Morphing of Moses

It has been 11 years since the sitcom Under One Roof last aired new episodes and Moses Lim, who played patriarch and mini-mart owner Tan Ah Teck in the show, reveals a fact few fans know.

The bit his character was known for - the long-winded "moral of the story" parables, the one that made Ah Teck's children want to flee the room - had caused the actor no small amount of worry.

The once-portly actor, now still on the heavy side but much slimmer than he used to be, was recently announced as a member of the cast in Our Sister Mambo, a comedy to be released next year to mark its producer Cathay's 80th anniversary.

He reveals that the father-children scenes that became a trademark of Under One Roof required him to recite a long tale without stumbling.

"It was a whole lot of dialogue, with no stops, with a live audience. I was allowed to stop, but if I did that, it would create a lot of problems for everyone on set. They would have to redo everything, so I tried my best not to stop," says Lim, 65.

Adding to the stress were the rules against improvisation or substitution. Once the actors received the final script, the text was sacred.

He thinks he made it through the takes because of the "mo xie" tests he took in school. These required him to memorise Chinese poems and essays, to be recalled in a written test. It had trained his mind, he thinks. He used the same technique to remember the longer sitcom monologues: first, digesting the meaning and intent of the lines, followed by repetition drills.

"It's quite blessed being Chinese-educated," says the former student of the bilingual Catholic High School and Maris Stella, with a smile.

In 1995, in what is thought to be the first move of its kind, he crossed the divide separating the linguistically segregated worlds of the English-language Channel 5 and the Chinese-language Channel 8, moving from 8 to 5 to become a leading player in both. He would pave the way for crossover actor-hosts such as Adrian Pang, Gurmit Singh and Wong Li-Lin.

For the English-speaking audience, Lim is so closely associated with the character he played in Under One Roof, Singapore's first locally produced sitcom, that strangers today still call him Tan Ah Teck - not as a joke, but because they genuinely conflate him with his character.

"It's interesting. When I go through immigration at Changi Airport, they call out - 'Hello, Mr Tan!'" says Lim. He corrects them gently, he says.

Because the show was exported to Australia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Canada, he gets recognised outside Singapore too. The last occasion was in Adelaide some months ago, when he was playing host to a group of Singapore foodies on one of his gourmet tours.

When he thinks of the ground-breaking programme, the one that showed it was possible to make a Hollywood-saturated audience tune in to a local English-language sitcom, he sounds both proud and wistful. It ran for seven seasons, ending in 2003.

"I miss the show. I really miss that show," says Lim in an interview held at The Straits Times office in Toa Payoh. He is keen to do a movie treatment of the series, in the same way the other fondly remembered sitcom, Phua Chu Kang, received one in 2010.

He ought to pitch the idea to Ms Choo Meileen, chairman and chief executive of Cathay Organisation.

Ms Choo did not know Lim personally, but like many in Singapore, came to know him as Tan Ah Teck and felt that in Our Sister Mambo, he would be good in the part of the father with four unmarried daughters. The script is to be penned by Michael Chiang, writing his first screenplay since the hit Army Daze (1996), also produced by Cathay.

The film will be a homage to the Cathay classic Our Sister Hedy (1957), with its profits going to charity. It will also star Michelle Chong as Mambo, one of the four daughters.

Ms Choo says: "In the original film, the father was portly and very fatherly. When I conceived the idea for this film... there were two local actors that I had in mind right from the start that I wanted for the two main roles - Moses Lim and Michelle Chong."

The journey to show business for Lim began at age eight, after a priest at Catholic High, who had come from Harbin, China, taught the boy the art of xiangsheng, or crosstalk, a form of stand-up comedy. The eldest son of a businessman and housewife (he has one brother and two sisters) found he could make people laugh and, more importantly, loved being on stage. He was soon winning elocution contests in both English and Chinese.

At home, he spoke Hokkien, but received coaching in English and Chinese from two neighbours. For a spell, his family lived in a terrace house in Serangoon Gardens, where during the 1960s, a vendor would set up outdoor screenings of old cartoons and Westerns, where Lim sharpened his English and picked up the dream of performing.

His father, though, did not approve of the boy's ambitions. He was a "typical Chinese businessman" of the time, who felt that show business was a shady occupation, home to lowlifes and dead-enders, says his son. So he continued on at school, eventually going on to Ngee Ann Polytechnic to study commerce.

The young man made his first television appearance during the early 1970s, performing crosstalk. His mother, having been warned in advance, took his father out to the cinema on the night of the broadcast to keep him in the dark.

But Lim's cover was blown the next day after his father's friends mentioned seeing his son on the show, says Lim, chuckling.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he held a series of white-collar jobs, while taking on freelance entertainment jobs, mostly in radio, with a few television crosstalk appearances.

After his father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, he joined the automotive spare parts import-export firm the older man co-owned, shortly thereafter leaving to start his own spare parts trading company.

It was during this period that he met his wife Monica, now 59, during a business trip to Taiwan. They married in 1977 and have two daughters, Grace and Angela, born in 1978 and 1979, respectively.

Back then, there was little demand for Mandarin performers such as Lim. Chinese radio and television were dominated by dialect shows, crewed by veteran performers from getai (Chinese street theatre). A greenhorn like him did not have much of a shot at the big time, he says.

He grabbed every opportunity, no matter how tiny. He, too, was starstruck by the big TV names of the time, such as the comedy duo Wong Sa and Ye Fong, who then performed in Teochew and Hokkien, with a mangled mix of Cantonese, English and Malay thrown in.

"In those days, they called me when they needed someone who looked like a wealthy businessman, because I am round and fat. I would sit there at a board meeting, for one shot. But to me, it was, 'Wow, this is TV!'," he says.

The life of the extra and bit player would turn around with the rise of Channel 8 as a Mandarin- only channel. In 1990, the channel launched five nights of variety show programming and put out a call for hosting duos. The veterans Wong Sa and Ye Fong took one night. The then-unknown Moses Lim and Jack Neo took another, a move that would launch them into national stardom.

They first met after Neo, then also an aspiring actor, spotted Lim on a variety show and suggested that they work together. They discovered they had great chemistry, bantering humorously in English and Mandarin about their odd-couple differences - Neo was thin, Lim was fat; Neo was young and impulsive, Lim was a decade older and wiser; Neo was streetwise, Lim was more refined. They were soon in demand as hosts at corporate gigs.

By the time they co-hosted Comedy Night on Tuesdays, they were a well-oiled crosstalk machine. The show was a hit, at its peak attracting up to a million viewers a night. Lim left in 1994 to join the cast of Under One Roof. Neo stayed on as a host, before going on to make films. They remain good friends and reunite to host on special occasions.

Lim has never been a full-time artist with MediaCorp, despite his success on two channels. He has never been offered a contract, which he thinks has to do with the organisation's preference for drama artists over comedians. He doubts he would have signed anyway, as doing so would have put a dampener on the duo's lucrative live shows.

But it was during his Comedy Night days that he would find a secondary career, one that would, in recent times, blossom into a primary job. He was approached by a now-defunct travel agency to lead a tour. Celebrity-led tours are now popular, but then it was untried. Lim was keen to give the new concept a go, but the entrepreneur in him began to think longer term.

"I thought, 'I love travelling, so this is good for me. But what happens if I lose popularity? Will people still want me to lead?'," he says. He needed a hook, one that would endure if his television fame faded. He remembered that on group tours, the biggest gripe tended to be about food quality.

A themed tour based on one of his passions, food, seemed to be the answer. It was proposed and accepted, and soon he was leading gourmet tours four times a year, a job he still performs, across Asia, Europe and North America.

He says he "knew next to nothing about food" when he began his tours, but through repeated contact with chefs, both on his tours and as host on cooking segments on television, he has learnt much.

Besides the tours, he hosts gourmet evenings at restaurants, gives talks on food and consults with restaurants. He also runs the Moses Lim Gourmet Club, a division of his company, ML Promotions and Marketing. The Gourmet Club consists of 400 former participants of his tours who stay updated on his activities.

Chef Eric Teo, 50, who has worked with Lim on food-related events for more than a decade, says that Lim has worked to reach and maintain his standing as an eater with precise and constructive opinions.

"He has knowledge about street food, fine dining, the top restaurants. He doesn't want to be in the kitchen, he wants to stay outside, to try the food. He'll put it nicely. He won't say, 'Your food sucks.' He will say something like, 'there's no body in your sauce'," says Teo, president-mentor of the Singapore Chefs Association and a television personality, food consultant and tour host.

Lim is philosophical about the closure of Singapore Style Porridge, a restaurant in Tanjong Katong Road run by his daughter Grace and her husband and for which he consulted.

Opened in late 2012, it closed earlier this month. Built around modest prices and a menu based on local favourites, it took off from the start, says Lim. But success could not save the small business from the labour shortage plaguing the food and beverage industry. There was too much to be done by too few hands, he says.

"It's a national problem," he says, shrugging.

He has been on the heavy side since he was eight, he guesses. He topped out at 125 kg about six years ago. He was briefly a spokesman for a local weight-loss products company, but these days, he keeps his weight at around 80kg by restricting carbohydrate and fat intake, among other methods. Like many his age, he is on medication to keep hypertension and cholesterol levels under control, but otherwise, he is free of medical problems, he says.

It is not too difficult to be a host at food events - he takes a bite and leaves the rest. But chefs' competitions can be tricky, especially the large-scale ones.

"I've cut down on judging dessert competitions. If I had to judge 20 cakes and need to try a slice of each one - wah!" he says, shaking his head.

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