The memory from Atlantis

To anyone roughly my age, the word ‘Atlantis’ will instantly conjure up images of Patrick Duffy in swimming trunks doing an underwater impersonation of a Slinky toy.

OK, you’re probably wondering why the word ‘Atlantis’ would even pop up at all. But then again, perhaps you don’t have to cross the road anywhere in the Msida/Gzira/Ta’ Xbiex area to do your shopping every day. To the rest of us out here in the submerged world, stepping out of one’s front door of late has been a little like white-water rafting on the Zambesi River. One is swept away by a flood of aquatic allusions, whether one likes it or not.

In any case: Atlantis did pop into my head on a recent boating expedition; and it also got me thinking of that old TV series starring Duffy, Belinda J. Montgomery and Victor Buono… about how useful it would be to have evolved in a submerged environment; with webbed hands and feet, the ability to breathe through gills, and an apparent immunity to extreme temperatures. Would save a fortune on heating, for one thing….

But looking back on such programmes from afar is never a very good idea. You know how it is: one memory leads to another, and there is a sudden moment of realisation that some of the things you remember with nostalgia were in reality just a load of rubbish. I just watched a couple of episodes of The Man From Atlantis, and... erm… was that really one of my favourite TV shows as a child? And was I really that much of a dunce not to immediately spot any of its glaring flaws?

Take the main character, for instance. As the name implies, the ‘Man from Atantis’ is supposed to be last living descendant of the survivors of an ancient city that was… um… destroyed in a cataclysmic flood…

Hmm. Sort of detracts from the whole ‘mass extinction by drowning’ idea, doesn’t it, when you suddenly realise they would have been living underwater all along anyway. Duh!

But hey, it was a TV series in the late 1970s, and to be fair it wasn’t even the wackiest. One of my favourites back then – though it has aged awfully in all aspects expect the theme tune ¬– was Space 1999, starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. The basic plot involved a freak accident in a lunar space station, which somehow managed to tear the Moon from the earth’s orbit and send it spinning off through space. 

The crew of Moonbase Alpha would spend the rest of the series trying to steer the moon back towards the earth. It never occurs to any of them (as it didn’t to me, at the time) that there wouldn’t actually be very much left of Planet Earth to get back to, considering that the pull of the moon’s gravity as it tore away would have dragged half its surface off into space with it.

Then there was Maya, the alien character who could metamorph into any living organism of her choice just by thinking about that organism. And what living organisms does an alien, with no earthly connection of any kind whatsoever, always seem to think about? The sort you’d see in any terrestrial zoo: gorillas, lions eagles, etc.

But like I said, reminiscing on past TV series may be harmful to your ability to enjoy life. So I may as well follow the reminiscence through to its bitter conclusion.

Patrick Duffy, for instance, is probably far more widely remembered as Bobby Ewing in Dallas. Small problem: back when that particular soap opera was busy defining the consciousness of at least two generations… I wasn’t allowed to watch it. It was one of a number of cultural icons of its day, alongside Black Sabbath and Uccelli di Rovo, to incur the wrath of the formidable Christian Brothers of De La Salle.

I am told that the power of this Christian brotherhood is less universal today than it was back in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps it has waned along with the pervasive aura of Malta as a hegemonic Catholic bulwark, and all that. But back then… those bros were a force to be reckoned with, let me tell you. In fact, it’s small wonder my generation turned out so screwy. The figures of our childhood authority were infinitely scarier than anything Ozzie Osbourne could possibly do on stage (unless you’re a bat, of course… but then you wouldn’t be reading this, now would you?)

And at the height of their powers, the Christian Brothers of De La Salle wrote a letter to our parents (which we all had to bring back signed the next day) forbidding them in no uncertain terms to allow us within a thousand miles of Southfork Range. The intricacies of the feud between the Ewings and Barnes were to be off-limits to us forever.  

And as I didn’t have the cojones to do what so many of my contemporaries did, and simply forge the signature… I was destined to spend the rest of my childhood officially deprived of the (utterly pedestrian) marital quibbles in a distant dysfunctional family of Texan oil magnates. Oh, the deprivations of my childhood…

But then again, I did say ‘officially’. As things turned out, I was probably more conversant in the to-ings and fro-ings of the Ewings than I was about my own family at the time. Just goes to show how effective a blanket ban policy really is. It’s a little like North Korea and ‘The Interview’ (or, for that matter, like Adam and Eve). Nothing quite like an explicit prohibition to get you interested in something that would otherwise bore you to death. ‘You can smoke, but you can’t inhale’, and all that…

Still: at age 12 or thereabouts I saw it as a grave injustice to humanity. Depriving a child of Dallas was akin to ostracising him from the cultural reality of his own lifetime. You wouldn’t be able to participate in any schoolyard conversation: they were all about who shot JR. Heck, you wouldn’t even recognise the names of three-quarters of the Maltese population born after 1979. Pamela. Sue Ellen. Missellie. And infinite combinations of Johns, Josephs, Jameses and Jurgens with Roberts, Ramons, Richards, and Rolands. You’d be utterly lost in your own homeland.

But such was the strength of the Christian Brothers that their will officially prevailed.  It was only when they tried doing the same thing with ‘Lupin III’ that the brave boys of Form III finally rebelled: and following a three-week stand off in a barricaded classroom, the college authorities eventually relented. We would, after all, be allowed to continue drooling over Margot’s (or Fujiko’s, depending on the series) accessories… but the ban on Dallas would remain in force.

And this, of course, was a great victory for freedom of thought and expression in the early 1980s, to be ranked alongside Perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because there was nothing quite like Margot to drool over in Dallas in those days; not, any rate, until Heather Locklear came onto the scene… no, wait, that was Dynasty… they’re all rolling seamlessly into one…

Right, kids. That’s enough for this week’s analysis of the impact of 1980s television on today’s psychological disorders. Happy New Year.