Aww-inspiring Grandpas

KOREA - When it comes to cuteness, South Korea has to be a reigning superpower now.

For evidence, look no further than Running Man, a Korean variety hit permeated by playground mischief and peopled with human cartoons such as Ha Ha, who has been nicknamed Haroro for his likeness to animated penguin Pororo.

There's Gwiyomi Song, a K-pop meme which has made it okay for full-grown guys to perform finger-counting rhymes and pretend to be six-year-old girls.

And here's Grandpas Over Flowers, a Korean reality show bent on finding cuteness in unexpected places.

Deviating from a run of teen-friendly Flower Boy dramas, cable channel tvN has fixed on four of Korea's oldest television dads to make an aww-inspiring show about their first backpacking holiday around Europe.

Lee Soon Jae, Shin Goo, Park Geun Hyeong and Baek Il Seob - with an average age of 74 - are of the generation who haven't strapped on backpacks since the Korean War, who suffered economic hardship for decades and who associate European tours with the extravagance of middle age.

For them, getting to rough it in Paris is bittersweet.

It is their chance to catch up with adventurous younger travellers, even as they envy how bold young lovers are nowadays, whether in Seoul or on a sunny lawn in the Palace of Versailles.

"We've become a society that accepts pornography," Lee remarks.

Back in his day, he says, couples waited for the cover of night to canoodle in parks.

He is quite the philosopher. Later, as he and the other grandpas struggle in a two-star hotel with boiling pots and instant Korean-style spaghetti with complicated instructions, he observes: "We're a generation who eat anything made for us, not a generation who cook for ourselves."

The show has too much reverence for the elderly to make them suffer too much for your entertainment, though.

That job has been given to an unsuspecting Lee Seo Jin, a 42-year-old actor who thinks he has signed up for a dreamy travel show with K-pop girl groups.

Instead, he not just becomes the grandpas' guide, driver, porter and errand boy but also carries the narrative as he stresses over their tight travel budget, tiny rooms and last-minute requests for Korean food.

And the old guys just have to be themselves, as the show works out cute contrasts: Lee Soon Jae is the class geek, who is the first man in and the last man out of a museum, whereas Baek is the slacker, whose favourite thing in a museum is the exit; Shin is the friendly and well- meaning one who tries to take care of Baek, who has bad knees, whereas Park, crusty but warm-hearted, is the one who takes care of Shin.

The show is a bit twee, but twee goes down well in Korea, apparently, and a spin-off with TV mums is coming up.

The sequel I'd like to see though is how the grandpas languish at home when their wives - the grandmas - holiday with a Flower Boy like that Lee Seo Jin.

Finding U, a Channel U variety show in which Kym Ng, Quan Yi Fong, Ben Yeo and Lee Teng race around Singapore, is a sedate local take on Running Man.

A take, not a copy, because have you seen how hilarious an average episode of the Korean treasure hunt show can be?

That kind of freewheeling fun is impossible to reproduce without producers who come up with the most stupid things (a segment in which toilet plungers are stuck on a pillar, say) and performers who throw themselves into all sorts of silliness (Lee Kwang Soo, a gangly giraffe of an actor, dares to look incredibly dumb pulling the plungers off).

By comparison, Finding U is rather sane. It is something of a pedant too.

On the way to a hidden prize in Tiong Bahru, for instance, players such as Ng and Yeo have to solve puzzles about local history and heritage and do mundane things such as eating cupcakes with clues inside them.

But a promising narrative emerges as Yeo wins the third episode and defeats Quan and Lee Teng, the foreign-born talent who outsmarted him in the first and second episodes.

They represent Taiwanese wit, and Yeo, Singaporean grit, as he endures bad luck and punishing physical challenges.

Although he isn't the funniest guy, his success in the show is something to see. And even though the show doesn't strike comedic gold, it can be compelling when it touches a nerve in Singaporeans.

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