$6M MAN

I think that my retro TV show re-watch of the year this year is going to turn out to be "The Six Million Dollar Man" if that's alright with you. Well, to be frank, even if it's not alright, it seems to have become my telly obsession of choice for the moment, and I'm going to persist with it anyway.

Sometimes a year seems to grab me like that. Last year the "newer" version of "Battlestar Galactica" saw me through some tough times, and before that the original "Twilight Zone" drew me into its mysterious and powerful web. A year before that and the first two seasons of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" chewed up more of my free hours than I care to admit to, as did all of "The Saint" a few years back, and at some point during the last decade I somehow managed to find the time to watch the complete run of "M*A*S*H" (twice...!)

So, what of it...? I enjoy a bit of nostalgia as much as the next person, and I certainly enjoy old telly and whilst I will admit that a lot of it can seem trashy, cheesy and positively ridiculous to people not brought up on this stuff, and no-one would consider it to be "high art" of any sort, personally I find it all still very watchable and, do you know what, I actually quite like it.

Which brings us to "The Six Million Dollar Man" which, despite its more obvious shortcomings, turns out to have been one of the most iconic American television series made in the 1970s and I bloody loved it at the time. As someone who was a boy during the 1970s I actually have little choice about this. "The Six Million Dollar Man" is what we all watched and, no doubt to the horror of anyone brought up in our modern "health and safety" obsessed world, imitated as we played it in our playgrounds.

Cue memories of slo-mo faux fighting with added "Du-du-du-derrr" noises and grazed knees from jumping off the climbing frame... In my head I was falling in slow motion, of course, but the laws of gravity had other ideas.

"So, is it any good when you watch it now?" I hear you ask...

Well...

Right from the opening frames when the title lettering is spelled out as individual characters to that repetitive bass-line beat, it feels as if something really special and exciting is about to happen. Then there is film of a terrible crash featuring a spaceship and, as the solemn voice-over intones it's well known phrasing "Steve Austin, Astronaut. A man barely alive..." and Richard Anderson (as O.S.I. boss Oscar Goldman) takes over with "Gentlemen, we can rebuild him... We have the technology..." and so on, there then follows perhaps - especially in its revised form for the second season - one of the finest title sequences ever designed for television…*

Strangely enough, the 1973 award-winning (!!!) (Okay, they may very well have dished out awards for anything back in those days, for all I know...) "pilot" (Ho, ho...) TV movie didn't feature an opening credits sequence and the two sequels they made featured such godawful graphics that, until I saw them again, I thought that I must have imagined them. These were accompanied by a song by Dusty Springfield which is worth tracking down just to hear the strangeness of it, if you get a moment, and which was never heard again once the show began its five year run from 1974-1978.**

The rest of it is fairly standard TV adventure series fayre, to be honest, although it's enjoyable enough and has a charismatic star in Lee Majors who looks almost unrecognisable today when compared to his iconic self from the posters, toys and annuals which I used to have in my bedroom as a boy, at least until I became aware of the far more appealing pictures of both his then wife and also of "The Bionic Woman" which was a spin-off from the main show.

It's probably safe to say that sitting through two episodes at a time is about enough, because after that, the third tends to find you drifting off and finding other things to do with your time, despite the fact that it is all fine quality stuff when viewed in isolation.

So anyway, the next few months are going to find me working my way through at least a season or two of bionic action when I get a spare hour or two to myself and, do you know what, I reckon that it's going to be fantastic...

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5zn-mF2-_8

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkPxb01aAdI