The joy of pure escapism – from Dinny up to Dallas

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There was a time when the earth as we knew it almost came off its axis when RTE decided to call an end to the shenanigans of Benjy and Batty and Maggie and Minnie in Leestown.

Because sitting down with the Riordans was part of what we were; and going out on a Sunday night, it had become the national signal that the weekend was over before everyone went back to school and work.

Without this touchstone we were left to flounder – even allowing for new arrivals like Pat Barry in Bracken or Dinny and Miley in Glenroe.

And then – in a parallel universe and a world we knew nothing about – a family of feuding oil barons from Texas came into our lives.

In the blink of an eye, the Ewings of Dallas replaced the Riordans in the national psyche.

We didn’t even question how this could happen – after all, tuning in to watch farming families enjoying time off in Johnny Mac’s traditional Irish pub is one thing, but evesdropping on JR and Cliff Barnes at the Oil Baron’s Ball wasn’t the sort of stuff we grew up with.

But then the secret to a good book, movie or even television show is that it offers you the chance to suspend disbelief, to escape into a world that has nothing to do with you and to spend an hour in an alien land.

Why else would we have grown up reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, the adventure of two brothers, their sister, their friend and a dog as they traipsed around Kirrin Island where they found more adventure and crime than you’d encounter on the streets of Baghdad on a Saturday night?

Everything in their world was jolly – even when it was jolly awful – and they drank lashings of ginger ale at a time when we thought the height of sophistication was Orange Cadet.

They went on ‘jolly japes’, got themselves into ‘awful scrapes’ and wore galoshes to keep their feet dry and they trapped dangerous criminals with nothing more than their intellect and Timmy, the curious dog.

But Julian, George, Dick, Anne and Timmy the dog had first appeared on the printed page back in 1942 – in Five on a Treasure Island, going on to feature in 21 further adventures.

And six years ago, the publishers decided that all of these phrases from back in the war years were out of date with the modern, high-paced world the children of today live in.

So – for that reason and the fact that you cannot use phrases like dirty tinkers or reveal you’re feeling awful queer – they decided to update the language of the children’s classics for a modern audience.

So “mercy me” was changed to “oh no!”, “fellow” to “old man” and “it’s all very peculiar” to “it’s all very strange”.

To read Dave’s column in full, please see this week’s Connacht Tribune.