances. If a single operator could run multiple coffeeshops in neighbouring estates, they may be able to operate on a similar scale to a whole hawker centre, thus benefitting from economies of scale.

In addition, NTUC Foodfare, which operates price-controlled Rice Garden outlets offering economy mixed rice options in 27 food centres across Singapore, could extend its reach in areas that may not be as easy to access.

To mitigate shortage in labour supply, operators may also consider hiring older workers. For instance, Silver Spring, a senior employment social enterprise, operates two food and beverage outlets run by older workers.

Hawker centres are social spaces and the foods that they serve are a cherished part of our Singaporean heritage. Thus, even as we nurture the next generation of Michelin-starred hawker chefs, we should balance this with the original mission of hawker centres — the need to provide people with access to cheap, basic dishes. Let’s try to have our carrot cake and eat it too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Koh Heng Hwee is a second-year Psychology undergraduate at the University of Oxford. She was an intern at IPS Social Lab from July to September 2016.