Basically they were an Indian family. Think about it. They all lived in the same house. They all worked in the family business. They were riven with feuds and fights and infidelities. Not to mention the mandatory misunderstood alcoholic aunt/wife/sister-in-law.

Dallas was the perfect example of what it was to be a child of the eighties. While the series projected a world of wealth, cut-throat business dealings and all manner of sexual peccadillos, at its beating heart Dallas was about a family. I reckon it was this abiding component, threaded through every episode, that made this the only TV show that my dad insisted upon watching. From 8.10pm for fifty minutes there was an uncharacteristic silence in our house as we all say glued to the box. Maybe it was because the Ewing family mirrored his own family, to some extent: Jock, the strong and silent patriarch; Miss Ellie, the put upon, family loving matriarch; and the three sons, J.R, Garry and Bobby. (Obviously I was middle son Garry, the black sheep of the family, the troublemaker, the one that turned his back on the family business and subsequently was ostracised.)

Tomorrow marks the fortieth anniversary of the first transmission of the iconic American prime time soap opera. This was a series that captured the collective imagination of not only a country or a continen - it had the entire English speaking world on the edge of its seat. Of the most viewed TV shows in the UK of the last eighty years, the revelatory 'Who Shot J.R' episode of Dallas is the only American import to chart - with 21.6 million viewers, there are only five more watched TV shows in the UK. This same episode commanded a third of a billion viewers worldwide, across almost sixty countries. At its height, the soap even inspired a computer game in the 80s - Dallas Quest was a surprisingly successful venture. And as if that wasn’t accolade enough, the great ABBA even mentioned the TV show in the lyrics of their 1982 song 'The Day Before You Came'.

On a more serious note, it is said that the downfall of Ceausescu’s Communist Romania was influenced by broadcasts of Dallas, one of but a handful of Western TV shows allowed to be screened by the totalitarian regime. The hope was that viewers would be disgusted by the overt greed of money-grabbing Free Market America. The plan backfired spectacularly with the audience being wooed by the conspicuous consumerist consumption of Capitalism. It’s worth noting that shortly after the summary execution of Mr and Mrs Ceaucescu et al, one of the first programmes shown in the newly liberated Romania was the pilot episode of Dallas.

There was a simplistic and almost Shakespearean quality to the concept of Dallas. There were two rival families, the Ewing’s and the Barnes’; in trusted Romeo and Juliet style Bobby Ewing fell in love with Pam Barnes. Bobby and Pam were the perfect couple. Even when the writers killed off Bobby at the end of season eight, so devout were the viewers that when he returned at the end of season nine, stepping out of the shower and thus writing off the intervening shows as a “dream”, it was happily accepted.

Unlike Bobby, J.R was pure evil - he philandered as much as he back-stabbed, and he created enemies wherever he went. Yet he was the vital ingredient, an anti-hero that kept us watching. Like Hamlet, J.R appeared in each and every of the 357 episodes. This fact is yet more astonishing when one considers that Larry Hagman’s realization of the amoral J.R was originally written as a supporting character.

Televisual phenomena like Dallas - TV that is a shared experience across the entire UK, TV that takes possession of the zeitgeist - are now a thing of the past. Our viewing patterns and habits are becoming increasingly more fragmented and personalised.

And while box sets like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones have a profound cultural impact on the viewing public, it’s an impact that is governed by the viewer rather than the broadcaster. Great television drama is still being made - if anything the quality and scope may be better than ever. But I’ll always miss those Tuesday evenings at ten past eight as my family gathered and settled, like so many other families gathered and settled and prepared to find out who J.R had alienated now, if Sue Ellen would ever stop drinking long enough to get with Dusty or if anyone else was going to step out of the shower as if nothing had happened.