Time smooths the wrinkles

Larry Hagman.
Larry Hagman.
Whenever French existentialist philosophers gather in Octagon cafes, and July is a particularly luxuriant month for them, you will invariably hear talk of the Cher song If I Could Turn Back Time. The warship setting for the song's video, huge gun barrels thrusting at Cher's supplicatory body, is clearly compelling for existentialists, but if you have been eavesdropping on them, as I have, you will have heard their particular fixation this year has been - CAN we turn back time and SHOULD we turn back time.

Well-read eavesdroppers will know precisely where this current debate springs from - the eye-popping news from America that the trail-blazing night-time soap opera Dallas is back on screen. The wild punt of seeing if daytime soap opera pap could work at night paid off staggeringly for Dallas from 1978 to 1991, and spawned a prozacma of weak-kneed wannabes that still eat away at our television screens like famished maggots. But Dallas has turned back time, and the new series, with principals JR, Bobby and Sue Ellen back, all hands visibly stretched out for the cash, is five episodes old and rating pretty damn well.

They have even corrected the main flaw of the original, nobody ever cleaning their teeth; people went straight from breakfast to their cars.

This no longer happens.

Should Dallas have turned back time?

Hell YES! This is part of American history, this is one of the few things of true moment America has given the world. If there is anyone out there who seriously believes billion-dollar crooks like Bernie Madoff weren't sent down their nation-destroying paths by the ethical pond slime of Dallas during those 13 years, then, quite frankly, pull the suicide pill out from under the lapel: for you, there is no point in carrying on.

I have spent a week trawling through YouTube and Dallas websites to see if the new series is worthy. And unquestionably it is. JR is 81 now and, in a brilliant piece of writing, he opens the series in a rest-home, mute, lock-jawed and maniacally depressed.

Linda Gray.
Linda Gray.
Family come to visit, but not a single facial tick, he just stares straight ahead.

Dead people look more alive.

But, and I don't really want to give too much away, JR is soon up and running, babbling and barking like the treacherous lying weasel he was back then.

He remains a riveting character, the best in the series, still, even though he has, in real life, survived decades of alcoholism and tobacco, and been introduced to LSD by David Crosby and marijuana by Jack Nicholson. Larry Hagman is your quintessential fully rounded man.

Bobby, the humanist, is as thick and wet as ever, I will say no more. And while Sue Ellen seems vaguely similar to before she turned back time, one look at her immobile lips shows she has been trying to turn back time far too much. She will be 72 in September.

I was so delighted to see Lucy back, if only, so far, very briefly. Lucy, who used to have wanton rumpy pumpy with Ray Krebbs in the haybarn until it was discovered he was her uncle, had the most unique walk in television - her tiny little legs went up and down as if her thighs were French accordions, she was able to move forward only through the momentum powered by her thunderously top-heavy upper body. In the new Dallas, she is thunderously top-heavy all over, though still only two feet high. You may also have seen Lucy in Abdominiser infomercials. I know I have.

It doesn't look as though Priscilla Presley and Victoria Principal are coming back. Priscilla has reportedly had so much plastic surgery she is unrecognisable, and Victoria has aged so badly she looks more like Cliff Barnes than Pamela Ewing.

Exciting times, though. Forty countries have signed up for the new Dallas. No word yet if New Zealand is one of them. But hopefully next year.

Nothing turns back time like soap opera pap.


- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

 

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