“Texas, I Think”

Dallas  is returning to our TV screens this evening (Channel5 at 9pm, Wednesday 5 September). This got us thinking about some of the things Larry Hagman got up to in the days before he struck oil playing JR Ewing.

It was in 1976 when he played the role of an incompetent police officer who thought he was Sherlock Holmes in a NBC TV movie called The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective.

Curiously enough, his side kick was a female Watson called Joan, played by Jenny O’Hara. The Pilot show wasn’t particularly well received so hopes for a planned series never developed.

Another Fine Success

BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives (Series 28. No.6, Tuesday 4 September 2012) featured Stan Laurel, one of the great comedy talents of the twentieth century. You can listen to the programme on the BBC iPlayer.

And, it can hardly come as any great surprise to learn that there’s a connection to our own world. In 1927, Oliver Hardy played Sherlock Pinkham, assisted by Stan Laurel as Ferdinand Finkleberry in Do Detectives Think? . Ollie & Stan’s 1944 comedy The Big Noise  also had a detective theme, with Stan donning the deerstalker.

We’re not sure if there’s any evidence that Stan played at the old Empire Theatre in Belfast’s Victoria Square, sometime between 1906 and 1909. There is proof positive however that Stan and Ollie both appeared at the Grand Opera House here in 1952.