A truly global celebration

Grand gala

He points to the CCTV Spring Festival gala, which he appeared on in 1999, when it was one of the most viewed televised events in the country and the world.

"For a long time, this was a kind of family tradition, that everyone watched at the same time. It was the talk of the town the next day, and everyone sort of compared it to the last year, and it was like a ritual that united everyone," Moser says.

"Nowadays, some people don't even have a television. They're looking at their phone, and they're watching several different chunjie wanhui (Spring Festival galas) at different times, and they watch them later on, and stuff like that.

"So, you sort of get more variety and maybe greater quality and more interest, but you also lose this kind of unity. It's good and bad. You lose some things, but you gain some very valuable things."

Moser, who moved to China in 1986, says appearing in the gala was a "very special event" in his life.

"For Chinese people, it's also not just cohesive and unifying for the country, but everyone is aware that the Chinese people overseas are also watching it — maybe not at the same time, but they end up watching it. So, it's like uniting Chinese culture all across the world, which I think is very important."

For the 1999 edition, he joined three other non-Chinese for a performance of xiangsheng, or "cross-talk", a Chinese comedy genre involving humorous conversations.

"It was the Year of the Rabbit. So, I really loved that during rehearsals they had these little children dressed in rabbit costumes, and they were always running around. I thought — these cute little kids dressed in rabbit suits — it was just so sweet," Moser recalls.

"I'd seen the Spring Festival gala many years on the television, but it was my first time to actually participate in it. I was amazed at all the effort that goes into it — many months of preparation and many, many rehearsals and changes. The timing has to be exactly the same for each performance because it's done live, so you need to have each performance timed down to the second," he explains.

Another challenge is that every part needs to appeal to every viewership in China, he says.

"Young kids, the grandmas, the parents, the young teenagers — you need to have something in the show that has something for everyone," he says.

"It was probably one of the most exhausting experiences in my life but also one of the most, sort of, gratifying," Moser says.

"It was very scary to be standing there performing the skit on TV knowing that as many as 800 million people were going to be seeing us on the stage. That's pretty terrifying. But luckily, we'd memorized our lines so well that we could read them in our sleep. It was a really, really amazing experience and so much fun."