Tuesday 23 January 2018

The Ones I Didn't Watch...





I’ve written a lot about the television I remember watching in the past, but I’ve just been put in mind of a couple of series neither of which I watched, but both of which I remember. In both cases, it’s not so much a case of recollecting the programmes, but a certain atmosphere with which they’ve become associated.

There was never any shortage of Western series on TV during the 1960s, from Wagon Train (before my time) to Bonanza. The genre was beginning to wane in popularity by the end of the decade, but two particular titles remained perennial favourites of the schedulers at the BBC. The Virginian, starring James Drury, had been shown by the corporation since 1964, initially on BBC2, then from the mid-60s onwards, on BBC1. The series itself, produced by America’s NBC network, was television’s third longest-running Western, amassing a total of 249 episodes over nine years, and its demise in 1971 signalled the end of the dominance of the genre. The other fixture Western at the BBC, this time on BBC2, was The High Chaparral, which had also aired on NBC in the States from 1967 to 1971. Both series continued to be repeated on the BBC as late as the year 2000, clocking up hundreds of broadcasts between them. Interestingly (or not), these were the only two big Western series that the corporation picked up in the 1960s, with titles like Bonanza, Gunsmoke and Wagon Train going to their commercial rivals, who had more money available to spend on such imports. ITV had pretty much given up on Westerns by the late 60s – it’s hard to think of any examples that were being scheduled by around 1970 – but the BBC continued to show both The Virginian and The High Chaparral in primetime slots well into the new decade.

I remember our dad watching both of them (on the rare evenings when he wasn’t out playing the drums), but I’d lost interest in Westerns at about the same age that I grew out of my cowboy outfit. There had been an offbeat entry on ITV in the early 60s, called Sugarfoot (known in its home country as Tenderfoot), which was broadcast by ABC in the Midlands and North of England on Saturday teatimes, and which I remember watching with some level of enjoyment (although I was barely of an age to be able to follow the storylines), but aside from this one example, and a few old movies that were cranked out on Sunday afternoons, I never really got into the genre.

Yet, simply by dint of their constant presence in the schedules, both The Virginian (latterly The Men From Shiloh) and The High Chaparral worked their way into my consciousness. A glance at their opening titles, courtesy of YouTube (links below) shows them to be instantly familiar, albeit in colour, where I would have been watching in black and white, and each is accompanied by a memorably evocative piece of theme music (composed, in the case of The Virginian, by the prolific Percy [Theme from a Summer Place] Faith). In fact, I always felt that the theme from The High Chaparral had plagiarised the melody from Joe Meek’s Telstar, adding a soupçon of Jerome Moross’s theme from the movie The Big Country. In the case of both these series, the opening credits were as much as I ever saw, but the face of Virginian star James Drury is instantly familiar even now, whereas the cast of The High Chaparral, glimpsed only in passing during the opening credits, are still a mystery to me.

By the early 70s, these two series had each settled into a bit of a scheduler’s rut, with Chaparral tending to occupy a slot around 8pm on Monday nights, and always on BBC2. The Virginian, meanwhile, was a staple of Friday evenings, generally to be found in the 6.40pm slot, immediately after Nationwide. The merest glance at the listings on the BBC’s genome database confirms that these slots persisted over months, if not years, the cumulative effect of which was to confer on each series certain associations.

Just hearing the music from The High Chaparral is enough to evoke the dull tedium of a Monday evening, knowing that there was nothing else to see that night on television (nothing I was allowed to stay up for, at any rate) and with the knowledge of another four days to be endured at school before the weekend rolled around again. The music from Panorama has pretty much the same effect. The Virginian, on the other hand, and still to this day, comes with a Friday feeling, welcoming the start of the weekend; and although I never sat through an episode, the music and opening credits still have that magical Pavolvian effect. A further level of association comes with The Virginian, probably spurred by my imagination conjuring up impressions from the wide, Wyoming landscape glimpsed in the titles. What it says to me is not necessarily the ‘West’, but the idea of there being a wider world out there, and ideas about what it might contain. It also speaks somehow of the lighter evenings in spring and early summer, and that glimpse of landscape might also be conjuring up the rather more parochial setting of the wide expanses of Sutton Park, a potential destination for a trip out on such evenings.

Athough I never sat and watched either of these series, in a curious way, the memory of them is clearer than my recollection of programmes that I actually did make a point of watching, certainly when those series disappeared off air in a relatively short space of time. I tend to find, though, that however much one thinks one remembers, or not, memory remains imprinted in the mind, like a recording, and even things one imagines one has forgotten can spring to mind afresh just by some associative stimulus. Repetiton is clearly a big factor, and regardless of whether one was a devotee of either The High Chaparral, The Virginian or, for that matter, Panorama, the memory of hearing that same piece of music, week after week, played out at a set time of day, with its surrounding context of obligations to school, work, or whatever is deeply imprinted, set permanently in the wet cement of the past.

See if it works for you:



 

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