The Dallas cowboys
We said goodbye to scheming JR Ewing and the residents of Southfork Ranch 30 years ago.
TEXAN oil barons, family feuds and shady business deals kept viewers hooked on Dallas for 356 episodes.
It all came to an end in May, 1991, when the BBC aired the final episode just two days after it was shown on American television. The finale imagined how the world would have looked if JR Ewing had not been around.
Larry Hagman, who played the ruthless oil tycoon, once said: “Dallas hit a chord back in the late 70s and 80s because it was the age of greed. Here you have this unapologetic character who is mean and nasty and ruthless and does it all with an evil grin. I think people related to JR back then because we all have someone we know exactly like him. Everyone in the world knows a JR.”
The glitzy American series about the Texan super-rich was watched by 65 million viewers worldwide every week during its heyday.
Initially JR had been intended as a supporting character, but Larry Hagman’s Dallas baddie soon became the star act of the series, coming out with lines like “Never tell the truth when a good lie will do”.
Who shot JR? was the question of everyone’s lips in 1980 and more than 300 million across the world tuned in to find out who had tried to bump off the head of the Ewing family in a memorable whodunnit plotline.
Southfork Ranch was the setting for much of the action with Linda Gray as JR’s long-suffering wife Sue Ellen, Patrick Duffy as Bobby Ewing, who famously returned from the dead in a shower scene explaining that everything that had gone before was “just a dream”.
Sir Terry Wogan was a big fan of Dallas and even nicknamed Charlene Tilton, who played Lucy Ewing in the hit series, the “Poison Dwarf” due to her antics on screen and her 4ft 11ins height.