When I was growing up, the Dallas theme tune was like a call to prayer. As the Copland-esque trumpets rang out, we ran to the television set. A hushed silence descended as cattle stampeded beneath the snazzy gold title credits. To watch the glamorous travails of the Ewing family from a sofa somewhere near Coventry in the 1980s was to experience the very promise of the age. Escapism, certainly. But Dallas was also about dreams. Frontier dreams.
That there was a place on earth where oil men in Stetsons plotted each other’s downfall while slurping bourbon was too fabulous. That these men were married to women with shoulder pads bigger than Darth Vader’s was beyond inspiring if you were a kid growing up not in Midland, Texas, but in The Midlands, UK.
When CBS started repeating the iconic series ahead of the revival show, I became hooked again.
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