Bernard O'Shea: Modern TV has everything... but I still crave my '80s shows

MacGyver, ALF, Airwolf, Knight Rider... I look at the world through square-eyed tinted spectacles

The US drama Airwolf ran for four seasons, from 1984 to 1987. 'Nobody on board the military helicopter ever seemed concerned about where they would park it.'

I'm currently touring a new show. When you start writing a new hour, you’re trying to find one joint theme.

It’s OK if you have a really good hour of stand-up, but it’s even better if you have a coat hanger to hang all your ideas on.

For some reason, I thought this year’s show would be firmly grounded in life, family, and my constant struggle to lose weight and get fit... but it all changed when, after 47 years of living on planet Earth, I finally could admit to myself there was one thing that I only ever truly wanted to do, and that was (drum roll please) sit in a room on my own and watch telly.

It mightn’t seem like a grand idea worthy of any artistic output, but when I declare it to a room of strangers, the recognition is universally bizarrely comforting.

I knew this was my calling on May 24, 1989, sitting in my room in Durrow, Co Laois.

We had a tiny black-and-white Hitachi portable telly with a coat hanger as an aerial. It didn’t even have buttons. It had a manual rotary dial, in fact, two of them. 

At times, picking up RTÉ 2 felt like how the Nasa crew in Houston felt when they made visual contact with the moon landing crew in 1969.

But to me, a nine-year-old boy, that telly was my whole life.

That evening in 1989, I sat in complete bliss watching the European Cup final — AC Milan versus Steaua Bucharest. Milan won 4-0, and I won the knowledge that this is the ultimate in what humanity created.

But looking back now, I can’t help feeling a tiny bit lied to.

The programmes I loved were mainly cheap US buy-ins. RTÉ at the time revamped RTÉ 2 and rebranded it Network 2. It was a massive deal in my life. It later went on to inspire some of the very low aspirational daydreams that Bridget and Eamon would strive for in their lives. Ironically, it was a sitcom I co-wrote that ended up on RTÉ 2 25 years later.

Programmes like The Golden Girls, The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, The A-Team, and Knight Rider blew my little mind apart. However…

Airwolf was a supersonic military helicopter. It was no ordinary supersonic military helicopter; it had a theme tune that made you feel like walking across the living room floor, you were heading to the Pentagon to make some unofficial covert-operation decision.

However… nobody on board Airwolf ever seemed concerned about where they would park it. Nobody ever got out of it and said: “Is this paid parking?”

I don’t remember any episode where the owner had a 45-minute argument with an insurance company: “How can you legitimately quote me that?”

As a child, I also saw Airwolf as the future of legitimate travel. I daydreamed that instead of getting Kavanagh’s Bus from Burger King on Dublin’s O’Connell Street back home to Laois, we’d all be in helicopters and be home within minutes, with no painstaking hour-long delays in Monasterevin.

In short, I dreamed that by the time I was my parents’ age, cars and buses would be a thing of the past. Airwolf, you sold me a dream that never could and never would exist.

But then there was ALF — Alien Life Form. He was a brown furry alien that landed smack bang in American suburban life. He fitted into family life and developed a love for eating pizza and cats!

But what amazed me was this family could take on another person and still have a massive fridge, two cars, every conceivable mod-con, and a TV with millions of channels.

I would look at ALF and think, “ALF has an amazing life, and he’s allowed to use the phone”.

I remember having a massive row with my mother when I wanted to enter a phone competition, and she said “No”. My reply: “ALF is an alien, and his family lets him use the phone all the time. I’m a human, and I’m not allowed to.”

My life was built around these programmes, quite literally. They were on at certain times in the day. You got the newspaper and went through the listings. I revolved my life around what time MacGyver was on.

My summers revolved around watching Wimbledon, The Horse Show, World Cups, and then playing those tournaments on the road with my friends.

Yes, it’s all very warm and fuzzy, with a hearty pinch of rose-tinted nostalgia; not every summer was long and hot.

But today, my kids have everything on demand. There is very little appointment viewing anymore.

My wife and kids are glued to The Traitors Ireland, and it’s a rare moment when they all sit as one and are glued to the telly, but more or less everything else they want is on demand.

The future hasn’t disappointed me. I just wish we could have brought the best bits of the past with us too.