SINGAPORE — The new MediaCorp TV Channel 5 drama, Tanglin, will be making history in more ways than one when it airs in June. Not only is it the first long-form English drama with 199 episodes in the works, it is also the first time a two-storey set has been constructed for local TV.

The drama, starring a host of actors including Nat Ho, Fauzie Laily, Constance Song, Syirah Jusni, Eswari Gunasagar, Adam Chen and Darryl Yong, is about four families living and working in the Tanglin area.

We were treated to a special tour of the set before filming started, and boy, were we impressed. The structure, which took two weeks to design, sits in a studio with a floor area of nearly 800sqm at Infinite Studios, and has been built and kitted out with the utmost thought and care. The man behind the structural design is Wong Lab Seng, who has been designing sets for MediaCorp for the past 30 years. His credentials include sets for The Unbeatables 1, 2 and 3; and, more recently, Gonna Make It and You Can Be An Angel Too for Channel 8; and Refleksi and Saga for Suria.

His work isn’t anywhere near as simple as just putting up walls and dividers — he also has to consider things like lighting and camera angles. And even after the basic structure is built, “we still sit down to see where we can put in windows or airwells”, he said, because “we could just build a wall, but that’s not fun”.

The Tanglin set features four residences, a clinic and a cafe. It is the most challenging set Wong said he has built so far, adding that he spends his lunch hour shopping in lighting stores and his weekends looking around construction sites. “I am very kaypoh,” he laughed. “Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and write down ideas. My wife is used to that.”

Ahead of the show’s premiere, we got him to share some interesting details about this one-of-a-kind set.

1 Why a two-storey set? “The production people said they wanted to do something different, and also wanted to have multiple sets in the same studio,” Wong said. This is so that filming can take place concurrently on more than one set at a time, so that the artistes can have weekends off. The biggest challenge, Wong said, was to match the upstairs to the downstairs, size- and structure-wise. “We don’t have trial and error in set design, so all the calculation for the construction has to be very precise.”

2 Builders spent two days “just stepping on the floor”. “The original studio floor was not even so we had to build a stable one on top of it,” Wong said. This was done by laying metal bars underneath a new flooring surface. “We had to check every metal bar to make sure that everything was level.”

3 The show revolves around four families living in the Tanglin area from different walks of life, so the set features an HDB flat, a condominium and a landed property.

4 It’s important to make things visually interesting. For example, the cafe set features a platform. “If we make it one level, it doesn’t look nice — I’d rather have one step up and one step down, to create depth,” Wong said. Another example is the contrast between a plain wall and a skirted wall: “That’s how I try to differentiate areas.” A divider rail in the cafe also features a cute cupcake design, instead of just boring bars.

5 In the show, the cafe is owned by a family who live on the second floor above it — and it’s supposed to be situated on Lorong Liput, in Holland Village.

6 There are a total of six bathrooms on the Tanglin set, all fitted with sinks, tubs, showers and toilets — even though it’s not often that you see characters actually making use of the facilities.

Tanglin starts on June 29, weekdays at 8pm on MediaCorp TV Channel 5.