80s Actual: Hart To Hart

12 June 2010

Hart To Hart

The idea behind Hart To Hart was once described as a "'spin on the Thin Man films".

There are similarities: like Nick and Nora Charles, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart were a wealthy, crime solving husband and wife team. Like Nick and Nora Charles, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart had a dog.

But Jonathan and Jennifer Hart also had a friend/servant who was a genuine one-off - Max!

The pilot show made its debut in England on Sunday, 27 January, 1980 - on ITV - the series having begun in America a few months previously. Minus the famous "'cause when they met it was murder" catchphrase, which came a little later (in the first season Max said: "I look after both of them which ain't easy - 'cause their hobby is murder!"), the other ingredients were all present and correct. The fabulously wealthy Jonathan Hart (Robert Wagner), his wife Jennifer (Stefanie Powers), their faithful servant and old pal Max (Lionel Stander), and Freeway, the dog, solved crimes week after week.

TV was more of an event in those days, with only three channels, and most of us looked forward to the feature-length pilot episode. Hart To Hart began at 9.15 pm, breaked for fifteen minutes of news at 10.15, and then continued until 11.15.

In my ITV region it was followed by a dreary programme called A Question Of Sex, in which Clive James and Anna Raeburn debated whether women are more emotional than men, then, just after midnight, it was Closedown. Those were very different days.

Hart To Hart was an instant hit here. The final episodes were filmed in America in 1984.

One mystery remains. Whilst the Harts' bedroom was regularly featured in the show, Max did not appear to have one and it was a standing joke on the set that he slept standing up!

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INTRODUCTION

The '80s Actual blog is designed to be an antidote to all those television shows and on-line articles of recent years which examine pop culture - and frequently get it hopelessly wrong!

If you sat watching the BBC's "I Love The 1970s" and exclaimed over items being shown "I could swear that was 1968!" or "Wasn't that 1981?" chances are you were right.

If you look at certain '70s fan sites and think a lot of the material written about is actually from the '80s, you are almost certainly correct.

If on-line encyclopedia articles which state that pop culture of 1983 is really 1977, or similar, have you wishing for reality, then '80s Actual is for you.

There is a huge drive in the media and on-line to negate the 1980s, to attribute that decade's innovations and fond memories to other decades, and basically to present it as a completely vapid ten years, not worthy of examination.

I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's just comforting to have a decade people can scapegoat and declare "HORRIBLE"?

This blog is based on actual memories, media footage (thank you, YouTube!) and snippets of newspaper and magazine articles from the 1980s. If you read it here, I think you can rest assured it's accurate, though I can take no responsibility for the newspaper reports from the decade!

The '80s Actual blog examines the decade's news stories - from the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer into the public eye in 1980, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Was it simply "The Greed Decade" as many like to claim? I think not - the '80s saw the emergence of yuppies, but also Red Wedge, the Greenham Common Peace Women, and increasing concern for the environment. It may be convenient to scapegoat the '80s as the cause of all known ills, but the reality of the decade was far different - absolute bedlam, as Right fought Left, idealism fought corporate ambition. The election of Ronald Reagan as American President in 1980, and his second victory in 1984, had a far more decisive effect on the international political landscape than the three successive general election victories of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, 1983 and 1987.

Fashion came fast and furious - deelyboppers, ra ra skirts with lycra leggings, Swatch watches, pixie boots, jelly shoes, shoulder pads, blonde highlights, hair gel, hair mousse, men in pink, goths, shell suits, New Romantics, donkey jackets, leg warmers...

Musically, the 1980s saw the beginnings of House Music, the exciting and still evolving world of synths taking centre stage, the evolvement of Rap music into the fully-fledged Hip Hop scene, Band Aid and Live Aid, great Indie, startling Acid House, and Raves...

At the amusement arcades, Space Invaders ran rampant and we first met Pac-Man...

And there was so much more! The decade truly had something for everyone - and provided a welcome escape for a while from the long-running and boring saga of flared trousers as fashion, begun back in the 1960s!

It was a brilliant decade for telly - bringing us such wonders as A Very Peculiar Practice, Inspector Morse, Spitting Image, Hot Metal, The BeiderbeckeTrilogy and Edge of Darkness.

The 1980s also saw the creation of The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, and other wonderful (often groundbreaking) American TV shows like Kate & Allie, Cheers, The Golden Girls, Married... With Children, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and Hill Street Blues.

The '80s gave us some wonderful UK TV ads. Remember Ted Moult advertising double glazing at the Tan Hall Inn with "Fit The Best - Everest"? Remember the Weetabix gang? Remember the Scotch video tape skeleton ("Re-record, not fade away"?). Remember the romantic yuppie couple in the coffee ads? And what about "Lotta Bottle"?

In fact, the '80s totally transformed our telly viewing, bringing us Channel 4 and Sky TV.

The '80s were a fascinating time for science and technology! Video recorders became widespread, the Sony Walkman arrived, the first hand-held mobile phones hit the streets (expensive analogue bricks!), the ZX Spectrum, Game Boy and the World Wide Web (Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!) were invented, the first computer mouse eeked its way into our homes and Sir Alec Jeffreys accidentally discovered DNA fingerprinting. It's all here!

There are also also '80s Actual sister blogs taking us back to the '70s and '60s - The Real 1970s and Spacehopper.

The view of the 1980s presented here is from an English perspective - much of the original '80s material used is from England, but I hope this blog will prove useful and enjoyable to people in the other nations of the UK and much further afield.