‘Timely’ has become one of this year’s most reached-for adjectives, surely second only to ‘unprecedented.’ It’s been applied with abandon to everything from prestige TV to personal essays and zeitgeisty fiction as we’ve desperately clung on to anything that might help us make sense of the never-ending hellscape of 2020.
Using such a word to describe a Sunday night period drama might seem like a contradiction in terms. And yet watching The Singapore Grip, ITV’s new adaptation of J.G. Farrell’s sprawling World War II novel, it’s hard to ignore some very uncomfortable parallels. A bunch of plummy-vowelled public school types pontificating over Great Britain’s place in the world, wilfully ignoring an unfolding catastrophe? Sounds familiar.
“I hope that audiences see that this is very relevant for today even though it’s this historical piece,” its star Elizabeth Tan agrees. “You’d think that we would learn — but it’s just same old, same old.” The London-born actress, 30, made history as Coronation Street’s first Chinese resident back in 2011 (she played Xin Proctor, who ended up fleeing Weatherfield with Michelle Keegan’s on-screen boyfriend) and takes her place in The Singapore Grip’s impressive ensemble cast as Vera Chiang.
A Chinese refugee who arrives in wartime Singapore under mysterious circumstances, she quickly wins over the warm-hearted Mr Webb (played by Charles Dance) and strikes up a romance with his idealistic son Matthew (Luke Treadaway) — much to the chagrin of the elder Webb’s stuffy British business partner (David Morrissey) and his daughter Joan (Georgia Blizzard).
Elizabeth Tan as Vera Chiang in The Singapore Grip (ITV)
These family dramas play out against the backdrop of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese army. A crucial port and much-valued outpost of the Empire, its loss was described by Winston Churchill as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”. The series lands on our screens at a time when Britain’s colonial legacy — and the way our imperial past is taught — is being interrogated.
“It’s a part of history that we know very little about,” Tan says. “We learn a lot about European history, about America, and yet the intricacies of Asian history, we don’t learn much about. It’s a wonderful thing to have a broader view of the world.” The British in Singapore, she believes, were victims of “hubris, a bit of arrogance that brought about that downfall — not anticipating that [the Japanese] could be so powerful.”
Costume dramas are one of British film and television’s biggest exports, yet they remain an overwhelmingly white genre (you can count the notable exceptions, like the BBC’s recent adaptation of A Suitable Boy and Armando Iannucci’s ‘colourblind’ David Copperfield, on the fingers of one hand). “Period drama tends not to have so much diversity, so to have this one character sneak into a predominantly white cast was really thrilling,” Tan says. “Vera’s this complex, enigmatic character who stands up for the things that she believes in — she’s a wonderful example of a three-dimensional female character. In a period drama, it’s rare to find someone like that from an East Asian background.”
(Photography Natasha Pszenicki)
She was pleased to note, too, that Farrell’s novel — and the script from Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton — gave Vera, who has a fondness for old-fashioned idioms, an authentic voice. “‘Kicked the bucket, hot about the collar — I still have some family in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and those are phrases that get used,” she laughs.
Farrell, she notes, “wrote this minority ethnic heroine in the 70s, when a lot of these conversations weren’t being had,” yet some TV bosses still aren’t so willing to put non-white characters at the forefront. “So often people might be like, ‘Oh, do we really want to do that?’” she explains. “There’s that questioning, because it is quite a new thing, to have an East Asian leading lady. Some people will be like, ‘I don’t know if people can relate to that.’ But it means a lot to the people who don’t see themselves [on screen] that frequently.”
Her friends in the industry, she adds, often find that when their pitches are rejected, the commissioners will cite other projects with diverse casts, as if trying to prove that particular box has already been ticked. “They get, ‘Oh, we’ve already done that, we did an Asian thing, that Japanese show...’” she sighs. ‘In theatre, we see the same, where people are like, ‘Well, we’ve done that Chinese thing, now we’ll go back to our usual programming.’”
Tan has first hand experience of the importance of representation. She falls silent for a moment when I ask about the actresses who inspired her as a young girl (she first discovered her knack for entertaining when her impressions of the Queen’s speech left her father in stitches). “Do you know what’s really funny?” she says. “My role models were all white. They all had beautiful blonde hair and blue eyes. Recently I saw a trailer for an animated movie [Netflix’s Over The Moon] where the lead was a Chinese girl. It was a beautiful story about how she wanted to fly to the moon and built a rocket. I cried watching that, because it’s still like ‘Oh, there’s someone who looks like me!’ I’m sure there are kids that are East Asian that feel the same way.”
When Tan appeared in Coronation Street, her presence on the cobbles elicited a similarly emotional response from the fans she would bump into. “15 million people watched that, and I had so many people coming up to me and being so emotional about [the character],” she recalls. She is tentatively hopeful that her latest primetime role will help usher in more diverse casting in period drama — and will ensure that other young actresses don’t have to go without role models who look like them, like she did. “It’s really wonderful that this is happening, because for other East Asian, other Chinese girls who are out there who want a career in acting, it means a lot to them. Seeing a person of Chinese heritage on TV, it means a lot.”
The Singapore Grip airs on ITV from September 13
