Early Spelling: Honey West

I have mixed feelings about Aaron Spelling. On one hand I do love Charlies Angels (circa Farah Fawcett) and thought I might one day marry Jonathan Hart, but generally I don't like how the type of shows he produced (such as T J Hooker) came to dominate television in the 70s and 80s. The style is formulaic, action-packed, with storylines that fit neatly into their 40 minute or so time slot, with no depth. Spelling didn't produce them all, but he was probably the godfather of that genre that replaced grittier shows like Ironside and Kojak.

But having said all of this, I'm quite pleased at having just discovered one of Spelling's first shows, Honey West. There was just one series of 30 episodes made showing in 1965 to 1966. The show is black and white, has those Spelling trademark plots, but is possibly one of the first shows to feature a feisty independent female lead and was probably rather remarkable when it was first shown. Honey runs a detective agency with her less interesting male friend, who there are appears to be a will they/won't they type of relationship (in the style of Remingston Steele). She drives a sports car (rather like Penelope Pitstop!) and she owns a pet ocelot called Bruce (the only detective to do so, to my knowledge).

I've just watched two episodes and so far her investigations seem to involve rescuing less feisty heiress and actresses from the evil schemes of men. Besides the ocelot, there is a good dose of quirkiness to the show, and some amusing dialogue such as when Honey was rescued by her male associate and she asks him how he knew where to find her, and he replies "I'd already looked everywhere else".

So its easy on the brain but sometimes that is good. It makes a change from the utter misery-fest of SVU.

Be Careful with that Sub-Plot, Hooker

Our cable service was playing up again the other night so the only channels that were working were the 'on demand' channels, so we really had no choice but to watch another episode of T J Hooker.


(I realise we could have done something else but we'd already played three rounds of Barry Norman's film quiz and it was raining outside)

We selected an episode based on the ridiculous title 'Sweet Sixteen....and Dead' as that promised the camp melodrama the show excels at. The story involved two teen runaways who had become 'working girls' and witnessed a city official being bribed by a pimp. The pimp then set his henchman (a wonderfully Afro-ed thug) after the girls to eliminate them. Pretty serious stuff.

Ignoring Shatner's poor acting (a difficult task - he was hard to distinguish from a line of trees at one point, such is his wooden style), the gravity of the main plot was undermined by the frivolity of the subplot. Light-hearted subplots occur in several shows, for example Monk usually involves a sideline about the Captain, Randy or Monk's assistant.

The sub-plot involved girl scount cookies, namely Romano being tricked into selling them for Hooker's daughter. It was too much of a contrast with the main plot, given almost as much screentime and frankly, it took the biscuit!

Enough with the nostalgia

I'm sick of it. All of this looking backwards. Yes, I love the 1960s, a decade before I was even born. I love its music, its fashion, I even write for a website about it. But in the last month I've been overwhelmed the amount of harking back to the past, mainly on account of Facebook. Old friends are popping up all over the place and whilst I'm pleased to receive a quick email saying they are still alive and doing well, that is probably enough. But no, reunions are happening all over the place, where you sit and talk about who kissed who when you were fifteen. Its fine for about ten minutes but then I'm bored. I want to talk about present, the future, the abstract. The past is a finite resource. Move on.

What has this to do with detective programmes, you may well wonder. Not that much really, except last night we watched an episode of T J Hooker on the Screen Gems channel.

The OH is a big fan of the opening titles of T J Hooker, the music and Heather Locklear, so we only intended to take a quick trip down memory lane but there was nothing else on so I thought we may as well watch the whole episode.

It involved some dispute in the trucking industry, with some gangster sabotaging the cargos of an old man and his daughter. The daughter had a pet orang-utan called Venus, who appeared in several scenes in various outfits before anyone even remarked on its presence, as if every trucker had a simian companion.

T J Hooker is very much a product of the 1980s. It was produced by Aaron Spelling, the police cadets wear shockingly short shorts and a big name star (Shatner), attractive blonde (Locklear) and some action scenes were obviously enough in those days to pass as entertainment. There was no mystery to be solved, no psychological element, just a straightforward cop gets bad guy, all done and dusted in 45 minutes.

The OH loved it, harking as it did back to a simpler time. I hated it which is strange considering I love Charlie’s Angels, Remington Steele and a host of other shows that have similar faults. I think it might be down to William Shatner, who is such a ham.