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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