I wrote this on the return of Dallas for Saturday's Guardian:
According to Michael Palin’s diary for Saturday 9
January 1982, at 9 o’clock that evening he rang his friend George Harrison. After
a few monosyllabic responses, Harrison said pointedly, “You’re obviously not a
Dallas fan, then.” 30 years ago, in a country
with only three TV channels, everyone except Michael Palin seemed to be
watching Dallas. Ed Miliband has said that it was his “secret vice”, which
alarmed his father, the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband, who worried he might be “planning a future in Big Oil”. David Cameron,
probably without generating similar parental alarm, watched Dallas while at Eton.
America was a long way away. Freddie Laker’s transatlantic Skytrain had been offering cheap,
no-frills flights since 1977, but that went into liquidation five years later. The
Atlantic really was an ocean, culturally as well as geographically, and most Britons
saw America only through their television sets. For them Dallas must have
seemed like a vision of
otherness and excess, with big hair, big shoulder pads and big plotlines. To
others it felt like a cultural invasion, American imperialism by other means.
Nowadays, of course, our talent show franchises have ensured that the trash doesn’t
just travel one way.
The new series of Dallas, which begins on 5 September
after a 21-year break, returns to a very different cultural landscape. The Sunday
Telegraph’s long-serving TV critic Philip Purser wrote in his 1992 autobiography,
Done Viewing, that “the gravest disservice that Dallas did television was to
create an appetite for flavours so strong and artificial that the palate was
ruined for more subtle and natural tastes”. But this isn’t quite what happened.
Dallas was a world in which every villain was
irredeemable, every emotion was signposted and everything happened for a
reason, even if it was only that it was all a dream. But most of the successful
dramas imported from the US since Dallas have been the opposite:
multi-stranded, self-consciously clever narratives that demand more
intellectual and emotional work from viewers and do not always reward them with
clear resolutions. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, the American cultural
critic Steven Johnson argued that this kind of complex drama had developed to stand up to repetition, as
shows were repeated on the multiplying number of channels and had an afterlife
as DVD box sets.
The
prototype for this type of series was Hill Street Blues, a programme that began
three years after Dallas. Dallas also had its clones, like Dynasty and
Falcon Crest, but they all predeceased it. Now we have become habituated to the
subtle, natural-seeming flavours of The Wire and Mad Men, they may have ruined
our palates for characters who say “You don’t care how many lives you destroy
if you get what you want!” and “You bought me once, you can’t do it anymore!”
to a swelling background chorus of woodwind and grand piano.
In another sense, though, Dallas in its first
incarnation may have created the conditions for it to be a success second time
around. For it was one of the first shows that British viewers watched with a
squint, with an awareness that it was both addictive and absurd. This
peculiarly British compromise was actually engineered by two expats: Terry
Wogan and Clive James. On his Radio 2 show, Wogan treated Dallas as “a weekly
Eurovision Song Contest” and mocked the way that the oil-rich Ewings could only
afford a single telephone in the hall. In his Observer TV column, Clive James homed
in on Dallas’s
strange, compelling details, from its southern pronunciations (prarlm for
problem, lernch for lunch) to the way that Sue Ellen moved her mouth in
different directions to convey emotion.
This
professionally flippant, slyly populist voice, accepting of kitsch and able to
rework it into unintentional comedy, has become the default style not only of
TV reviewers but also of viewers. We have learnt to
read programmes against the grain, to mine enjoyment from them that may never
have been intended by their makers. And thanks to this, Ed Miliband may like to
note, watching
Dallas need no longer be a secret vice.
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