From Leestown to Dallas – how JR replaced Benjy on a Sunday night

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Last Saturday marked the 35th anniversary of the night we got the answer to the question that had preoccupied the western world for all of nine months – who did shoot JR Ewing?

If you were there, you’ll know it was that scheming sister-in-law Kristen Shepard – played by Mary Crosby, daughter of Bing – and not Sue Ellen or Cliff, as the bookies and the public had predicted.

Unbelievable as it might seem to anyone under 40, we’d waited with baited breath from March – when JR took the bullet in his office – to November to find out who did the dirty deed.

Along the way Moate Country and Irish star, Tom Allen, changed his name to TR Dallas and had a massive hit with Who Shot JR Ewing – and I Shot JR tee-shirts were all the rage, in big black letters as a sort of Irish version Frankie Says Relax or Wham!

Years later, Pat Shortt’s character in Father Ted wore one with such menace that you’d have believed he might have actually done it, only he wouldn’t know how to make it off Craggy Island.

This was an era before the internet and social media so there were no leaks – but the media devoted as much space to the Dallas drama as it did to the start of the Iran/Iraq war which also began in 1980 and was to go on for the next eight years.

And it’s not as though there weren’t real issues to worry us either – Tipperary’s Ronnie Reagan became President of the United States, the country which saw a lunatic end John Lennon’s life at the entrance to his New York apartment, the country that boycotted the Moscow Olympics that same year.

Given how far technology has advanced since, 1980 was the year that the fax machine hit the shops along with the first domestic camcorder, and we thought the world have tilted on its axis.

For those who thought Dallas as a city as opposed to a soap, this was ostentation at its very best – oil barons sitting about shooting the breeze and scheming against each other when they weren’t jumping into bed with their rivals’ lives.

JR, Bobby, Sue Ellen, Miss Ellie – who once lived out the Glann Road in Oughterard in real life – Jock, Cliff Barnes

This was the second season of Dallas and it’s hard to describe how the antics of oil barons in the Lone Star State could grip the Irish viewing public in the depths of recession – ironically we were also in the depths of a petrol crisis because of the Iran/Iraq war.

Perhaps we were still searching for a soap fix in the aftermath of the shocking decision to axe the Riordans a year earlier after 15 years of addictive viewing every Sunday night.

And even rural Ireland – my own late father among them – made the seamless transition from the slow pace of life in Leestown to the breakneck drama of Dallas.

Not that the Riordans wasn’t cutting edge – because it was. Issues that wouldn’t even be aired on the Late Late Show made their way into the soap’s storyline.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.