The time, the place: First screened 1958-1965 on ITV; airing nowhere at present, but long runs turn up regularly in Channel 4's Sunday-lunch slot for vintage American nonsense along with The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, and Mission Impossible.
But really: on a long cattle drive from Texas to Kansas before the railroads came, vegetarianism became fashionable, or anyone had heard of mad cow disease.
The set-up: Trail boss Gil Favor (Eric Fleming) gets the job of moving several thousand cattle from San Antonio, Texas to Sedalia, Kansas. Hires a bunch of ornery cowpokes including Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood, right, with a guest star) as hired hands, and rides out. Adventures, all of them regrettably time-consuming, ensue.
Cult credentials: Made a star of Clint Eastwood. Featured a memorably odd and largely indecipherable theme song, sung by Frankie Laine (Keep them dogies movin'/ Though they're disapprovin'/ Keep them dogies movin'/Rawhide!/ Don't try and understand 'em/ Just roll 'n' rope 'n' brand 'em . . . etc) and later covered by the Blues Brothers in the film of the same name. Most of all, though, it's the fact that the trail never made it to Sedalia; the writers (many of them distinguished old Reds dodging the Hollywood blacklist under noms de guerre) were too busy arranging for Gil and Rowdy to right wrongs, challenge oppression, save menaced maidens, and generally poke their stetsons into various guest stars' business along the way. Which leads us to such matters as . . .
Culture credentials: In what was either an admirable attempt to improve the viewers' minds or an understandable reluctance to think of another new cowboy story, the writers specialised in unheralded adaptations of the imperishable (ie out of copyright) classics of European literature - including Madame Bovary on a wagon train, Jane Eyre in a ghost town, and, best of all, A Christmas Carol in a travelling magic and medicine show.
Incident of the Invisible Cows: Despite a cattle drive being the show's ostensible raison d'etre, there's hardly an episode (each one titled Incident of . . . whatever) out of the 144 that puts a dogie and a human actor in the same frame; they only appear, and then in stock-footage long shots, when the plot calls for a stampede. After seven years on the trail you might expect the poor beasts to be models for Pharaoh's lean kine, but surely we could still have seen them sideways.
Incident of the familiar camping ground: At least once in each episode the cowboys would make camp for the night, and video comparison demonstrates an eerie similarity between the almost Beckettianly minimal camp-site sets (a tree, a bush, a rock) they occupied. Is this why Sedalia never did get its steak dinners?
Incident of the novelty hit record: Among Gil Favor's gallant cowboys, Pete Nolan was always the man of mystery; his past, you felt, contained some dreadful sin for which he must atone under the light of Western stars. And indeed he had: for he was played by Sheb Wooley, who in another life had had a No 1 hit in Britain and the States with Purple People Eater. Maybe he's still out there, atoning, on the lone prairie with the rest of the boys; thank goodness they don't know Sedalia gave up waiting and opened a McDonald's in 1874.
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