Note: As has fairly frequently happened on this blog, I started writing this as a standalone blog post and decided towards the end that it would have to be the first instalment in a series.
I'm a compulsive compiler of lists and records. For instance, I have a spreadsheet of all the films I can remember seeing, which I regularly update. It's probably an unhealthy habit. I don't want anything to go unchronicled.
Recently, it occurred to me to list all the TV shows which were watched in my home, growing up. Obviously this is going to be a "dynamic list", as they say these days-- or an ongoing task, as I'd be more inclined to put it myself.
I've been ashamed of watching television my entire life. I think its influence on society was catastrophic. Still, that horse has long since bolted. And, although the initial and overall effect of TV on society was bad, that's not to say everything about it was or is bad.
The TV in my own home was constantly on. My father was a TV addict. He was also perhaps the most well-read man I've ever known, which is especially impressive given that he left school aged eleven and did manual jobs for most of his working years. He could, and did, recite long passages from Shakespeare, Yeats, and a whole host of other authors. The flat was full of books (hundreds or perhaps even thousands of books) that he'd bought. But he was also a TV addict, and would fall asleep watching television every night. Not only that, but he'd instantly wake up if you switched it off! To be fair, he was also a current affairs addict, so that was a big part of his TV viewing. But he watched pretty much everything else, too.
So TV is the background to all my domestic memories. And I didn't go out much as a child, being quite timid and shy.
Although I grew up in a housing estate that was euphemistically termed "disadvantaged", we did have one advantage-- at a time when most of Ireland had only the two Irish TV channels, we always had the British channels as well. Then we got satellite TV as soon as it came along. According to Wikipedia, "The Ballymun Flats were the first homes with cable television in Ireland". When I first heard about satellite TV, I genuinely assumed the studios were in a satellite orbiting the earth (although I quickly worked out this wasn't the case and felt silly for thinking it).
For many years, our television was a black and white portable. My father would even watch snooker on it. It had no remote control. In fact, even the dial had come off at one stage. You had to change the channels using a pair of pliers.
Well, enough background. I've broken my list into several categories. The first is...
Shows That Were a Big Deal in my Childhood
...either because I loved them, or because several members of my family loved them.
The top spot undoubtedly goes to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can hardly exaggerate the influence this show had on me. I wrote a whole blog post about it.
Although I can remember watching the original series, I barely understood what was happening. The only thing I really remember is the closing credits sequence. For me, The Next Generation is the gold standard of Star Trek. In fact, I've come to pretty much hate the original series, rather unfairly, because every time I mention Star Trek that's what people bring up. It's as though people started talking about Simon Templar every time you mentioned Sherlock Holmes.
I could write reams and reams about TNG-- so I won't. I used to watch it with all three of my brothers, the only show that brought us together like that.
I also watched Deep Space Nine, which I also liked, but not as much. Much later on, in my adulthood, I watched Voyager and really liked it (possibly more than TNG, although it could never have the same impact). I was derided for this at the time but Voyager is now the most streamed Star Trek.
After TNG, Fawlty Towers was probably the biggest show in my childhood. Me, my parents, and one of my brothers would all watch it together. We not only watched it on TV but also rented it from the video shop, and each episode had the sense of an occasion. My father always treated it as the pinaccle of TV comedy, and I think he was right. My mother would often quote lines from "Waldorf Salad" (there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that this was the greatest episode, although "The Germans" was also a contender).
Only Fools and Horses was another big show, although it didn't have the same sense of event as Fawlty Towers, perhaps because it was more long-running. (Still, it might surprise you that there were only sixty-four episodes made altogether.) My father always said that the show declined when it introduced enduring romantic interests for Del and Rodney, but I disagree. I think it actually got a lot better then. It became "dramedy" rather than pure comedy, which I like.
To round off this category, there is The Late Late Show. This was like the fireside of the Irish nation; its host Gay Byrne was known as "Uncle Gaybo". I often fell asleep on Friday evenings watching it, or perhaps just sitting in the room with it on, the weekend stretching ahead of me.
Children's Shows
The Den was more a "strand" than a show. It was children's after-school (and weekend) programming, comprised of various different shows, all presented by a human host. It really hit its stride when the human host was joined by two puppets, aliens called Zig and Zag, who became a phenomenon in Ireland. Later there was a turkey with a broad Dublin accent called Dustin, who was even better. All three puppets were mildly subversive and therefore massively popular.
There were also "strands" of children's programming on British channels, like Fun Factory on the new Sky channel.
I can't remember which "strands" showed which programmes, except that The Den must have shown the few homegrown Irish productions.
There was one famous (or infamous) show called Bosco which centred on a puppet who lived in a box. He had red hair and a squeaky accent. I really hated Bosco but watched it anyway. It was for young children.
There was a pop-culture centred show for teenagers called Jo Maxi, which is Dublin slang for "taxi". I didn't like this much and usually didn't watch it, but it was on anyway.
The most famous Irish children's TV show of all time is Wanderley Wagon, but I only have very vague memories of watching this once or twice.
Much less famous is Anything Goes, a sort of "zany" variety show called which I liked as I always aspired to be zany and eccentric. But even as a kid I could see it was pretty poor stuff. So much for the Irish production.
One of my all-time favourite cartoons was Ulysses 31, a Japanese science fiction cartoon which relocated Greek myths to space. It was excellent. Ulysses and his crew were trying to get home (to Earth), and I think "the journey home" is the most powerful narrative of all. It featured a blue-faced alien girl called Yumi, who competes with Diana from V as my first crush of all time. (Another show that exposed me to Greek myth was Odysseus, the Greatest Hero of them All, presented by Tony Robinson, though I only have vague memories of this.)
Shamefully, I really loved a cartoon called Beverly Hills Teens, which was just about a bunch of rich teens in Beverly Hills.
As this blog post is already too long, I'm just going to close it off with a list of children's shows I remember from my childhood, whether or not I watched them myself, and move onto other categories in a future post.
Cities of Gold. From the people who made Ulysses 31, but on this occasion followed a bunch of kids in pre-Columbian America, at the time of its discovery. Had magical elements.
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. A very strange science-fiction show which involved motorcycling heroes fighting plant people.
Danger Mouse. Not really my thing, though the London backdrop appealed to my anglophilia.
Batman (Adam West version). I honestly didn't realize this was tongue-in-cheek and got frustrated that the villains escaped from the State Penitentiary every week. What was the point?
You Can't Do That on Television: Mildly subversive Canadian TV show which I enjoyed.
Chockablock: a British educational show for young children, where a presenter drove around a room full of machines in a vehicle like a go-kart. This is so obscure that, until the internet came along, I thought I'd imagined it or misremembered some other show-- even though I had a very accurate memory, as it turned out. But nobody else seemed to remember it!
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I remember He-Man's backstory really bothered me, as it seemed full of contradictions, so I came up with my own alternative version once, in the school playground.
Transformers. I loved the toys and the comics, but the cartoon was never as good, though I wanted to like it.
The Trap Door was a rather witty and self-aware British animated series involving monsters that emerged from the titular trap-door. Loving anything to do with mysterious doors or portals, I gobbled it up.
A list of kids' shows which I watched, but I don't really have much to say about: Thundercats, Top Cat, Alvin and the Chipmunks (I hated it, but still watched it), Count Duckula, Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds, The Flintstones, the Jetsons, MASK, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Dungeons and Dragons, Fraggle Rock, The Amazing Adventures of Morph (which disturbed me), Bananaman, Rainbow, Sports Billy, Button Moon, Wacky Races.
Wow, compiling that list makes me realize I watched a lot of trash. And there's probably many more titles to add. The only thing that consoles me is that, going through a list of 1980's children's programmes on Wikipedia, there are many more that I never saw.
One peculiar footnote: for someone who was to become such a reactionary, I had absolutely no interest in the vintage black-and-white TV shows that were shown as part of kid's programming. I mean shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or Get Smart or (bizarrely) Mrs Muir and the Ghost. I can remember the title credits, but never watched more than a few minutes of any of them. There was one show called Comedy Capers, which was a compilation of supposedly funny scenes from old black-and-white slapstick films. I felt complete and utter withering contempt for this. I regarded it as the bottom of the bottom of the barrell, and wondered if anybody actually watched it!
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