Limp Pigs and the five-ring circus by Newham Mark

Author:Newham , Mark [Newham , Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pen Press
Published: 2010-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

***

It wasn’t that no one bothered telling me until the last minute that I’d be playing a doctor in the commercial, it was not being told that I was being expected to impersonate one at a medical conference that had me spluttering with disbelief. Unless my performance was edited out, there’s footage somewhere in China of a western ‘doctor’ walking out of one such conference mouthing obscenities at the director somewhere out of shot.

I wasn’t the first laowei to take up a part-time career as a Chinese TV commercial journeyman. Almost everyone I knew had been approached at some time or other with offers of cash for the use of one’s western features. Professional western actors are in short supply in the PRC and there seemed to be an almost unlimited demand for the right sort of face. Mine just happened to fit the ‘doctor’ stereotype, the middleman fixer had informed me, and in the course of 24 months he’d arranged for it to be used in some 10 TV ads, most advertising something unrecogniseable in a box whose Chinese characters translated, I was told, to ‘the elixir of life’ or some such quackery.

I didn’t object too strongly to this. On every occasion I, like every other foreigner put in this position, covered himself by slowly mouthing into the rolling camera the words ‘Please be aware that I am an actor, not a doctor or medical practitioner and in no way endorse whatever is contained in this package, the wording of which I cannot read being just a stupid foreigner’. Since whatever we said was going to be over-dubbed with some Chinese message to which we were not privy, it made little difference what we said to camera. But we continued doing it anyway in the hope that in the event of any repercussion – i.e. the product we were helping promote actually killing someone – it would be possible for lip reading experts to exonerate us at the trial.

By the time the medical conference commercial came my way I was already a veteran of five ‘doctor’ ads and thought I knew what to expect from every assignment. Not so. I’d made the mistake of becoming complacent in a country where surprise comes as standard.

My sixth doctor role was, to say the least, different. To begin with, the commercial was to be filmed not in the usual TV studio but in an up-market hotel where the commercial’s director and I were led celebrity-fashion by a squad of fawning, obsequious flunkies to the anteroom of the hotel ballroom. After a short wait I was ushered into the ballroom, thoroughly bemused, to the applause of an audience of some 300 people and asked to sit close to the middle of a long panel of Chinese ‘dignitaries’ arranged in front of a huge infomercial backdrop. The director handed me a piece of paper on which were scrawled a couple of appallingly-crafted English sentences relating, it seemed, to the efficacy of the product dominating the posters behind us and told me to read it when so asked.

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