A beacon of light shines all through the night just for me (Susan Cowsill)

Wie geht's?

Ron Howard and his brother, Clint Howard, have been a constant in my life.

I've just finished their Hollywood and family memoir The Boys and I felt again a real kinship to Ron as I read it.

[Although I also grew up watching Clint on Gentle Ben, I can't relate to him in the same way. I have never been drawn to excess, apart from record collecting, so his story of alcohol and drugs is completely alien to me].

But Ron, he's like my older brother (he is three years older than me and Clint is like my own brother - two years younger).

Although a world away in America there are some similarities:

• Loving parents who stayed together until our mothers passed away.
• The family dynamic is similar - Ronny and I are the older brother, with no other siblings.
• Ron and I have both sustained long marriages to one person, and we both have had families of four children.
• I even feel our personalities are similar - calm and even tempered, driven to succeed. but retaining our moral compass and values.

Of course, I've grown up with him as well thanks to the medium of Television.

My early memories of the sixties include watching The Andy Griffith Show on NZBC's one channel. Ronny Howard (as he was billed then) was my buddy - Opie Taylor. Or he would have been if he was real and lived in my Royal Oak neighbourhood.

My friends at Royal Oak Primary were all like me and Opie - friendly, quiet, generous with affection, funny, caring, sporty, respectful to our parents and adults in general, and not so clever at our schoolwork.

Then came American Graffiti (1973) and Happy Days when I was a teenager. I was a regular viewer of Richie, Potsy, Ralph and The Fonz.

Richie was again like me as I related to my friendship group: not the smartest tool in the shed, a bit vague and clueless but still like Opie grown into a teenager, battling all the things teenagers always battle. 

Reading The Boys, reminded me again how I am intertwined with other guys like Nick Hornby and Ron Howard - guys who I'll never meet, yet they feel like family.

Love and peace - Wozza

Gee I think you're swell (The Turtles)

This morning I watched an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, originally produced in 1963, while I ate my cereal before heading off to work. I'd recorded it on mysky.

I laughed out loud... a lot! And smiled... a lot! And enjoyed it...a lot!

I used to watch the programme way back in the 1960s. I loved it then, and it appears that I love it still.

This seems to be an anomaly. I've recorded and watched other sixties/seventies/eighties iconic TV and the appeal has waned considerably. There are a number of channels now that just show retro TV: Jones and Cue and two. I've taken to sampling old shows to see if they still hold up.

I couldn't last the distance with Mission: Impossible. It was slow paced and proved unable to transfer the excitement from that fuse intro into a whole 60 minute episode. It had dated badly.

The Twilight Zone (the remade one from the eighties, not the original Rod Serling version) has lasted comparatively better because it's not trying to be a wham bam action show. It's purely story driven and once you get past the eighties' hair, fashions and cinematography the story is still providing the momentum.

But each one comes in a distant second to The Andy Griffith Show.

I have delayed watching it because I was a tad scared that it would make me cringe and wonder what I'd loved in the first place. I should have had more faith.

Ron Howard, or Ronny Howard as he was then, gets second billing after Andy and before Don Knotts and he deserves it. He's amazingly self contained and knowing for such a young actor.

Apart from him and Andy's laid back, laconic style and Don Knotts' physical humour and comic timing, the key delight in the show I watched was the fantastic dialogue and interplay between Sheriff Andy Taylor (played by Andy Griffith) and his son Opie (played by Ron Howard).

In this episode Opie is influenced by a spoiled new kid in town who gets a bigger allowance and doesn't have to work for it. Opie tries to get this deal from his pa. Try watching the scene (posted below) without smiling and laughing loudly. If you can watch it and not be moved you've come to the wrong blog!!

The whole scene was warm, natural, funny, not overly sentimental, and idyllic and idealistic in a non cheesy way.

I don't remember ever watching the show in the sixties when I was roughly the same age as Opie (Ron is three years my senior) and wishing, during the opening credits as Andy and Opie carry fishing rods along a country road while the down home whistling happens on the soundtrack, that I was Opie and my dad was Andy.

But watching it now I do somewhat regret that our father son relationship wasn't as tight as the show portrays. It was a good relationship that got better with time but it wasn't as idyllic as Andy/Opie.

There were many reasons for that.

Apart from other things that don't obviously come to mind, we didn't live in Mayberry (no cops with guns in Royal Oak), I had a mum who I spent far more time with (there is no mother role in the show), our dialogue wasn't scripted (worked on until it was 'perfect') and Opie was an only child (I shared my parents with my younger brother).

I did subconsciously bond with Opie I'm sure. He was like a cool older brother from another mother to us all.



Love and peace - Wozza

America calls, I must go (Porcupine Tree)

Turned over from the Wimbledon tennis coverage yesterday morning to hear the TV One newsreader (Peter Williams) announce that Andy Griffith had passed away at age 86.

I know that it's going to sound weird but it felt a bit like my second dad had died. My own dad was about the same age as Andy Griffith and also passed away in his eighties a few years ago. They were both fantastic role models - wise, patient, generous gentlemen who oozed integrity, except one was real and the other was a creative piece of American fiction.

To people of my generation, now aged in the mid fifties (Peter Williams is also of that age), The Andy Griffith Show was about people we knew and could identify with, in a place that we also knew well.

To summarise for those not of my generation:

The Andy Griffith Show was an American sitcom first televised by CBS between October 3, 1960, and April 1, 1968. Andy Griffith portrays a widowed sheriff called Andy Taylor in the fictional small community of Mayberry, North Carolina. His life is complicated by an inept, but well-meaning deputy, Barney Fife (Don Knotts), a spinster aunt and housekeeper, Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier), and a young son, Opie (Ronny Howard). Local ne'er-do-wells, bumbling pals, and temperamental girlfriends further complicate his life.

Mayberry and Royal Oak in Auckland, NZ, felt the same to me. Small and safe and cosy and affectionate places to grow up.

Aunt Bee was like my own Ma (my mum's mum), and really - I was Opie. I like Ron Howard as a character and there were aspects of Opie that I could see in myself. Ron's only three years older than me and was only 7 when he first started on the show. When the show ended I was 11 and he was 14.

There were plenty of examples of a Gomer Pyle and a Barney Fife around me as well.

Never once did it occur to me that there were other little boys and girls watching The Andy Griffith Show and feeling the same things I did in the mid sixties. I still have that naive egoism as part of my character when it comes to popular culture. But age 11? Forget about it. The show was made for me and I was the only one loving it, absorbing it. It existed only in my head. It always comes as a mild shock when someone like Peter Williams expresses an emotional link to something I've regarded as mine and mine alone. 

A lot of the interweb talk surrounding Andy Griffith's death has been about the passing of a TV generation from history and I guess that's true to a point but there is always an inexorable move or shift going on, from what was once and what is now. A show like that could not get on the air now but it did once upon a time and I loved Andy Taylor as played by Andy Griffith.

Love and peace - Wozza