The Arena is a debate-style television show produced by Mediacorp Channel 5 in Singapore. Season 1 of the show was broadcast from January–March 2007. A second season, known as The Arena II, was aired from March–May 2008. The show involves teams of students from secondary schools in Singapore debating against each other on issues of topical interest.
Season 1 of the show was won by the team from the United World College of South East Asia, who defeated Hwa Chong Institution in the final. The season was hosted by the popular Singapore TV personality Adrian Pang.
For The Arena II, Jason Chan replaced Adrian Pang as the show's host. The season was won by Raffles Institution, who defeated Nanyang Girls' High School in the final.
The Arena was one of the four nominees for the 2007 International Emmy Award in the 'Children and Young People' category, alongside shows from Australia, Brazil and Poland. (The winning show in the category was The Magic Tree from Poland.) The Arena was also one of six nominees for the 'Best Game or Quiz Programme' at the 2008 Asian Television Awards.
The Arena Season 1
Season 1 of The Arena was broadcast from January–March 2007, and ran for 11 episodes. In each episode, teams from two secondary schools in Singapore debated against each other. The topic for debate was different for each episode. Ten schools competed in the first round, from which the five winning teams and the best-scoring losing team progressed to the quarter-finals. The semi-finals were contested by the three winners and the best-scoring losing team from the quarter-finals. In the Grand Final, telecast on 27 March 2007, the team from the United World College of South East Asia defeated the team from Hwa Chong Institution to win the competition. Each episode was hosted by Adrian Pang.
Progress of teams
Ten schools qualified for the televised rounds of The Arena Season 1.
Note: In both Round One and the Quarter-Finals, the highest-scoring losing team also advanced to the next round as a 'Wildcard'.
Topics and results for each episode
Debate format
The format of debates for The Arena Season 1 was created specially for the show and differed from other competitive debate formats.
Each team had three speakers. The first speaker on each team spoke for 3 minutes and 30 seconds, the second speaker for 4 minutes, and the third speaker for 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Each set of two speeches was considered to be one 'Round' within the debate, and each 'Round' was judged separately. Speakers stood in the middle of the room, and spoke directly to one opponent from the other team (rather than facing to the audience and the judges as in most other debate formats). This opponent was allowed interrupt the speech with points of information (POIs – a feature of both the World Schools style and British Parliamentary style of debating). However unlike other debate formats which use POIs, the speaker is not allowed to decline to hear a point when it was offered by the opposing speaker. Each team had a 1-minute and 30 second POI 'Rebuttal Bank', which they could use over the course of the three speeches by the other team. In between the second and third speeches of the two teams, there was an additional 3-minute 'Group Rebuttal Round' involving all 6 debaters in a series of short arguments and immediate responses on the topic.
Each episode was judged by four judges. Each judge decided which team they thought has won each 'Round' within the debate, and the team with the most points at the end was declared the winner.
Judges
Each episode was judged by three regular judges and one guest judge. The regular judges on the show were:
K.K. Seet – Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore
Eunice Olsen – Nominated Member of Parliament and former Miss Singapore Universe
Ashraf Safdar – Journalist from the Today newspaper and member of the Debate Association Singapore Executive Committee
Guest judges for the show included Singapore celebrities like Tan Kheng Hua and Daisy Irani, and Gaurav Keerthi, who was also from the Debate Association. The guest judge for the final (and the only guest judge to appear on the show twice) was Viswa Sadasivan, the Chairman of the Political Development Feedback Group of Singapore's Feedback Unit, who is also the Chairman of the Right Angle Group and a former TV presenter.