Before The Naked Gun came Police Squad!, a short-lived TV spoof of other cop shows. Reams could be written about it, but if you’ve watched The Naked Gun, you know as much as you need to know.
But I will talk about the title sequence, which changed every week: it’s motif was that the supposed guest star would die in the title sequence and never appear in the show itself and that the wrong episode title would be read out each time.
The end titles were also very Naked Gun.
You just don’t get that level of attention to detail these days.
Oh, incidentally, and I used to work somewhere once where they all thought I was Johnny the shoe-shine guy, because I was the source of all knowledge and not because I cleaned shoes:
If you went to see Legally Blonde: The Musical like what I did last year, Peter Davison would have been amongst the cast. In the programme, among his various credits (you know, like Doctor Who, All Creatures Great and Small, et al), he says that the thing he’s most proud of is that he wrote and sung the theme song to Button Moon.
I’m guessing he left out The Tomorrow People for a reason.
Anyway, Button Moon, as the theme song suggested, sees Mr. Spoon travel to Button Moon in his homemade rocket-ship (all of the characters in the show are based on kitchen utensils, as well as many of the props). Once on Button Moon, which hangs in “blanket sky”, they have an adventure, and look through Mr. Spoon’s telescope at someone else such as the Hare and the Tortoise, before heading back to their home on ‘Junk Planet’. Episodes also include Mr. Spoon’s wife, Mrs. Spoon, their daughter, Tina Tea-Spoon and her friend Eggbert.
Amazingly, the series lasted for 91, 10-minute episodes. And Peter Davison (with Sandra Dickinson, his then-wife) sung the theme tune to all of them.
Did you know there’s this tribe in Africa called the Dogon? There really is – this is true. What’s particularly interesting about the Dogon is that they have this weird relationship with the star, Sirius – aka the Dog Star – which is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. Exciting astronomy fact of the day: Sirius is actually a binary star – there’s a great big star and around it orbits a tiny white dwarf star that’s impossible for the naked eye (and even most telescopes) to detect: its presence was only inferred mathematically in 1844.
And the Dogon knew that there was a second star there. In fact, they reckon there’s a third star there, too. And in 1995, some evidence emerged that there might well be a brown dwarf in orbit around the two main stars.
Freaky, huh?
Now there are various explanations for this that I won’t go into, but back in in 1984, enterprising New Zealand TV station TVNZ created a six-part children’s TV series, Children of the Dog Star, in which it was suggested the Dogon know all this because they were visited by an alien probe from Sirius thousands of years ago that told them all this. That wasn’t the only probe, however, and out in a New Zealand swamp, the remains of another probe might still exist, waiting to be reactivated.
At the moment, CBS is top of the US ratings, able to deploy any old rubbish (Mike and Molly, Two and a Half Men) and people will watch it happily, while NBC is currently drilling a hole in the ratings basement so it can go and live in a new sub-basement it’s planning on building, even though many of its shows (well, Community and 30 Rock) easily trump whatever CBS has to offer.
But go back 25 years or so, and it was NBC that was the ratings juggernaut, crushing CBS with its peacock feathers and shows such as The Golden Girls, despite CBS turning out more than a few decent shows itself. CBS did, of course, have private detective show Magnum PI, which amazingly ran from 1980 through to 1988. But in 1987, with Magnum‘s fortunes waning, CBS went on a great mental trek and asked itself what kind of show it could replace Magnum with and came up with the astounding idea of… a private detective show.
However, in contrast to other private detective shows of the 80s (Magnum, Simon & Simon, Riptide, Tucker’s Witch), this one would be a little more realistic and star a woman – Margaret Colin, then famous as a comedy actress from shows such as Foley Square, but better known now for Gossip Girl, Now and Again and Chicago Hope. What a feminist move, echoing the likes of Honey West? Nope. This was a show for men and to let men know they were allowed to watch it, the producers called it… Leg Work. And focused a lot on Margaret Colin’s legs.
Eschewing gun fights and car chases in favour of humour and wit, the show was actually quite good. Colin played Claire McCarron, a former New York district attorney who becomes a private detective because of her skills at tracking down people and information. Keeping it real, the show regularly had McCarron in meetings, dealing with admin and interviews, suffering from a poor personal life, never having any money, dealing with creditors and having to track down her own clients so she could get paid.
Assisting McCarron were her father, a retired cop, and her PR cop brother Fred, played by Patrick James Clarke of Saracen fame, as well as her best friend/roommate, former fashion model Willie (played by Frances McDormand of Fargo fame). And she drove a rather nice Porsche 911, as well.
“The scripts are great,” Colin says. “The best of all possible worlds would be for us to be able to do a small picture each week. With a lot of emotion, a lot of character and conflicts that are real and not manufactured. Our stories are more Europe. They’re not as tidy as most American shows. The focus is on emotion and the characters. And the writers have hooked into my sense of humor.”
Nevertheless, up against NBC’s Golden Girls, Leg Work only managed to squeeze out six of its 10 episodes before it was cancelled, although the whole run aired in the UK on ITV. While not a classic of TV, it was still a cut above some of its more ludicrous rivals and should have made Margaret Colin a whole lot more famous than she ended up. Anyway, here’s a trailer for it and the title sequence, which has a very Mike Post-ish theme tune.
When it comes to weirdness, you can’t beat kids show Get Up and Go! and its follow-up show Mooncat and Co. The premise was simple: a talking cat from the moon comes down to Earth and moves in with the shows’ host, Stephen Boxer. Together with a variety of other people – Beryl Reid in Get Up and Go! but Pat Coombs, Kenny Lynch, Wilf Lunn and others in Mooncat and Co – Boxer would educate Mooncat in human ways.
Get Up and Go! ran for three series before Reid was offered a job in a major ITV drama series, so her character moved out and the show became Mooncat and Co, which ran for another two series.
