You can tell things have started to get really bad by the fact that they’re bringing back Little House on the Prairie. When a society is in serious crisis – or so I’ve read – it no longer needs edgy, transgressive, exciting art to push boundaries and challenge assumptions. Rather, it needs to be soothed and cosseted with bland, undemanding and familiar comfort food. Nothing, not even The Waltons, does that quite like Prairie.
It first appeared on British screens in January 1975 – so after an annus horribilis, including the Three-Day Week, power cuts, the miners’ strike, the Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings, etc. – and was scheduled to capture children just before bedtime. I’d love to be able to claim having pleaded with my parents for an early night so as to escape the saccharine horror. Except, if you remember, that wasn’t quite how you thought as a child in the 1970s. Your sole priority was accumulated viewing hours.
People griping about the remake have clearly forgotten how dire the original was
So, shamefully, I may well have gawped uncritically at quite a few of the original series’ 200-odd episodes. The one where the girls get scared of wolves; the one where they are helped through a crisis by a friendly Indian (as we still called them in those days); the one where one of the little blonde girls loses her ribbon and then finds it; the one where the dog barks, but it’s OK, it’s not a wolf but a cute baby porcupine; and the one where it’s the worst ever winter and they can only survive by drawing lots to see which daughter gets eaten first. I just made all these up but that, roughly, apart from the last one, was the extent of the drama.
