[quote=“terentii, post:19, topic:817258”]
The theme may have been popular; the show was not (though it was parodied on Eric Idle’s Rutland Weekend TV). I’m willing to bet the version of the theme most people knew worldwide was the one by The Ventures:
[/QUOTE]I don’t know who the Ventures are, but I remember the show titles: - jumbo jet, memorial, racing boats, beautiful girl (Elizabeth Logue) and the zoom into Jack Lord as McGarrett…
So far as I recall, the only times I ever watched ***Rhoda ***and Phyllis were in Scotland in 1976. How popular they were, I don’t know, but they were on the schedule.
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
[quote=“terentii, post:19, topic:817258”]
The theme may have been popular; the show was not (though it was parodied on Eric Idle’s Rutland Weekend TV). I’m willing to bet the version of the theme most people knew worldwide was the one by The Ventures:
[/QUOTE]That doesn’t appear to have been a hit at all in the UK though. All I’m saying is that if you play the theme tune, or ask what show “Book 'em, Danno” came from, a goodly proportion of UK people of sufficient age would know.
***MTM ***I don’t remember seeing there at all. 
Since I was still stuck in Minneapolis in 1972, all I can do is cite what the representative of the Beeb told us. 
As he should.
Mind you, it ran from 1968 - 1980 (and my memories of it are from the mid/late 70s) so maybe it did eventually did find an audience. Widespread adoption of colour TV in the UK lagged the US by a good number of years, and I imagine Hawaii 5-0 in B&W wasn’t quite the visual feast it could have been.
Quite possible. As for The Ventures’ rendition of the theme, I remember hearing it all the time on the radio when I was in junior high, i.e., around 1969, so it must have peaked well before the mid-70s.
I remember Hawaii Five-O doing plenty well in the UK. I’m not saying it was good, just that it did well. As an aside, I remember reading that one of the very few football terrace dances was based on the show (lines of supporters conga-style pretending to canoe up and down terraces whilst singing the theme tune - can’t remember which football club).
But my main point: there were lots of comedy shows that you might not expect, that did OK in late night slots. Taxi, Barney Miller, Gary Shandling, Beavis and Butthead, and so on. These ran for years without ever breaking out (like Cheers, say), but presumably with a big enough audience to keep them going. So a lot more shows than you might think had exposure without becoming huge.
j
How popular was Cheers!? I once had an Englishwoman tell me I looked like Norm when sitting at a bar.
Soap, Married with Children
Everything is relative. The thinking man’s hit. It sure wasn’t Friends.
(There was a time, when I commuted by train, that I thought the sole purpose of mobile phones was for 20-something women to ring up a flatmate to make sure Friends was being recorded.)
j
I once had a 20-something Englishwoman tell me ***Friends **was “wicked.”
*The only bits of that show I ever watched were the ones where Paget Brewster was wearing nothing but a jersey and some sweat socks. :o
Channel 4 - when it came into being in 1982 with a public service remit of doing things differently from the three existing channels - showed some great US stuff, and Cheers was one of their early successes. It wasn’t top-rated TV or anything, but it found a loyal (and I suspect influential) audience.
Hill Street Blues started out being shown on the mainstream ITV channel, but it wasn’t a good fit for them, and then Channel 4 picked it up and started showing it from the start again on a regular slot. For me, that was just breathtaking TV, the blueprint for decent TV drama ongoing.
Honestly, 1980s Channel 4 was an outstanding broadcaster. Publicly owned, but not publicly funded, with an actual Act of Parliament remit to do things differently. Let’s say that for the first decade or so they really ran with that…
Hey Baron - in my memory HSB was always Channel 4 - they started showing it, suddenly had an unexpected hit on their hands, and chose to restart broadcasting again from episode 1 because of it. Am I hallucinating?
Absolutely agree re Channel 4. An aside - they’re ultimately the reason why the NFL plays in London; they were the first UK broadcaster to show football, back in the 1980s. One unfortunate - some would say tragic - consequence of this is that I have been a Browns fan for thirty-odd years.
j
These examples aren’t TV shows since they were originally made to be shown theatrically and are also now pretty dated but I’ve wondered how much of following The Three Stooges shorts and the Warner Brothers cartoons had in the UK. They were the mainstay of local TV afternoon programming in the US from the 50s through the 80s.
I’m so sorry.
Huh. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I’m sure I remember where I first watched HSB - my folks first letting me watch proper adult TV - and that’s the house we lived in before the one we lived in when C4 started. I’d phone my Dad, but it’s getting late here and it would be maybe a bit too random of a thing to ask him at this hour. 
Anyway, just found out Channel 4 has the whole run of HSB on their All 4 platform, for free for UK viewers.
Glee, you say that Graham Norton dominates the British talk show market (where those shows are called, yeah, I know, chat shows). But in the U.S. there’s a huge number of talk shows. There are the shows hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, Samantha Bee, James Corden, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Trevor Noah, just to confine myself to the evening and night ones. The U.S. needs so many of these shows that it has to steal hosts from other countries - Corden and Oliver from the U.K., Bee from Canada, and Noah from South Africa. Graham Norton’s and Jonathan Ross’s shows also are available on American channels.