Why NOT Late Night With Stephen Colbert ‘Live’ from Singapore, or Hong Kong, or Sri Lanka, or Mumbai or ANYWHERE in Asia?

When some pretty prominent figures in the region contact you to mention just what a game changer it would be if the idea to try and have Stephen Colbert host his show in, perhaps, Singapore or the Philippines or Hong Kong, one listens and slowly exhales and hopes to hell this could happen. 

The highly rated CBS television show that had become a nightly fixture of sharp satirical wit under Stephen Colbert and those great hosts before him, shone a powerful light on a country no longer under God, but being trampled and Trumpled by a convicted felon and dictator who bought for himself and his family the right to be the most powerful and morally bankrupt person in America. 

It didn’t take long before those big businesses he had reined in with all manner of party favours were happy to be his “running dogs” and shone a cracked mirror on what lay ahead and how taking aim at the bigly TACO would not be tolerated. 

This led to some big deal corporate business dealings going on that needed his approval and which was given, seemingly on the condition that Stephen Colbert and The Late Show be removed.

We in Asia saw some of this fawning at work when, like Debbie Once Did Dallas, Trump Went To Beijing and watched China’s inscrutable President Xi play the bigly blob of wobbly orange jelly pudding like a cat would a cockroach. 

So bamboozled by the show of shows put together that played to the serial narcissism of someone constantly needing his fix of being around gutless sycophants, what most of the American media who reported on this hysterical and hardly historical visit completely missed was The Art Of War being played on China’s terms, and those who know all about “losing face” watching The Man Who Would Be King lose “face” while continuing to turn the other cheek. 

Donald Trump was being bitch slapped and made to look like the crazy fat “gweilo” that he is. 

Meanwhile, in America, Stephen Colbert was saying goodbye to the millions who had got to know him and trust him and love him as his time behind the desk of The Late Show started to wind down with a guest list of those very much aware of how power corrupts and disrupts and like a cancer grows. 

Stephen Colbert will be back soon somewhere, because, as Tom Petty once sang, he won’t back down. 

Being someone who was a stranger in a strange land when at nine years old being uprooted from my birthplace in Ceylon, and today known as Sri Lanka, and ending up with his penniless parents in a place with a funny name- Hong Kong- and having had to grow up fast as an “ethnic minority”, I am a self made man who understands today’s global landscape pretty well.

I have also met Trump a couple of times in Dubai and when he was in the company of former German champion tennis player Boris Becker and selling whatever he was trying to sell to the powerful Maktoum family. He 

failed, but I got a whiff of where he was heading.

This was when with Universal Music and somehow meeting and seeing the business model that the flawed genius of Roger Ailes had for the what became Fox News. 

In life, you meet all kinds and you never forget and very rarely forgive. More on this and how the dots join at another time. 

Right now, it’s about righting some gawdawful wrongs and, hopefully, giving Stephen Colbert a strategic option right out of left field and where he can make himself heard toute de suite: Asia.

What I am proposing goes from being a little thought bubble I was massaging to something much bigger and much LOUDER and with a sting to its tail. 

For myself, there’s such a brilliant opportunity for the Asian region to stop being categorised as “Third World” and come together and present to the world who we are and what we have and how we are ready to DO, because this world cannot limp along being torn apart and fractured. 

If this can somehow happen by Asia hosting and being part of the Stephen Colbert Show or a Stephen Colbert Special, this would be a beautiful and timely opportunity to be seen as ONE WORLD.

It’s bigly and unchained stuff, Django.