Dirk Benedict

Occasional visitors to this blog may be baffled when they encounter some random picture of Dirk Benedict. Regular readers will be used to it.

Dirk Benedict is an American actor who is best known for playing loveable rogues, especially in the science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica (1978-79) and the adventure series The A-Team (1983-87).

Why does this chap's picture appear without explanation in many of my blog posts? Here is a numbered list of reasons:

1) Because I have a rather silly sense of humour, and I enjoy the irrelevance, as well as the idea of people being baffled by it.

2) Because I love traditions, and posting irrelevant pictures of Dirk Benedict on this blog is now a tradition.

3) Because "Dirk Benedict" is the coolest name ever.

4) Because there is something very likeable about the chap.

5) Because I think it's a good idea to include pictures in longer blog posts, to give the eye some relief from a monotonous block of text, and sometimes I can't think of any other picture to use.

I'm hardly a dedicated Dirk Benedict fan, or anything like that. I watched a lot of episodes of The A-Team when I was a boy, but only because my brothers were watching them. I found it hard to follow and a bit tedious. (I watched some episodes again quite recently, and enjoyed them more as an adult.)

I preferred Battlestar Galactica. I have happy memories of watching this on Saturday mornings. The otherwordly visuals stirred my sense of wonder. Sadly, my experience in this regard has been the exact opposite of my experience with The A-Team. I tried to watch it again in recent years and found it almost unwatchable. I'm not a big fan of the remake, which ran from 2004 to 2009. But it had its moments, and it was undeniably better than the original.

Dirk Benedict himself wrote an essay which mauled the remake, and which I found very entertaining. You can read it on his personal website here. A brief passage will show that he has his heart in the right place, whatever he might be wrong or right about when it comes to specifics: 

Witness the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica. It's bleak, miserable, despairing, angry and confused. Which is to say, it reflects, in microcosm, the complete change in the politics and mores of today's world as opposed to the world of yesterday. The world of Lorne Greene (Adama) and Fred Astaire (Starbuck's Poppa), and Dirk Benedict (Starbuck). I would guess Lorne is glad he's in that Big Bonanza in the sky and well out of it. Starbuck, alas, has not been so lucky. He's not been left to pass quietly into that trivial world of cancelled TV characters. [Benedict was particularly annoyed that the character he played, the roguish fighter pilot Starbuck, had been "re-imagined" as a woman.]

"Re-imagining", they call it. "un-imagining" is more accurate. To take what once was and twist it into what never was intended. So that a television show based on hope, spiritual faith, and family is unimagined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction. To better reflect the times of ambiguous morality in which we live, one would assume. A show in which the aliens (Cylons) are justified in their desire to destroy our civilisation. One would assume. Indeed, let us not say who are the good guys and who are the bad. That is being "judgemental". And that kind of (simplistic) thinking went out with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne and, well the original Battlestar Galactica.

Despite his views on the remake, he did have a picture taken with the actress who plays the new Starbuck. In Starbucks. A somewhat famous picture which, perversely, I've never actually used on this blog.

A lesser-known Dirk Benedict appearance, but one which made a big impression on me in my childhood, was "Mark of the Devil", an episode of the Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense TV series. In this episode, a man murders a tatooist and finds an uncanny tattoo spreading on his body. Although this programme stuck in my head, I forgot that it was Dirk Benedict who played the murderer, until I watched it again in my twenties.

Dirk Benedict made a personal appearance in University College Dublin, where I work, some years ago. I think he was receiving honorary membership of one or other of the university societies. One of my library colleagues attended (he was a student at the time). He said that the excitement was at fever pitch before Mr. Benedict appeared, with audience members (who had mostly grown up in the eighties) drumming on the tables and humming the A-Team music. He also said that DB was very charming and funny. When one student asked him if he would sign his metal plate, he simply replied: "I'll kick your ass." The lecture theatre was packed out, and DB also spent some time talking to those students who didn't get into the main event.

Anyway, that's the story of Dirk Benedict and me. 

I have no plans to discontinue the tradition of him popping up without warning in unrelated blog posts. (I can't actually remember when I started doing this, which gives it the misty provenance of a sure-nuff tradition.)