TV - The Golden Oldies

In the 60’s and 70’s, we had a black and white TV, which looked something like the picture on the left. At that time, we had only 2 channels and broadcast times would start in the evening and end by midnight.

Son No 1, who will be 13 this year, expressed surprise when he first heard about this. Only then did I realize how much this younger generation took the TV for granted. He and the other two younger boys were born in an era where TV programmes were on 24/7 and they could channel-surf close to 100 channels. He probably never imagined that TV could ever exist without cable, or subscription, TV. But I digress.

Coming back to those days, even within the limited broadcast hours, we managed to watch quite a number of programmes. One of the earliest shows I remember was the cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, the timeless classic that continued to captivate my own children today. [I realise now that for one year from 2004 to 2005, Scooby-Doo held the Guinness World Record for having the most episodes of any animated television series ever produced. Amazing!]

As very young children, my younger sister and I also watched a local children’s production called Tepuk Amai-Amai. Every week, the host would interact with different groups of invited children and one of the segments had the children skip around the room riding a wooden-stick horse. I remember we would follow this segment in our living room by skipping around the room, using our bolster or anything that resembled a pole, as our de facto horse! As far as western educational programmes were concerned, I don’t remember Sesame Street but instead, at that time, we watched a similar show called The Electric Company.

But the two shows that were the most popular amongst us in the 70’s were The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. The former was about a man called Steve Austin who had parts of his anatomy replaced by mechanical (bionic) parts which enabled him to perform super feats. The Bionic Woman was a spin-off from the show and more or less followed the same story line with a woman protagonist called Jaime Sommers.

These were the Super Heroes of our time and we followed each episode faithfully. Believe it or not, I was such a fan that I kept a log which documented the development of the story line each episode – that clearly showed my love for writing since young! The guy who played The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors, recently took the role of the grandfather in the action movie, Ben 10.

Another category of shows that we loved to watch were the family shows. My firm favourites were The Brady Bunch (left) and later, Eight Is Enough. We also watched The Little House On The Prairie and The Waltons but I was never really hooked on these two shows as they were a bit too... wholesome? I also remember a show called My Three Sons which of course is the inspiration for the title of this blog of mine :)

In the late 70’s, we watched Kristy McNichol in the family drama, Family, which explored social issues in an upper middle class family with 3 fairly grown-up children.

In terms of soap, we watched Peyton Place – which was unbelievable, because the themes of adultery and betrayal in a small town were really not very suitable for our very young minds then. But the show was not graphic like the shows of today. Later, we watched Dallas – which had all the girls in school swooning over Patrick Duffy who played Bobby Ewing, the younger brother who was always outsmarted by the evil J.R.

Our diet of TV shows consists of shows from many different genre. As far as entertainment variety shows were concerned, who can forget The Donny And Marie Show? Click here for the Youtube video - “I’m a little bit of country.... and I’m a little bit rock n roll…”

For crime shows, we loved Charlie’s Angels, a show about 3 beautiful lady sleuths which shot Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith to fame. I also followed a fairly light-weight show called CHiPs, which was about the adventures of two California Highway Patrol (geddit?) policemen and the only reason it remained in my mind was Erik Estrada. The high profile detective shows like Hawaii 5-O, Kojak, Starsky & Hutch and Mission Impossible were not really my cup of tea, though these were household names during the 60s and 70s.

I also remember the medical drama, Emergency!, about two paramedics who drove an ambulance and the World War 2 show about a group of American soldiers in Europe called Combat. The fantasy genre threw up shows like Bewitched and Fantasy Island.

That’s not all. The 60's and 70’s had some of the best sitcoms ever. Before Cheers, Seinfeld and Friends, there were Gilligan’s Island, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. And they all have memorable opening songs which I am pretty sure we can still hum after all these years... Thus, I will leave this post with this great show opening number from Laverne & Shirley - Make Our Dreams Come True!