Ian McMillan: The son casts a shadow over the Ponderosa

ALL together now, let's sing: dangdangerlang dangerlang dangerlang Bonanza! Dangdangerlang dangerlang dangerlang dang, der lang lang lang!

There goes the map, smouldering outwards in grainy black and white from Virginia City to Carson City and beyond, to the shores of Lake Tahoe, and here come the Cartwrights, galloping towards the front of the TV screen on their magnificent steeds: Hoss, Adam, Pa and Little Joe, role models all, carriers of the Wide-Brimmed Hat Of Truth in a shabby and exhausted world.

Readers of a certain age may now be explaining the previous paragraph to younger people, but many of us remember the sheer gut-wrenching excitement of Bonanza on a Friday night (I'm sure it was Friday) as the Cartwright family fought on the side of good in the dusty 19th century Wild West.

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The theme tune burst into our front rooms in the South Yorkshire coalfield with all the power of a massed brass band or a huge cathedral organ. As I watched, hypnotised by the action and the stirring music, I pretended my water pistol was a sixgun and the back of the settee was my faithful steed, and I bet I wasn't the only one, and I know I've written about Bonanza in these pages before, but it remains a direct motorway-sized link back to my childhood and to the childhood of lots of people who, like me, know that Hop Sing was the name of the Chinese cook at the Ponderosa and don't care how useless that fact is.

Over the years, though, the actors who played the brothers and the dad have passed on to the Great Ranch in the Sky: Dan Blocker, who played Hoss, died in 1972 when I had put Bonanza behind me and was pinning my faith in Progressive Rock and wearing army greatcoats and using my old water pistol as a microphone and pretending that the settee was a stage I could jump off.

At least I could while my mam was out of the way having her hair done and my dad was in the conservatory tying his fishing flies, trying to decide whether to do a Bloody Butcher or a Baby Doll.

Lorne Greene, who played the patriarch Pa, died in 1987. I would have been 31-years-old with a young family and I may have acknowledged his passing with a shrug rather than a tear, although I do remember being a grown man before I realised what a bizarre name Lorne Greene was; it was a bit like being called Sea Blue or Tomato Red.

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Michael Landon, who played the baby-faced Little Joe, shuffled off his bandana in 1991 and again, I probably briefly noted it and didn't give it too much thought, being too involved in carving out a career as a Northern literary gent to notice there was one more empty saddle in the corral.

The other day, though, I was genuinely saddened to see that Pernell Roberts, who played the enigmatic and often leather-clad Adam, had died. Adam was different: he was a bit of an intellectual, a bit of a bohemian. I imagined, even before I went along to the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Nevada a few years ago, that Adam would have been a cowboy who wrote poetry even though the idea seemed outrageous at the time. And, as I've said, he wore leather trousers!

This seemed amazing to me: What did they mean? I thought leather was for shoes! How did you get them on? Did they creak? A few years later, of course, I saw Emma Peel in leather trousers in The Avengers and I knew exactly what they meant, but at the time I'm writing about I was more than happy with my half-full water pistol and the back of an old settee.

The obituaries, however, painted old Pernell Roberts as a bit of a curmudgeon, and he was quoted as saying: "I spent six seasons of playing the eldest son on that show. Six seasons of feeling like a damned idiot, going round like a middle-aged teenager going 'Yes, Pa, no Pa' on cue. It was downright disgusting – such dialogue for a grown man."

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I was upset that he'd died, and I was doubly upset that he didn't regard Bonanza with the same awe and reverence that I did; maybe the person who said you should never meet your childhood heroes was right. Wouldn't it be awful if Postman Pat turned out to be a bloke who sat in a chair all day like Jim Royle, scratching his bum and sending Jess out to make a cup of tea while he watched the telly?

Maybe, as the years go by, you want life to be as simple as Bonanza made it out to be, with a narrative arc that always ends with the good guys winning just before bedtime. Maybe that's why I wanted Pernell Roberts to be the man I thought he was. Maybe that's why I still whistle the Bonanza theme tune when times are hard...