The secrecy of Starsky and Hutch: the stealth, and the glory and necessity of a lie.
S&H hit the screens in 1976, I was 9 – ideal mental age to become enthralled in it. I recall Starsky & Hutch like it was kid’s tv. It was pretty dumb, not that I thought that until about 1981. Gawd, it was daft, cardboard boxes were never so untouched as the ones Hutch would jump into, that Starsky would smash the Gran Torino through. It was The Wire of its shitty day – a shitty The Wire of its shitty-shitty day. One was blond, the other was swarthy – one wore leather, the other knitwear (the oddest cardigans this side of an Auntie’s Christmas pressie). Chalk and cheese. Black and white, but white (whitey white, honky white). Huggie Bear was the charismatic, funky, acceptable face of the ghetto black man – just an Amos ‘n Andy wearing a pimp’s feather in his pimp’s hat in his pimp’s car. This was street, but street as in Sesame Street. They took on drug dealers, sex traffickers and devil worshippers. They dated air stewardess. I didn’t know what an air stewardess was – some grown-up version of a uniformed Nanny – sex nannys?
Starsky and Hutch was virulent. Every kid, from 4 to 18, was consumed in its fever. Schoolyards were the back alleys of NewYork, we chased through them in hot pursuit. It was wild. Blond kids having to make mates with some swarthy kid. Kids started getting their hair dyed Ken Hutchinson yellow, the colour of church candles. Woman’s Realm printed David Starsky cardigan patterns.
Me? I looked like Hutch but was Starsky inside.
The secrecy: I’d a brother and sister, 4 and 7, they were huge, huge fans of the general consensus that Starsky and Hutch was a unmissable tv programme. They’d never seen it. They’d seen Paul Michael Glazer and David Soul on Swap Shop, they’d seen the endless impressions by double acts as childish as Little & Large - but they’d never be allowed to watch the programme. It was on after the watershed, after 9pm. I had to make a Oscar-worthy pretence of going to bed, wait, reading chapter 155 of Lord of the Rings, before sneaking down to the tv and being devoured.
We didn’t get the full S&H in the UK, the BBC screened its screenings. It was weak orange squash, not the strong orange squash the States got to revel in. S&H was a programme akin to Byker Grove or Grange Hill in its original form, but it was made a late-night Basil Brush – it was weak, weak squash, but there was a tincture of vodka in it, 0.001% – the idea of that illicit spike was enough to make us drunk. Kids can get drunk on the idea of something, on the idea of drunk. We’d wheel about school, staggering under the influence – of S&H.
It was just Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid as cops, and the contrast between leads heightened. I didn’t get that, that impoverished mode of creativity that tv lauded in those days (let’s take the success of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, two likeable rogues, merge it with the success of The French Connection, two likeable rogue cops, add a smattering of blaxploitation, a jive-talking negro fella, include a nod to Bullit, a Gran Torino, sweet, and, presto…
…
one day, S&H was meaningless. It stopped effecting me. I left it, I left the room, bowed out. I stayed upstairs, didn’t tiptoe down (not regularly), I finished Lord of the Rings numerous times. It’s only a visual nostalgia for the programme and personal nostalgia that sustain it in my thoughts. But, still there it remains, in my thoughts, Hutch, David, Huggie and Captain Dobey.
I had Shoestring instead.
