Hong Kong (series) - Rod Taylor (1960) - Victoria Harbour

Another shot out to Steve Monticelli for pointing me towards Rod Taylor's website and its links to all of the episodes of Taylor's 1960 series, Hong Kong. I had heard of this show a while ago but it had been relegated to the back of my memory with everything else that I was finding so it's nice to have finally get to watch it.

The premise was apparently inspired by the Soldier of Fortune novel/film with Taylor as a foreign correspondent getting involved in all manner of subterfuge as he seeks out stories on the criminal goings on in the British Colony. He's aided in this by the Police Chief Inspector (played by Alex Davion in the pilot, but then changed to Lloyd Bochner in the subsequent series) and sometimes his butler/manservant, Ah Ting (played by Harold Fong).

It looks as though there was some location filming in Hong Kong, but very little of it actually involves the main actors and there is widespread use of back projection for some of the supposed local close ups. However, there is enough in there worthy of identifying and starting with the 30 minute pilot and its opening aerial shot of the harbour.

It's interesting to note that the opening credits features a bit of a blunder as the Chinese characters for Hong Kong are mixed up. See below. The characters read from right to left, and then move into vertical alignment with the 'Hong' (香 - heung1 in Cantonese) at the bottom and the 'Kong' (港 - gong2) at the top. The characters then spin and turn into the anglicised version of the words, but now the right way around. Someone must have tipped them off because the error was fixed for the start of the proper series.