 If the TV show you are watching features a swag of characters in
unfeasibly large shoulder pads and an excess of hair gel, do not
adjust your set - you are watching television as seen in the 1980s.
The 80s was the decade in which American soaps such as Dallas
and Dynasty dominated the ratings, media coverage and popular
debate.
Dallas was a behemoth! The biggest episode of all was the
one which The Simpsons later parodied in
Who shot Montgomery
Burns?. It dealt with the mystery of who offed evil bastard JR
(Larry Hagman).
Equally brilliant was the way the show dealt with falling ratings
- A season's worth of storyline was dismissed as just a dream in
order to bring back dead hero Patrick Duffy to save the show!
Aaron Spelling (who later would produce Melrose Place and 90210
as well as siring an unnaturally ugly daughter) firmly established
himself in the Eighties. It all began with the trials and
tribulations of the Carrington's and Colby's in Dynasty.
Spelling was also responsible for the introduction of Joan Collins
as superbitch Alexis Colby.
American soaps, with their lavish sets and costumes, dominated
Western television in the 80s.
The 1980s also represented a period when some very expensive
classic drama was produced. In Britain this included Death of a
Princess which gained notoriety because it was about the public
beheading of a Saudi princess and her lover. The Saudi government
tried to stop it being transmitted and banned its importation to
Saudi Arabia (Because of video technology it was being clandestinely
viewed in that country within 24 hours of first transmission in the
UK).
Almost as controversial was the BBC's Boys from the Blackstuff,
about unemployment in Liverpool. Granada TV produced the hugely
expensive but highly successful 13-part The Jewel in the Crown
which was entirely shot in India. The BBC also produced the
film-noir style six-part drama, Edge of Darkness about the
attempt to sabotage a nuclear power station.
EastEnders went on the air in the UK in 1985. The
twice-weekly soap from Albert Square featured the Beales, the
Fowlers and Den and Angie at the Queen Vic. It quickly won the
hearts of a nation and knocked old-timer Coronation Street
from it's perch at Number One.
From a European perspective possibly the most disastrous attempt
to compete with the United States head on was the production of Chateauvallon
(1985) where five European networks attempted to produce a
competitive European equivalent to Dallas.
The 1980s saw a revival of crime drama. NBC created Hunter
, a police drama about a rebellious and tough cop, reminiscent of
Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry role in the movies.
Barbara Corday and Barbara Avedon shaped the first successful
female "buddy" show, CBS' Cagney & Lacey, about
two female cops fighting crime and managing life in the big city.
That show was saved by its fans in 1983 who wrote in protesting
its cancellation. But aside from the novelty of using women as the
stars, the show added little to the style of action-adventure.
Much the same could be said of ABC's imaginative version of the
detective drama, Moonlighting, in which action-adventure
usually played second-fiddle to romance, comedy, or even fantasy.
Still it launched the career of Bruce Willis who would become one of
the great stars of action-adventure in the movies.
 There were two new experiments with the drama genre of crime
during the 1980s. The most interesting was Miami Vice which
represented a return to a conventional 'buddy show' with two
policemen (albeit one white and the other black) plus lots of speed
and doses of violence.
But Miami Vice was unusual in that it appropriated the
look and feel of music videos on MTV. The show made great use of
pastel colours and dressed its stars in hip clothes and featured
rock music backgrounds.
In short Miami Vice offered viewers an extravaganza of
sights and sounds. Such effort cost money, up to $1.5 million per
episode, which made Vice one of the most expensive series of the
period.
The other experiment was MTM Enterprises' Hill Street Blues
which challenged the conventions of traditional crime drama. Comedy
and soap opera styles combined to fashion a different kind of police
story - a serialized version of the everyday life of the men and
women in a particular precinct.
The result won much critical acclaim, not the least because Hill
Street boasted excellent scripts and well-drawn characters, and the
transformed police drama proved a model for some hits of the 1990s
such as NBC's Homicide and ABC's NYPD Blue.
In Britain, police dramas proliferated in the 1980s. Both the BBC
and ITV had female detectives; Juliet Bravo (BBC) and The
Gentle Touch (LWT) respectively; there was a black detective - Wolcott
; a local radio detective Shoestring; a Chinese detective The
Chinese Detective; a Scottish detective Taggart ; the
long-running series set on the island of Jersey Bergerac ;
and the highly acclaimed Inspector Morse series set in Oxford
and starring John Thaw.
There was a massive growth in video recorder ownership in the
1980s, so we were now able to have more control of things (if we
could work the timer), and the VCR became the new necessity.
In 1985, 94% of American households had a television set, and 50%
had a videocassette recorder - double the number from only a year
earlier.
Ah, but which to buy? Beta? VHS? Beta? VHS? One of the most
pressing decisions in the early 80s was which video system to choose
for your expanding home entertainment unit. By 1982 there were nine
VHS manufacturers and three Beta. The term 'Beta Loser' entered the
lexicon as that format went the way of 8-track cartridges.
Also revolutionary, and very pernicious to networks and
advertisers, was the invention of the remote control which first
appeared in 1983. For the first time viewers were able to take
control, flip channels and avoid commercials.
Meanwhile, with satellites now in orbit around the Earth, news
reports became instant and the world shrank. Television made us see
more and made some of us care more. When the Chinese students were
trying to democratise their world we saw it happening live. In fact,
we knew of the events in Tiananmen Square before people elsewhere in
Beijing did!
There was much more television too. British commercial
television's second channel (Channel 4) was launched on Tuesday 2
November 1982 at 4:45 pm. The very first program broadcast was Countdown
with Richard "Twice nightly" Whiteley and Carol Vorderman
(then Mather), long before she turned up on every other program and
commercial in Britain.
Britain's first hour-long news show, Channel Four News,
began at 7:00 pm, followed by Brookside at 8:00 (It was set
in Liverpool, in case you didn't know). The very first Comic
Strip Presents . . . was transmitted on the first night, showing
Five Go Mad In Dorset.
Breakfast TV was introduced in the UK in 1983. The IBA created a
franchise for a national station to run for three hours each
morning. It was awarded to TV-AM, a new TV company which featured on
screen the Famous Five: David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Robert Kee,
Anna Ford, and Angela Rippon.
TV-AM promised to offer a dynamic and exciting news service and
took to the air with a self-declared "mission to explain."
The BBC decided to establish its own five-days-a-week breakfast news
service (Breakfast Time, renamed Breakfast News in
1989) which went on air two weeks earlier (17 January 1983) thereby
making the competition tough for the fledgling commercial station
which began transmission on 1 February 1983.
Viewer ratings for TV-AM were disastrous and the original
presenters were replaced by Anne Diamond and Nick Owen later that
year.
To further boost the survival of TV-AM, the 'superstar' Roland
Rat and his friend Kevin also came onboard.
In the 1980s a range of highly successful and, in some cases,
long running British sitcoms developed. There was Carla Lane's
long-running Bread , and Yes, Minister was successful
enough for Paul Eddington (the Minister) to return as the Prime
Minister in Yes, Prime Minister in 1986 and 1988. Hi-De-Hi!
; 'Allo, 'Allo and Only Fools and Horses were long
running series' that, like Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers,
continue to be regularly repeated.
Meanwhile, cable and satellite networks were being established,
and By the close of the eighties, the box in the living room
(and the ones in the bedrooms and the kitchen) became unquestionably
the main source of our entertainment.
¤ The
Facts of Life
¤ Fairly Secret Army
¤ Falcon Crest
¤ The Fall Guy
¤ Fame
¤ Family Fortunes
¤ Family Ties
¤ Fantasy Island
¤ The Far Pavilions
¤ Fast Forward
¤ Filthy Rich
¤ Filthy, Rich and
Catflap |
¤ Finder
of Lost Loves
¤ A Fine Romance
¤ Finger Mouse
¤ First Tuesday
¤ Flamingo Road
¤ The Flying Doctors
¤ Fortunes of War
¤ Fox
¤ Foxy Lady
¤ Fraggle Rock
¤ Fresh
Fields/French Fields
¤ Fridays
¤ Full House |
¤ Galactica 1980
¤ Game
For A Laugh
¤ Game, Set and
Match
¤ Games People Play
¤ The Gangster
Chronicles
¤ General Hospital
(USA)
¤ The Generation
Game
¤ A
Gentleman's Club
¤ The Gentle Touch
¤ Gimme A Break
¤ Girls On Top
¤ Give Us A Break
|
¤ Give
Us A Clue
¤ Going Live!
¤ The Golden Girls
¤ The Goodies
¤ The Good Old Days
¤ Grandstand
¤ Grange Hill
¤ The Greatest
American Hero
¤ Growing Pains |
¤ Karen's
Song
¤ Kate and Allie
¤ Keep it in the
Family
¤ A Kick up the
Eighties
|
¤ The
Kids from Degrassi Street
¤ Kinvig
¤ Knight Rider
¤ Knots Landing
¤ The Krypton Factor |
¤ Naked
Video
¤ Nancy Astor
¤ Nanny
¤ Nationwide
¤ Neighbours
¤ Nero Wolfe
¤ Never The Twain
¤ New Faces
¤ Newhart
¤ Newsnight
|
¤ The New Statesman
¤ Night Court
¤
Night Heat
¤
Night Shift
¤
No. 73
¤
No Place Like Home
¤
Northern Exposure
¤
Not The Nine O' Clock News
¤
NYPD Blue |
¤ A Question Of Sport
¤
Quincy M.E |
|
¤ The Waltons
¤ The War Game
¤
Watching
¤ Waterloo Station
(Australia)
¤
Webster
¤ We Got It Made
¤
We'll Meet Again
¤
What's My Line? (UK)
¤
Wheel Of Fortune (UK)
¤
Where There's Life
¤ Who Dares Wins
¤
Whoops Apocalypse
¤ Who's The Boss?
¤
Why Don't You?
|
¤ Widows
¤
The Wind in the Willows
¤
The Winds of War
¤
Winner Takes All
¤
Winston Churchill - The Wilderness Years
¤ Wiseguy
¤
Wish Me Luck
¤
WKRP in Cincinnati
¤
A Woman of Substance
¤
The Wonder Years
¤
World In Action
¤ Worzel Gummidge
¤
Worzel Gummidge Down Under
¤ Wyatt's Watchdog
|
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