October 6, 1991....30 years ago today

Sarah

Sarah

Moderator Emerita
Dallas came to an end on television in the UK. As a 15 year old school girl I was distraught and I remember sitting watching it with my Mum and a cup of tea on my wee tv in my bedroom (we were having a moment and Dad was downstairs, asking me in a concerned tone afterwards if I was ok - eh no I wasn't!, I felt like my life was over).

I truly did. I felt like my whole wee world had collapsed and why was Dallas ending? Why? Was JR dead? Would I ever see him with Sue Ellen again?

I still remember the lead up and the trails in the days before the actual episode aired, to the tune of 'Fool If You Think It's Over..'. I thought, 'Are they trying to trick me? Is it not really over??' and the announcer saying 'This brings to an end one of the most successful television shows of all time...'

When I saw JR with the gun I remember saying out loud, 'No JR, don't, please don't, no JR...' and crying.

It really was the end of an era. Everything felt so....unfinished and up in the air. I was so, so sad. :cry: It couldn't be over.

Do I still love Dallas? Yes. Would I still cry for Dallas. Yes. And to this day I still think it should be a legal offence to talk through the credits and theme of Dallas.

Such a huge part of my life and nothing will ever change that.

 
CeeCee72

CeeCee72

Telly Talk Star
Not sure what date it aired in the US, but I had stopped watching by then. No Donna. No Pam. No Miss Ellie. Worst of all no Sue Ellen.

The storyline with James drove me over the edge. Having that little snot outsmart JR was the final straw for me.

But I tuned in and watched the finale.

And honestly, it was so bad, by the time it was over I wouldn't have objected if JR shot ME for bothering to watch it.
 
G

Grangehill1

Telly Talk Fan
Relegated to a Sunday afternoon slot on the BBC. We didn’t even get the ‘previously on Dallas’ showing all the past cliffhangers.
I sat bored to tears thinking why are we meant to care about all this. None of it is real. But I sat through it hoping that at the very end Pam would appear or Bobby would get a message from someone saying they’d found Pam. To end the show like they did was a travesty. To seriously misread what the fans wanted and give us that ending none of us wanted and a non resolution to what had happened to Pam. Nobody knew the show would ever come back. And it was the end. And what a terrible, terrible ending.
 
Luke_Krebbs_Ewing

Luke_Krebbs_Ewing

Telly Talk Champion
I cried at the close of Conundrum but the show just wasn't the same anymore. A lot of the characters I cared about were all gone, Miss Ellie, Pam, Sue Ellen, Donna and Ray. The newer cast simply couldn't hold a candle to the originals.

I didn't like the concept of Conundrum as it's basically a retread of the dream season. Leonard Katzman had to have been burnt out creatively.. So sad, the show deserved a better ending than that.

As the theme tune blared out for the final time on BBC1, I teared up and whispered Goodbye...,
 
Rove

Rove

Telly Talk Warrior
It was addictive television at its best and it felt like one planet was along for the ride. The effect Dallas had on the small screen can still be felt today: cliffhangers being the big one. But who knew then that a small Texan family would have such effect which still resonates with die hard fans like ourselves.

When it was good, it was exceptional. When it was bad I so desperately wanted to file divorce papers. However, I kept watching to the bitter end...and if there is one sweet thing I remember about Conundrum it was watching the final episode with my grandmother. Fond memories.
 
Angela Channing

Angela Channing

Telly Talk Veteran
It was a sad end to one of the greatest TV shows ever. Relegated to Sunday afternoon in the schedules and ending with one of the worse (if not the worst) episodes ever, it didn't feel like great loss to me when it ended. It was like having a terminally ill friend having his life support machine switched off: although you're sad he's gone, deep down you know it's better than him barely surviving in the state he was in.
 
Mel O'Drama

Mel O'Drama

Admin
I remember the Radio Times cover with the headstone (1978-1991). I can even remember where I was when I first read it (a coffee shop in a shopping centre). At that point it was probably been many a year since Dallas had made a RT cover. I thought this particular cover looked cheap and generic but somehow appropriate for what Dallas had become.

It was a sad ending as others have said. I struggled to bring myself to care and only watched to satisfy my curiosity, to see the guest-stars and hoping I'd get a sense of closure. None of it felt as though it mattered anymore, and all the long-term characters looked tired and bored. Quite a contrast to half a dozen years earlier when the entire world's axis seemed to rotate around the goings on at Southfork.
 
Mel O'Drama

Mel O'Drama

Admin
Monzo said:
Has a season in the UK ever been interrupted for months? I found an article from 1985 about such plans, but they were discarded at the time.
Click to expand...

Dallas was unceremoniously yanked off UK screens for the best part of two months midway through Season Seven (ending with Jenna's smoking gun and Naldo's dead body). It was due to a rival network outbidding the BBC who had screened Dallas since the beginning. The BBC bods were furious and threatened to sit on the remaining episodes of the season, with a plan to screen them directly against Season Eight episodes on ITV, with the reasoning that the audience would have to watch their episodes because otherwise they wouldn't know what was going on.

As it turned out, the BBC got it back, and Thames ended up paying the BBC a large amount of compensation. But we were so far behind, storylines such as Bobby's death were splashed all over the newspapers months before it ended up airing here.

In January 1985, the company made a deal with international distributors for US production company Lorimar to purchase the UK broadcasting rights for US drama Dallas, at that time transmitted on BBC1. This broke a gentlemen's agreement between the two sides not to poach each other's imported shows. Thames paid £55,000 a show compared to the £29,000 of the BBC. The deal brought condemnation from the BBC and from other ITV stations, who feared the BBC would poach their imports, pushing up prices. The BBC planned to delay transmission of the episodes of Dallas that it already had, with the hope to broadcast them at the same time Thames broadcast its new purchases. Ultimately, pressure from several ITV companies (especially Yorkshire Television) to the IBA, forced Thames to sell the series back to the BBC at a loss. Bryan Cowgill, the managing director of Thames left the company, as he believed his position was untenable since the board was unwilling to support his plans to buy the series. In October, Thames paid the BBC, via the IBA, £300,000 in compensation to make up the shortfall in additional cost for new episodes of Dallas.
Click to expand...

en.wikipedia.org

Thames Television - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org


 
Monzo

Monzo

Telly Talk Star
Grangehill1 said:
Relegated to a Sunday afternoon slot on the BBC. We didn’t even get the ‘previously on Dallas’ showing all the past cliffhangers.
Click to expand...
What season was Dallas moved to the afternoon? Did the BBC generally say goodbye to US shows from its prime time schedule at that time or was it just Dallas? Sports are often broadcast on Sunday afternoons, so was Dallas on air every Sunday?
 
Sarah

Sarah

Moderator Emerita
Monzo said:
What season was Dallas moved to the afternoon? Did the BBC generally say goodbye to US shows from its prime time schedule at that time or was it just Dallas? Sports are often broadcast on Sunday afternoons, so was Dallas on air every Sunday?
Click to expand...
Last season I think from memory.
 
G

Grangehill1

Telly Talk Fan
Monzo said:
What season was Dallas moved to the afternoon? Did the BBC generally say goodbye to US shows from its prime time schedule at that time or was it just Dallas? Sports are often broadcast on Sunday afternoons, so was Dallas on air every Sunday?
Click to expand...
Yes it was the final season.
What was weird was that the last few episodes of the previous season were broadcast around the time of the football world up in 1990 and so the BBC transmitted double episodes. So there was clearly an audience to watch 90 mins of Dallas in prime time. But then suddenly next season it had gone to Sunday afternoons

I do think at the time there was a move away from US shows on prime time BBC.
The only exceptions from memory were shows like Due South and Lois and Clark that were on a Saturday night but after that I think that was it
 
Monzo

Monzo

Telly Talk Star
Grangehill1 said:
I do think at the time there was a move away from US shows on prime time BBC.
Click to expand...
It was similar in Germany. There was one single slot on the major broadcaster ARD's prime time for US shows. After Dallas was over, the final season of Miami Vice aired in the time slot and since then (1992) ARD has not aired any US shows in prime time.
 
Last edited:
Carrie Fairchild

Carrie Fairchild

Telly Talk Star
I was only 7 when it ended, so my main recollection of the original run is the theme tune, before I got properly acquainted with the show in reruns. However, I still remember sitting on the floor in front of the TV that Sunday afternoon, with my mother instilling similar importance in the last episode airing to something like watching the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't think she'd regularly watched it for years but was going back to see how they wrapped it up. One other memory of the finale was the front page of one of the UK tabloids had a cartoon of the cast riding in a convertible with a headline like "Farewell Dallas". Much like the show at the time, it had been relegated to a subheading but was obviously still seen as important enough to make the front page.

Grangehill1 said:
I do think at the time there was a move away from US shows on prime time BBC.
The only exceptions from memory were shows like Due South and Lois and Clark that were on a Saturday night but after that I think that was it
Click to expand...
Yes, I think there was a bit of a backlash against US programming on the Beeb after they saturated the schedules with it in the 80's. As much as we love them, there would have been a faction of the general public who'd have been critical of their license fee being spent on "cheesy US soaps".
 
Top