Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Western District Community Centre, Sai Ying Pun

What is supposedly Aberdeen Police Station in the series, is in fact nowhere near Aberdeen but in the middle of Western Hong Kong Island in Sai Ying Pun. Locating this place was made easy by the street sign in the second picture, but this place is quite well-known so it wouldn't have taken too long given the absence of other clues.

The Western District Community Centre started life as a hospital, the old Tsan Yuk Hospital to be precise, built in 1922 and still going strong. You can read more about it on the wiki entry here. It has been given a Grade 3 status which, as you should all know by now, means totally nothing in terms of its ongoing survival.

Real building, fake sign

Coincidentally, the building also contains the Conservancy Association's Centre for Heritage. Streetview below.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Edinburgh Place, Central

Edinburgh Place has featured quite a few times on this blog now, and here we see it once again with its recognisable (and still standing...for the time being) car park. You can see Jardine House and the main post office at the back and on the far right of the second picture is the roof extension/cover for the Star Ferry entrance, now all gone along with the pier itself.

I'm sure at some point this car park will be considered a design classic - it has certainly outlasted a lot more of its slightly more architecturally-aesthetic neighbours (Queen's Pier, Star Ferry, Hong Kong club etc). From certain angle it's almost as if the place hasn't changed at all - see the Streetview below.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - The Regent Hotel, Tsim Sha Tsui

What we now know as the rather plush Intercontinental Hotel, used to be called The Regent Hotel and was owned and operated by New World Development (Cheng Yu-tung's company - he also owns the Chow Tai Fook jewellery chain) before being sold off to the Intercontinental Group circa 2001. It was rebranded and has operated as the flagship Intercontinental since then.

Funnily enough, Intercontinental have also just recently sold off the hotel to another owner. But all is not lost for your IC fans because the brand will continue thanks to a deal they struck to retain management of the hotel for at least the next 40 or so years...

In the above picture we are looking back the other way towards Salisbury Road and it's quite interesting to see (if you can just make it out) the old signal tower on Blackhead Point (top right). The grey building beyond the van is the Mariner Club along Middle Road. Suffice to say the open sky at the back is now filled with high-rises.

The two shots above are snipped from Episode 2, but we also return to the hotel during Episode 3 when Dunross goes to meet Brian Kwok, only to find out he is 'indisposed'. So in Epsiode 3 we also get a brief look inside the hotel lobby. From what I can remember of the place it hasn't changed much.

Noble House (Mini series) - Pierce Brosnan (1988) - Central Police Station, Hong Kong

In this post we see the Central Police Station which was recently undergoing a major refurbishment and was supposed to be open full time last year (2015). However, just yesterday (29 May 2016) it seems that a major part of the building has collapsed. Time will tell the cause but I wouldn't rule out human stupidity at this point, HK seems to be infected with it of late.

Anyway, in case you wanted to remember how it all looked 30 years ago, here are the grabs from Noble House.

Southern building facade

Apparently, this is the real Interior

Driveway to central courtyard

The Protector - Jackie Chan (1985) - Victoria Harbour

No film in HK is complete without at least one shot of its famous harbour, so here it is, albeit at night (arguably the best time because the smog gets hidden). The harbour is probably at least 100 metres narrower now than it was back in 1985. The brightly lit building centre-screen is Jardine House.

The Protector - Jackie Chan (1985) - Kai Tak Airport, Kowloon

It's been a while since I did a The Protector post because I thought I had finished it, however, looking back at the original post from 2010 over at my now defunct Wordpress blog, I realised I had included a couple of extra easy ones for the sake of completeness. So here they are so I can finish this one good a proper. It's a quick nighttime shot of a plane (supposedly the one carrying JC and Danny Aiello) landing at Kai Tak airport. Worthy of inclusion here simply for the fact that we all love Kai Tak.

I Spy (TV Series) - Robert Culp (1965) - Prince Edward Road East, Kowloon City

A similar shot (probably reused) from No Exchange on Damaged Merchandise, showing the view from Kai Tak airport looking over Prince Edward Road East towards Kowloon City. This was filmed at a time before the Regal Airport Kowloon Hotel was built and also before the single lane exit/entrance ramps were built.

This one is another one of AP's rather excellent panorama stitches which show a nice wide angle from the end of Nga Tsin Wai Road on the left to the buildings lining Sa Po Road on the right. The car park at the front of the terminal building can be seen in the bottom of the picture.

It seems that the only building that has survived the past 50+ years is the one on the far right (between the orange/red  and blue signs). It's a nameless building that occupies 43 - 49 Sa Po Road. Everything else has been demolished and redeveloped. Here's an approximation of the same angle using Streetview. 

Yep, lots of changes road-side as well. The flyover is the aforementioned single lane exit ramp from the airport carpark which pretty much blocks any kind of useful view. I have no idea if the flyovers will remains once the former airport area is finally redeveloped.

I Spy (TV Series) - Robert Culp (1965) - Hankow Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

Here's an interesting shot from No Exchange on Damaged Merchandise. It shows the boys crossing the road to a newspaper vendor with a cinema in the background.

Look carefully in the background and you can just make out the film being shown at the cinema is John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. I don't know when the film was released in Hong Kong but it certainly was first released in the US in 1965, which tallies with what we know about when this show was made. But which cinema was it?

In this case the blue stripes on the building provide a bit of a clue to its identity. It was a cinema called the Sands Theatre in TST, specifically on the NW corner of the junction between Peking Road and Hankow Road. The boys have just crossed the southern part of Hankow Road and Peking Road is the one going across screen behind them on the upper shot.

According to Cinema Treasures, the Sands first opened in 1963, so it was a fairly new venue at this time, and closed in 1980. The theatre was demolished and a new building put up on the site which during my first few years in HK contained an HMV. The HMV has since moved on (twice!!) and the shop now has a large Adidas store there. See below. The angle on Streetview is a fairly good match to the original.

AP provided a nicely put together stitch of the two shots to give us a wide angle view of the same scene.

There's also a nice picture of it on FLICKR but looking down the road from Peking Road here.

Yellowthread Street (TV Series) - Bruce Payne (1990) - Sai Street, Sheung Wan

It all kicks off between the cops and the gangsters, in Power Play, when Bruce and co are sitting down for noodles and minding their own business. Up comes some bully boys and all hell breaks loose. The location was the rather hidden away dead-end of Sai Street - where it intersects with Tai Ping Shan Street.

Awesome hair Bruce! Anyway, here is how it looks today, sadly no noodles in sight.

Yellowthread Street (TV series) - Bruce Payne (1990) - Mongkok Police Station, Kowloon

I've been putting it off for a while and got sidetracked over the last 6 months or so with the abundance of locations to be found in the I Spy series, but now that is slowly drawing to a close I can start doing some of this UK series from 1990.

The series was a bit hit and miss, and is no better second time round for me. It's nice to see the locations and at least try and spot some, as well as some early turns by people such as Bruce Payne and Tzi Ma. But on the whole the program was let down by a slightly plodding pace and wooden acting from some (though not the two mentioned). The thing didn't really pick up pace until later in the series, but by then I think people had lost interest and a planned second series, aimed to be more centered around HK-style action, never got off the ground.

Anyway, it has a great opening theme and lots of familiar faces from the local film and TV industry as well as some interesting locations, starting off with this one - Mongkok Police Station. This is a grab from the very first episode called Power Play.

Mongkok station is indeed a working station and this block seen on TV is the last remaining one. There was at least one more similar columned block that fronted Nathan Road (you can just see a tiny bit of it here in the I Spy series) that was demolished to make way for the MTR construction. The shot above was taken through the main gate on Playing Field Road (yes, that is a real street name!).