Channel NewsAsia celebrates 50 years of S’pore

SINGAPORE — Local history buffs are in for an informative three years ahead on Channel NewsAsia (CNA).

The regional news channel announced today (Aug 21) plans to commission, produce and outsource over 30 hours of documentary programming that celebrates the Singapore story. Beginning in 2014, the project will span three years and coincides with Singapore’s 50-year independence anniversary in 2015.

Production houses are invited to submit proposals for documentaries that explore Singapore’s historical perspective as well as nation-shaping events.

Titles that are already in production include: We Made The News, a programme that revisits 10 of the most iconic news reports aired in the last 50 years, which airs this Sunday; Treasure Hunt (starting Jan 8, 2014, 8pm), a six-episode series that uses heirlooms and personal artefacts to tell the nation’s collective story; Days Of Rage (starting Jan 17 at 8pm), a five-episode series recounting destabilising events in history like riots and strikes; and Footprints (starting Mar 5 at 8pm), a four-episode series that tells the story of our earliest migrant communities and how they grew to leave rich legacies.

According to CNA’s Managing Director Debra Soon, the project was spurred on by the fact that “there was a view that we hadn’t been doing blue chip documentaries on Singapore for a long time”. Support from the Media Development Authority of Singapore in the form of S$13m now makes it possible to produce “something of an international quality and scale”.

While CNA plans to situate history within a modern context, Soon said that the programmes will be “very much historical because I think many of these stories are not quite in the subconscious of the Singapore psyche today, as they used to be. A generation has grown up who has not lived through these incidents and it’s useful — a reminder to retell history, but in a more modern, engaging way; making use of the archival footage that we have; recreating it; and finding new formats.”

She cited the example of how We Made The News relied on crowd sourcing to trace the people who had been featured in decades-old news reports.

We Made The News is hosted by former news presenter and Growing Up actress, Wee Soon Hui.

Catch We Made The News this Sunday (Aug 25) at 8pm on Channel NewsAsia.