Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood features a long scene concerning the filming of an episode of western series Lancer.
I was discussing the film with my son and he assumed Tarantino had made Lancer up -- he was surprised to learn ( after a tour of what I like to call my ‘mind shed’) I could dimly recall the show.
The tale of two half brothers working on their father’s ranch had an early Sunday afternoon slot on the BBC in around 1974 (it must have been summer otherwise I’d have been watching the Big Match on ITV).
Lancer, one of the last of the crop of US western series of the 1960s, made little impression on me.
Its main drawback was that it wasn’t The Virginian. James Drury (pictured) the star, title character and foreman of Shiloh ranch was my first childhood idol -- I had a picture of him, clipped from the Radio Times, on my bedroom wall.
As an under-five I was obsessed with cowboys and, to my shame, recall insisting on wearing my gunbelt to the girl next door’s birthday party.
Friday night was Virginian night and I was allowed to up to watch Drury galloping his white horse towards the camera in time to the theme tune and being joined by Trampas (Doug McClure) and sheriff Emmett Ryker ((Clu Gulager).
I was distraught when the show received a reboot as The Men from Shiloh -- the cast looked like a bunch of hippies with their broad brimmed hats and even broader moustaches. The previously clean cut Drury was sporting facial fungus. too! I didn’t like it one bit.
The revamp lasted one series before the show was ditched as US TV moguls switched from the wild west to cop dramas.
However, for a few years in the early to mid-1970s Monday night on BBC2 remained an oasis for western fans and if there was no school, or I was deserving of a special treat, or I just kept really really quiet, I could stay up to watch High Chaparall or Alias Smith and Jones.
The former was more modern than the Virginian but had not adopted the hippy dress code. Its look could best be described as dusty and sweaty. Buck and Blue Cannon, especially Blue, were permanently glistening with perspiration as they battled Apaches and Mexican bandits in the arid wastes of Arizona. How did the cattle survive?
The series must have been a huge hit as Airfix produced a 00 scale set of tiny High Chaparral cowboys which I received as a present.
While I enjoyed the sweat-stained drama of the Chaparall I preferred the less po-faced Alias Smith and Jones. I first knew of the programme from overhearing teenage girls on the school bus discussing the relative merits of its TWO stars Pete Duel and Ben Murphy but even so I assumed, naturally enough, that it was actually about THREE cowboys Alias, Smith and Jones.
When I finally saw the show I was delighted to find the outlaw duo’s efforts to go straight were funny as well as exciting and it became my new favourite. I remained loyal even when Duel died and was replaced by an actor who didn’t look a bit like him (and I was reliably informed by the girls was not a quarter as good looking).
A few years later my family did something it had never done before -- we watched the big film on Christmas Day night, a time normally devoted to present giving, listening to old Frank Sinatra records and binge drinking. However, 1975 was different and, for no apparent reason, we gathered to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
About half way into the movie my nine-year-old brain whirred into action - here were two lovable outlaws trying to go straight, one’s really smart and the other’s a quick-on-the-draw crack shot. For Hannibal Hayes and Kid Curry read Butch and Sundance. This was my first realisation that TV directly ripped off cinema all the time.
Alias Smith and Jones was the last hurrah for the TV cowboy in the 1970s and Monday night on BBC2 became home to The Waltons, who preferred sawing planks to punching cows and solved their problems with homespun wisdom rather than six-shooters. Golly gee, it was all very nice but whether or not Elizabeth should switch from dungarees to dresses was hardly as gripping as an attack by rustlers. The main tension for me was provided by John Boy’s mole which looked as thought it was about to explode at any moment taking half of Waltons Mountain with it. I have since discovered the blemish has its own Facebook page.
Doug McClure did make a short-lived appearance in the Monday night slot. This time in tandem with William Shatner (Trampas and Captain Kirk!) in a curious semi-western comedy-drama Barbary Coast about a spy and conman in old San Francisco. I enjoyed its intricate plots, full of double crosses and disguises, but I must have been one of the few as it ran for just one season.
For decades The Virginian was not repeated in the UK but with the proliferation of channels it has turned up in recent years and I was amazed to see that each episode was 75 minutes long! This means as a child I can only ever have watched the first half an hour or so before being spirited off to bed. All those endings I missed…
As for any reader who might be thinking ‘What about Bonanza?’. I never saw it as a kid but did catch it when the BBC dredged it up for reruns in the 1980s. I thought it was crap and I think as a five-year-old I would have thought ‘This isn’t a patch on the Virginian!’.
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