The morning TV showed me previews of Get Smart and I suppose I will have to bestir myself to get out and see it. There is a cheap day in picture theatres during the week to see films, I will check my purse for loose change. Or else wait till it’s on DVD at BlockBusters.
But it made me think of the shows I used to watch on TV (how many many years ago?) in the 60s and 70s.
Get Smart was one of course, and I enjoyed Dick Van Dyke too - we were more innocent then. The only other American show which I remember enjoying was the Twilight Zone for my tastes ran - and still run - to English cops and robbers, and to English spies.
Z-Cars was a fabulous show. At the time it was shocking! There was suddenly a new realism to the genre as it featured ordinary policing in Newtown, a fictitious town to the north of Liverpool. Apart from the crooks, it featured the day to day lives of the policemen themselves, depicting them as fallible human beings capable of gambling, drinking and, most controversially of all, wife beating.
Society was changing rapidly and Z-Cars mirrored the social changes of its era. The writers bravely dared to push the envelope of the dramatic depiction of the police and their role in a rapidly changing society, to starkly realistic new heights.
It went on to be replaced by an even more realistic show, the Sweeney. More on that later, and on Callan.
Can you spare a dime for an old dame?Tags: TV
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June 24th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Are you old enough to have been able to watch Peyton Place? I remember it but I wasn’t old enough to be allowed to watch it.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Um. Cough. Yes, I’m old enough. 1964? I imagined myself to be far too sophisticated to enjoy it.(I was at an insufferable age)