The Story Of HK Commercial Television (佳藝電視臺)

As I am reading the bizarre news of missing flight MH370, I remembered a story concerning HK CTV now ceased operation. The Commercial Television (CTV) was the third free Hong Kong commercial TV which started business on November 7, 1975 but closed on August 22, 1978. There is a rumor going about the proposed date selected for the opening ceremony.

 

The below story is as I heard from an old astrologer friend:

 

It was said that in 1975 (乙卯), the CTV management has selected a san-sha (三煞) month and time for the TV station’s opening ceremony. According from an insider story that the purpose of selecting such an inauspicious timing was because the broadcasting industry in HK was like a war zone, since there were three TV companies at that time; the management decided to ‘fight san-sha’ (斗三煞). It seems like that the idea was taken from ‘the story of Liu-powen fight san-sha’ (劉伯溫斗三煞).

 

The opening ceremony was set at 4pm but rain started to pour down heavily few hours earlier and the situation worsened during the HK governor’s speech at that time. The rain continued through the night. That was the first indication of very bad omen to CTV.

 

My pal has guessed that the CTV management at that time wanted to mimic the san-sha fighting story so they invited the governor and many VIPs to attend the opening ceremony in the hope that these VIPs can overcome the san-sha.

 

However, things went quite unexpected as the governor didn’t attend the ceremony and added to the extremely bad weather; the VIPs were also absent! Frankly speaking, there weren’t anyone to fight the ‘sha’ so to speak.

 

In addition to the already bad omen was that one of the program broadcasted was “the story of the three kingdoms” (三國志). In the story of the three kingdoms, the kingdom of Shu (蜀國) where the main heroes were from was destroyed first; more significantly the story was handpicked by the general manager himself.

 

Therefore, astrologers were being advised not to ‘fight san-sha’ unless one is super confident. There are just too many bad examples around and one pretty recently too! Personally I think the ‘the story of Liu-powen fight san-sha’ (劉伯溫斗三煞) is just a folklore and cannot be trusted.