The time, the place: BBC1, 1978-1991.

But really: Southfork Ranch, Braddock County, Texas, in the hog-heaven years after the A-rabs obligingly hiked the oil price.

Format: a rich extended family of oil tycoons spend their lives eating Texas-sized outdoor breakfasts on the Southfork porch and conspiring to ruin each other's lives.

Cult credentials: Shakespeareanly magnificent creation of smiling villain J R Ewing (Larry Hagman), after whom at least three pubs in Glasgow were named or renamed in the 1980s - one of them, in Partick, had a lounge named after his dipso wife, Sue Ellen (Linda Gray). White-trash-make-good appeal - the oil-rich Ewings were just one rung up the social ladder from the Beverly Hillbillies, but this being Texas, no-one ever criticised their taste in soft furnishings.

Identity Crises and Brechtian Alienation Effect: no-one was played by one actor in Dallas when two or three would do. Miss Ellie started and finished as Barbara Bel Geddes, but was Donna Reed for a while in between; JR's son JR Ewing III changed overnight from Tyler Banks to Omri Katz; J R's mistress Jenna Wade was three different people including Priscilla Presley; the Kristin who shot JR looked nothing like the first Kristin. And none of the others ever noticed.

The Season That Wasn't: in 1985 J R's brother Bobby died in a hit-and-run caused by Patrick Duffy asking for more money. Ratings slumped, so a year later his wife Pam (Victoria Principal) awoke from uneasy slumbers to find him soaping up in the shower - lo, the past 26 episodes, including the widowed Pam's second marriage, had all been a dream. On the side of gritty realism, however, Bobby was at least still Patrick Duffy.

The Husband That Wasn't: some time after Jock (Jim Davis) went missing, presumed dead, in a helicopter crash in South America, a gold-digger called Wes Parmalee (Steve Forrest) turned up at Southfork claiming, despite looking nothing like him (plastic surgery and all that, you know), to be the miraculously surviving Ewing paterfamlias. Miss Ellie was very nearly convinced, but then she didn't know what she looked like herself from one season to another.

The Kennedy connection: there is a seriously held theory among a certain school of conspiracy dingbats that the whole series is a coded biography of America's First Family and in particular an expose of the JFK assassination. There's the setting of Dallas, for a start. Then the family patriarchs, Jock Ewing and Joseph Kennedy: two womanising old soaks ruthless in business. Tragic family matriarchs Rose Kennedy and Miss Ellie: we can safely assume each owned a black dress. JFK and J R: two charismatic rogues both referred to by their initials, each with a nicer, younger brother called Bobby (Patrick Duffy) who would die a violent and premature death. After being shot, both J R and JFK were taken to Dallas Parkland Hospital. And the episode Who Shot JR? was first screened on November 21, 1980 . . . the very eve of the anniversary of the JFK assassination. All that you call a coincidence?

Yes, we do: thank goodness.

Just remind us - who shot JR, again? A wronged woman, of course - his nefariously pregnant sister-in-law Kristin Shepard (Mary Crosby). Were they trying to tell us that JFK was really assassinated in a revenge kill by the Marilyn Monroe Appreciation Society? Mm . . . probably not: spoilsports!

In the end: plots started getting implausible and repetitive. Bobby followed J R in getting shot by his sister-in-law, J R fell on hard times and shuttled in and out of prison and mental hospital, and shot himself at the end of a bizarre final episode, based on the film It's A Wonderful Life, in which an angel explained what would have happened

to everyone else (been happier, mostly) if he had never been born.

Moral: money can't make you happy - but at least you can be miserable in comfort . . .