I am Wat Siam – TV in Thailand

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 9 JANUARY 2000

ON THE NIGHT before Christmas I hired a high-prowed wooden fishing boat and put out through the breakers, skimming fast across the surface of the Andaman Sea, as warm and dark as a glass of mulled red wine. The wake swirled and gleamed with faint phosphorescence, like the distant glimmer of the lights from a department-store Christmas tree that had slipped overboard and lay unravelled across the sea-bed. The moonlight danced on the sea like tinsel. After an hour I arrived at Buddha Island, a tiny, unlit dot off the west coast of Thailand. I made my gift of bottled water and loaves of rye bread and a small tub of Philadelphia cream cheese to the head monk. He spoke no English, and my Thai should be punished with a coconut-husk flail and sharpened length of bamboo, so the boatman translated as we stood under the rushing, swaying hurricane palms in the uncanny glow of a tropical full moon.

It is a tradition in these parts to bring gifts to the monastery, and to ask the head monk, who has a reputation for knowledge beyond ordinary ken, questions of the future. My principal curiosity concerned the cricket score, but while the Buddha was undoubtedly wise and good and even fun-loving, there was no suggestion He was a cricket fan.

“What can I expect from the new year?” I asked instead. The head monk looked at me narrowly, and pulled his saffron robes close about him. “Is it new year already?” he said. He was perhaps 60, but his muscles were taut and alive, like a school of fast-swimming ocean fish in a surgical glove. He was a persuasive advertisement for the clean life, or at least the life lived far from other people. He placed a hand on my upper arm and frowned. “Beware,” he said, “of lawsuits.”

It was an alarming thing to hear, so far from Jani Allan and the SABC, but southeast Asia is a place of surprises. It is also a good place for Yule-phobes such as myself to spend the season. The only sign of Christmas against which I stubbed my toe was a tinny album of carols playing in a department store in Kuala Lumpur.

The album was recorded by a Thai pub band specialising in Western music, which perhaps explained why it sounded as though a plantation of annoyed dwarfs were yelling “Sirent night! Hory night!” I bought my souvenir gift hamper of Malaysian rubber and fled. Behind me the dwarfs were building to a frenzy: “I’ll pray my dlum for him, pa-lum-pa-pum-pum!”

It has been quite some journey to the east, but by the time you read this I shall be home. As I write, a water buffalo grazes in a rice paddy outside my window, and if I look to the left I can see a clipper in white sail following the current down to the Straits of Malacca and into the China Seas. I came in search of television, but I found the footprints of authors.

In the Bangkok Oriental hotel I took tea in the suite in which Somerset Maugham nearly died of malaria, and stood on the spot where Joseph Conrad slumped to the ground after too many rum toddies. In Singapore’s Raffles I drank a gin sling on the porch where Noel Coward sat shuddering with dengue fever. I rode the same rails as Graham Greene up the Malaysian peninsula, and slept in the same compartment of the Orient Express that Wilbur Smith once infested. I tried to change compartments, but nothing doing.

Which is not to say that I entirely neglected my television duties. TV, unlike the portions served in local restaurants, is big in the Orient. On the River Kwai, barely 500m downstream from the infamous and strangely unimpressive bridge, a nearby settlement is visible only by the tangled thicket of television aerials rising above the bamboo and banana fronds. In the villages and farmsteads lining the railway through the Malaysian jungle, every small stilted shack housing rubber tappers and dirt-scrabble palm growers has a rickety aerial receiving all that local television has to offer.

In Thailand, that consists principally of the same overpitched game show that followed me about like a hungry mutt. Wherever there was television, there was that green and purple stage design, those seven Thais in animated conversation, that cheering, whistling audience. I spent many hours trying to puzzle it out, but I still haven’t any idea how the game is played. All I could gather, by the succession of groans and crumpled facial expressions, was that no one had yet triumphed. Finally, after 10 days of such torture, the grand prize was won. I wasn’t watching when it happened, I’m happy to say, but Dam, my driver, told me it had been a motorbike.

Dam was a font of invaluable information. When buying cobra’s blood from a street vendor, he cautioned, always make sure it’s fresh. “Watch the snake be kill,” said Dam earnestly, “with own eyes.” Apparently unscrupulous cobra-blood merchants will substitute the pre-packaged blood of the more common tree snake. Dam tutted at the depths of man’s depravity.

Two days later I stood in a narrow Chinatown alley, carefully watching as my cobra was sliced open. The blood was decanted into a small plastic packet, such as you would use to wrap your child’s sandwiches for school. I looked around eagerly, savouring the exoticness of the moment, but the vendors weren’t watching me. They were peering through a half-open door at a flickering TV screen. I looked over their shoulders. A Barbara Cartland movie was showing.

Hugh Grant stood proud in Regency wig and ruffles. He appeared to be defending, or perhaps defiling, the honour of a simple country lass in blonde curls. He said something in Thai, and the snake vendors hissed approvingly. I sighed and sipped my blood. Everyone wants to be a critic.