Southfork and stetsons return to our screens

It’s back.

And so are the sluts, drunks, silly hats and boardroom battles. It can only be Dallas, says a thrilled Sharon Crowe

Hello darlin’ — yes, he’s back. They are all back. Well, the ones that aren’t dead, anyway. And with some new ones. Dallas.! On telly! Just like the Eighties, except with added guy-candy to lure in younger viewers.!

Ready for that opening sequence? — the shiny buildings, the iconic faces, the sweep into Southfork, the unforgettable theme tune......Da DAH da DAH da da dada DAH......

! For those of you too young to remember, Dallas was HUGE in the late Seventies and Eighties. It came about just as The Riordans ended (and if you’re too young for Dallas, then you’re definitely too young for The Riordans), which means the Irish television viewing public moved almost overnight from Leestown to Southfork. It blew our minds — from farmers to ranchers, from wellington boots to shoulder pads, we took to Dallas like the glamour-starved culchies we were, falling instantly for the intrigue, scandal, big hair, back-stabbing, and the wobbly mouth of Sue Ellen.

Anyway, these days Larry Hagman is 80, and looks it — he had a liver transplant in 1985 after years of drinking champagne on set all day, and has recently had cancer. (With his comedy old-guy eyebrows, these days he looks like an elderly horned owl rather than a scheming womaniser). Patrick Duffy has aged a bit better, but is now in the role of family patriarch rather than chief DILF. With neither JR nor Bobby sexually plausible anymore — unless you’re a gerontophile — fresh flesh has been shipped in to make the new series more, ahem, visually appealing.

Remember those two small children who would periodically appear at the Southfork dinner table, only to be whisked away by white-aproned staff in blue uniforms? Well, Christopher and John Ross have grown up.

Christopher — Bobby and Pam’s adopted son (his birth mother, high on speed, jumped off the roof of Southfork and drowned in the family swimming pool — that kind of thing never happened in the Riordans) is played by Jesse Metcalfe, the shirtless gardener from Desperate Housewives. He keeps his shirt off in Dallas too.

To replicate the Bobby/JR tension of good brother/bad brother, the two cousins are set against each other as rivals — John Ross, played by boy starlet Josh Henderson, is pitted against Christopher. Do we care? Probably not. Any viewer who has seen it the first time around — which I imagine will be 99% of its audience — will be watching purely to see how ol’ JR and Bobby are doing after all these years.

Although Linda Gray is 70, she looks pretty much the same as when she originally starred as Sue Ellen all those years ago.

The slut, drunk, and unfit mother — her former husband JR’s favourite description — is now lean, clean and sober, and set on world domination. Or something. Can’t wait.

Of all the female characters, ‘Swellin’ was always the most interesting — the others tended to be one dimensional cut-outs sent straight from central casting: Miss Ellie the sainted matriarch, Pam the pretty trophy, Lucy the poison dwarf. Swellin had a bit more going on.

So what will the next 10 episodes bring? Lots of squaring up, lots of talk about what it means to be a Ewing, lots of wind-swept breakfasts by the pool?

Hopefully lots of psychodrama and double crossing too, involving ye-olde plot device of two men — yes, Christopher and John Ross — fighting over the same young woman, whose name I forget, but looks a bit like Victoria Beckham. We want sex, pecs, steaks, deals, steals, perhaps even the occasional shower scene where everything was a dream. And lots of bourbon swillin’. Just not by Swellin.

And for God’s sake no political correctness. Patrick Duffy may be a Buddhist, and in real life JR is green — Larry Hagman is vegan, drives an electric car, and his Malibu home runs on solar panels — plus the two have been best friends off screen for 30 years, but we don’t want to know about any of that. The show’s entire premise was its raw capitalist greed, with lots of oil guzzlin’ meat eatin’ cigar chompin’ old boys in silly hats being horrid to each other and their womenfolk. More please.

* Dallas starts Monday 3rd September at 10pm on TV3.