28 June 2012

TV Party Tonight (Slight Return)





As a belated addendum(b) to a pointless meandering of a good while ago, I had forgotten about this one above, which I saw when it initially aired many years ago, via the late '70s short-lived sit-com CPO Sharkey. Which may have actually been, to what limited degree I can recall, perhaps the one punk-rock portrayal on American TV at the time that wasn't hilariously awful. Sure, I think it may have involved a punk-rock girl with spiked purple hair, who was supposed to be a niece of Don Rickles' titular character, and at one point she teaches him how to pogo, telling him that all it involves is "jumping up and down...like after you get out of the swimming pool and you're trying to shake the water out of your ears!" At the very least, it was benign in how it portrayed punk, foregoing the more common moral-panic angle.

But at the time I had no idea who the Dickies were, or that the program had actually featured a legit punk band. But just how "legit" were the Dickies? I seem to remember that within a decade their reputation or legacy had become a bit toxic in certain enclaves, with them getting shredded for having been a bunch of poachers or opportunist buffoons. If anything, I guess they amounted to little more than the Buzzcocks' pop sensibility being channeled through some West Coast, Hanna-Barbera equiv of the Dictators. Case in point, didn't they do a cover of The Banana Splits theme song, even? They did, and I guess that settled the matter.

Memory-jog courtesy of Waitakere Walks.

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