The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
TV isn’t what it used to be
Idon’t, leaping instantly to my own defence and justifying my sad daily existence before actually called upon to do so, watch that much daytime TV. Although I will admit to the odd fix of A Place in the Sun or Escape to the Country when unsuspecting couples find themselves shunted round resorts at home and away that I like the look and sound of when confronted with the Scottish winter. There is a reason, after all, that the word “dreich” was invented in Scotland.
Be that as it may, staying indoors glued to the gogglebox (as opposed to Gogglebox, to which I have not yet succumbed) isn’t usually for me. Until, that is, I spotted an ad recently, for which obscure channel I signally failed to notice, for whole afternoons of 70s Western favourite The High Chaparral.
Boy, did the idea of back-to-back fast draws and slow drawls take me back to the days when the small screen was festooned with what my late father-inlaw used to refer to as “cowsers”.
I loved them, partly because my wee cousin and I still used to play cowboys and Indians together (rather than the even less politically-correct Japs and commandos) as we ran around the back green, swinging off greenie poles and firing cap guns. No girlie dollies and prams for me, no indeedy.
Apart from the odd intervention of Batman and Robin (the original and best with Adam West, long before the Dark Knight ever saw the light), we were re-creating Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Cheyenne, The Legend of Jesse James and The Virginian.
Of course, moving into early teenhood, there were one or two adolescent ulterior motives for settling down at 9pm on a Monday night to watch the latest from America.
Mirroring my fondness for the crusty-yet-witty Rooster Cogburn in the big-screen original (and best) True Grit, my High Chaparral favourite was the eccentric Uncle Buck rather than what passed for eye candy for others (Mark Slade as Billy “Blue Boy” Cannon and the saturnine charms of Henry Darrow’s Manolito Montoya).
Little Joe in Bonanza did little for me, either, but I did have an early fangirl fancy for Jess Harper in Laramie, as played by the rather lovely Robert Fuller, for Ty Hardin as Bronco Layne and even the very young Clint Eastwood as Rawhide’s Rowdy Yates.
But my favourite of all was a shortlived series that ran for only a couple of seasons in the cross-over between the 60s and 70s – Lancer.
Having been inspired by the recent unexpected re-appearance of High Chaparral, I took to th’interweb and thanks to the wonders of technology, I now find there are entire communities of nutcases like me who remember these things from their impressionable youth and a slew of excerpts on Youtube, so I don’t even have to pretend I don’t watch daytime TV any more.
Lancer was Bonanza-lite, about a patriarch rancher and his two very different estranged sons who united to defend the family homestead against assorted baddies and blackhats.
I absolutely LOVED it; the blond, clean-cut and privileged older brother Scott pitted against the young gun Johnny Madrid, dark, troubled and ultimately turning up trumps.
So cliched; so brilliant! And how can anyone compete with a character called Johnny Madrid? Except perhaps, the aforementioned Rowdy Yates.
Call me shallow, but in the wake of the common knowledge that John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison, I never quite recovered from finding out that Ty Hardin’s real name was Orison Whipple Hungerford junior. It’s like discovering that Che Guevara was actually christened Ernesto.
Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t make ’em like that anymore… All about that bass It was rather fine this week to hear that the late Jack Bruce, one of the great bass players of all time, has been honoured with a special sculpture at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
He attended his alma mater in its days as the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama to study cello and composition, although his real love at that stage was jazz.
As the RSAMD stuffily didn’t approve in those far-off days of its students playing that kind of music, he was given an ultimatum to stop or leave. As if in preparation for a life as a rock ‘n’ roll rebel, he left.
And didn’t look back, as his subsequent career, most notably with Cream, alongside Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker, attests. For my money, the first few bass-heavy bars of Badge, a song he wrote for the three-piece supergroup, is one of the great rock introductions of all time.
Apt then, that some of his own bass strings form part of the installation created by another Conservatoire alumna, Hazel Blue. And in spite of him being more or less pit oot by the college authorities of the time, Bruce’s words, etched into the piece, are pretty good advice for any would-be professional musician in any style.
“Failure can be a triumph; but fear of failure is always a disaster.”
Call me shallow, but in the wake of the common knowledge that John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison, I never quite recovered from finding out that Ty Hardin’s real name was Orison Whipple Hungerford junior