When we watch TV, we don’t often notice the chair the main character is sitting in, the mobile phone he’s holding or the fruit bowl on the table. The fact that we don’t notice indicates that a team of people working behind the scenes to create on-screen verisimilitude have done their job well.
Every drama series or variety show on television relies on props to draw the viewer in. How these props are sourced, crafted, stored, managed, cared for, used and reused – well, that could be a series in itself.
Over the years, from the original building at Caldecott Hill to the new space at Stars Avenue, our local TV productions’ cavernous props storehouse has housed everything from The Sheng Siong Show’s iconic backdrops to the original Golden Pillow from the 1995 Zoe Tay starrer of the same name, to a papier-mache model of Desmond Tan’s head for a macabre scene in 2009’s The Ultimatum in which his character is decapitated by baddies who then send the head to his father in a box. Lovely stuff.
