Introducing the lasso and whips performance…

Playing the ‘Bad Guy’

And so we returned from Turkey, and prepared for the next trip. I have lost track of which country came next, but it always seemed that we were traveling to places during their winter times; Finland in February, Australia in June, South Korea in October, Argentina in August, Moscow in February, and a slew more. I will talk about those in time, but I will give you a short break to recuperate from the week-long trip to Turkey.

Although I was involved with arranging the production of the overseas segment of the program, there was also another segment where my language skills were required: our ‘record breaking’ segment. For a period we scoured the Guinness Book of Records and invited various record-holders to come to Thailand to attempt to break an existing record. We had a smattering of record breakers, including plate spinners, strongmen, lasso and whip experts, and others. At the same time we also invited other entertainment acts to Thailand, skateboarders, hypnotists, magnet-man (who was also able to withstand being stapled), and Shaolin Monks. Although many of the other acts were one-time shows, the monks were something totally different, and definitely in a class of their own. Even today it is possible to visit the original Shaolin Temple in China and spend some time learning about the long history behind the amazing feats of strength and agility of these monks. I have also read subsequently about people who have spent months or even longer living with the monks and learning some of their skills – yet most importantly, the major lessons taught, and to be learned, are respect and humility.

With all these various acts and performances from abroad, the program soon became one of the highest rated programs on weekends, and often enough people would ask for more information or whether or not what they had watched was actually true or just performance. In the meantime, local stories focused on foods, strange abilities, and endurance records (such as spending a few days living in a glass box with scorpions), and more. We tried for a while, after our production trip to Moscow, to get the Moscow Circus to visit Thailand, but unfortunately that was simply too costly, and it would have been a logistics nightmare; nevertheless, we tried but were unsuccessful.

Taking on a role based on a true story

Based on a true story…

In the meantime, I continued to appear in small roles in local drama series, including one which was a single 1-hour episode based on the true story of a foreigner who had come to Thailand in his early 20s, ended up in the wrong place with the wrong person, and was left destitute with four children to care for, none his own. He fell in love and found whatever work he could to support himself and his ‘wife’. He became an itinerant teacher, often leaving home for a few weeks or even months at a time. He would sometimes return home to find his wife pregnant, at first believing that the child might be his, but none ever were. He ended up raising the children on his own after his wife left him with their only child together, a child who was probably used by the mother to earn money. His manner of survival was charity from neighbours, and collecting cans, plastic bottles, or any other recyclable materials. He lived in the northeast of Thailand, and once grown, none of the children he raised ever returned to look after him.

Hosts of the show, Tarm Pai Doo – Songvithya Jirasophin and Ken

Evil lurks…Life imitating art?

Then there was my second major television role as the head of a development agency that worked to improve the lives of children living in slums. The beginning of the series introduced the character, a god-fearing priest who was giving up his comfortable life in the west to come work in the slums of Thailand. As the program progressed, there were small, yet increasingly frequent, glimpses of a hidden lifestyle – secret phone calls, strange meetings, odd ways of accounting for donations and expenditures. “A Dusty, Dirty Life” was the title of the series, and it was a hit. From the likeable character, so kind and generous to the poor children of the slums, the priest slowly devolved into a greedy, heartless manipulator who managed to swindle several HiSo wannabees out of their savings, converting the proceeds into speed boats and fancy houses in a foreign country. While shooting the series, there were several real stories of shenanigans by evangelists in the news in the USA, and so there were moments where I felt as though the fiction we were filming was actually based on the reality on the far side of the globe. The series culminated in a shouting match between the priest character and the young star of the program who had finally gathered the evidence needed to get the priest arrested and incarcerated. What I had not allowed for was the reaction of people to imaginary characters in television programs meant to entertain; and it would not be the last time that the dislike of the audience for a particular character was put on display in real life in the form of shouted comments and the occasional concern for personal safety. I confess, the character was really evil, and in real life would have been flayed alive, but if nothing else, I was remembered, and as Jack Nicholson once commented “Nothing plays as good as a bad guy.”