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 | Triple Nine stars
James Lye and Wong Li Lin |
Triple Nine was the first television series I worked on. In 1996, I joined the then Television Corporation of Singapore (Now MediaCorp) and was assigned to work on the crime drama which was into its second season. It starred James Lye, Wong Li Lin and Lim Yu Beng as investigators from the Special Investigation Section of the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) who specialise in murder cases. I began, oddly enough, not with a murder case but with a hostage situation. Drawing on my experiences during my National Service days as an ammunition technician, I wrote a story about a man who rigged up a bomb in a TV studio and held everyone in it hostage. It was quite an thrill to see the episode go to air (despite the many rewrites.)
 | Triple Nine Season 3:
Robin Leong and Chong Chia Suan |
From there, I progressed to kidnapping stories and thinking up ways to kill people creatively. I started reading voraciously crime books and real-life crime stories to get ideas and inspiration. I also devoured forensic science books, books on weapons and poisons, medical and psychology books just to make sure my characters were realistic and that the cops were following proper procedure. We had a contact from the police force whom we could ask questions and we even met with the late Prof. Chao to learn about crime scene investigations and post mortem procedures. We visited the morgue at the General Hospital that Prof. Chao designed to see how cadavers were exmained. That was a real eye opener.
 | | With Chia Suan |
For the third season, I was made the head writer of the series. I got to plan the stories, develop the character arcs and edit the scripts from the team of in-house and freelance writers. On top of all that, I ended up penning 14 out of the 22 episodes simply because we were short of good writers. The third season was radically different from the previous one. We spent time examining the lives of the police officers and we dug deeper in the human stories behind the crimes. The third season was also marked by a shift in story-telling style. It was an ensemble piece now, with six main characters and it was shot with an edgy docu-drama style. James and Li Lin were out of the picture so we added Robin Leong, Mark Richmond, Chong Chia Suan, Amy Cheng and Beatrice Chia (among others) to the series. It was rewarding to see the critics and fans reacting favourably to the deeper human stories that we were creating.
 | Triple Nine Season 3:
Mark Richmond and Lim Yu Beng |
It certainly was challenging and rewarding being in charge of the writing. There was great satisfaction in seeing stories that I believed in going on air. It was also very difficult to keep pace with the production schedule and I found myself working 16-hour days. What was even more difficult was having to change stories because of location, cast and budget constraints. There were so many occasions when I had to cut down on action because there was no budget. Other times, the cast got hurt or fell sick and I had to write them out of a few episodes so they could recover. But all that is part of TV production. I loved almost every minute of it.
All the Tiple Nine scripts I had were stored on 1.44" floppies which have turned bad with the passage of time. However, I did manage to salvage two scripts from season two. From the looks of them, there aren't shooting drafts but will still have some historical and entertainment value for fans. And the script formats aren't exactly industry standards. That was TCS for you. To read the scripts, you'll need Acrobat Reader to view the PDF files. You can get a free download of the reader from Adobe's site.
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