HONG KONG: PORKY BANNED IN ASIAN TV STAKES.
Date: Jan 18, 1995
By Jane Blennerhassett
HONG KONG, Jan 18 (Reuter) - Porky Pig is banned, news is pulled, heavy metal is on the scrap heap and Madonna's pointy bra stays in the closet.
Welcome to satellite television in Asia, where international broadcasters bend over backwards to woo the region's more sensitive viewers and ingratiate themselves with nervous regional governments.
In three weeks, China will kickstart the next phase of the region's television industry when it launches its new satellite Apstar-2 over Asia.
Apstar-2 will carry a raft of ambitious broadcasters who are realising their success stories in the United States or Europe cannot simply be relabeled and rerun in Asia.
Take stuttering Porky for example -- he's a hit with kids in the West.
But Moslem viewers, who don't eat pork, might have seen red over the sight of Ted Turner's porcine character if tuning in to Asian cartoons at dinner time .
Unasked, Turner banished the swine to the archives when he launched his movie and cartoon network in Asia last year.
"We are not having Porky Pig altogether. We are going to be sensitive to regional viewers," a spokeswoman for Ted Turner's TNT & Cartoon Network said in a recent interview.
Blanket broadcasting and Western tastes do not always go over well in Asia, a region filled with races, religion, culture and languages as diverse as those found in Europe.
Rupert Murdoch, whose STAR TV pioneered Asian satellite broadcasting in 1991, should know.
This month STAR announced its pop-music "Channel V" was finally blessed by the Singapore government, well-known for its tight grip on the media.
But no nudity, rap or grunge will be seen on Singapore's eight hours of STAR TV pop videos each week. STAR has substantially tamed its music broadcasts from its early days to include more crooning love songs and less rock 'n' roll.
"We vet everything for not just vulgarity and sex and violence but also for cultural taboos," said Channel V programme manager Don Atyeo.
"It's a real myth that music travels across boundaries," Atyeo said. "It's very hard for a kid in (Hong Kong's working-class area of) Mong Kok to relate to Madonna prancing around with traffic cones on her tits. They relate more to Andy Lau with a sports coat and a turtleneck sweater."
Murdoch also yielded to China, axing STAR TV's BBC news broadcasts over north Asia last year when Communist officials found uncensored Western news too close to the bone.
While Western broadcasters were rethinking their Asian strategies, niche local broadcasters began to spring up, promising sanitised family-style entertainment to please Asia's increasingly wealthy but relatively conservative middle class.
Asian television veteran Robert Chua started China Entertainment Television Broadcast Ltd (CETV), a variety satellite channel in the main Chinese dialect of Mandarin.
Former Hong Kong publisher Yu Pun-hoi launched Chinese Television Network, which plans to show Mandarin news and entertainment.
But Western broadcasters say they can still use their popular material and play to their strengths in Asia, as long as they give the locals in each country what they want.
Ted Turner has archives full of movies about making money, a favourite local pastime.
This Lunar New Year holiday while Asia's Chinese viewers are wishing each other good fortune they will be bombarded with movies about wealth and getting rich. Cartoons will feature poor little rich kid Richie Rich.
Advertisers, too, after their experience in Europe, find generic ads rarely have pan-Asia appeal, even for universal brands.
Companies planning regional television campaigns mostly buy time on local terrestrial television stations, often creating a different ad for each country.
"There's no such place as Asia. India is a very different place to Malaysia and a very different place to China," said television researcher John Kaye. "Pan-Asian advertising is as daft a proposition as pan-European advertising was."
(c) Reuters Limited 1995. All rights reserved.
