Boring? Nay lad/lass, Beckindale had plenty of drama from 1972-1979. Here, we see Amos and Henry reading a 1979 "TV Times" special magazine - "The Secrets Behind Emmerdale Farm", which contained a short story by Kevin Laffan, the show's creator, about Amos being held by armed robbers who planned to murder him.There is a daft idea doing the rounds that
Emmerdale Farm was boring and largely ignored by TV audiences before the plane crash storyline of 1993. OK, people say, maybe things
were a bit more interesting from 1985 onwards, but from 1972-1984 it was constant tea making, sheep and cows in fields, and men wiping their feet on Ma's mat before sitting down to some good old Yorkshire nosh.
That's nonsense.
Emmerdale Farm arrived (in some lucky ITV regions) on 16 October 1972, in an obscure lunchtime slot, and was immediately hard hitting. Jacob Sugden was dead. He had not been a great husband or father and now he was dead. The very first episode covered his funeral.
In following 1972 episodes, we saw the family dealing with the return of prodigal son, Jack - who had apparently been leading a racy 1960s lifestyle in London. It was the arrival of a friend of Jack's to visit Beckindale which almost caused my mother to switch off the show, never to watch again. Jack was seen exchanging banter with his chum about incest!
Incest! On lunchtime telly in 1972! My mother went red with rage and switched off immediately. She'd dismissed much telly from the mid-1960s onwards as "filth" and now this "filth" was spreading to daytime!
The incest banter was penned by Kevin Laffan, the show's creator, who apparently rejected scenes of adultery and road accidents in the mid-1980s as too graphic and shocking and resigned as a writer of the show in disgust!
Back to 1972, and fortunately, within a week or two, my mother had decided to give
Emmerdale Farm another chance, and it didn't blot its copybook again.
The next big storyline was the murder of Sharon Crossthwaite, a grim knee trembler of a saga (it woz batty Jim Latimer wot did it) and the death of Old Trash, a tramp. Trash fell from a window and this was actually quite graphically depicted if my memory serves me well. I recall, as a kid of eight or nine, being quite startled by it.
Meanwhile, Peggy Skilbeck had died suddenly, and a couple of years later the Skilbeck twins and Matt's Auntie Beattie Dowton were also dispatched when Beattie's car stalled at a level crossing and was hit by a train.
Vaguely
Acorn Antiques style nonsense pervaded at times - Alison Gibbons had killed her family with the central heating and the vicar's son was arrested for gun running in Athens!
Jim Gimbel shot himself dead in shame over his daughter "living over't brush" and Amos and Mr Wilks were held at gunpoint by two teenage runaways. When Sam Pearson found himself being held at gunpoint by the same two miscreants, my little sister was highly distressed. To see the old man enduring this brought a lump to
my throat, and I was thirteen at the time!
And the 1972-79 era went out in a blaze of misery as Wendy Hotson was raped.
The show was much slower than the
Emmerdale programme now. And there
was much more tea drunk. And farmhands philosophised (particularly if Kevin Laffan had written the episode!) and there
were lots of sheep and cows. But not many pigs.
Still,
plenty happened to keep us interested. I must admit, I found the show more natural and true to life without the relentlessly philosophising farmhands and with the inclusion of more graphic gritty detail from the mid-1980s onwards, but
Emmerdale Farm from 1972-79, and indeed in the early 1980s, was
not one big lesson in tea making and sheep shearing - far from it!
And as for the show not being "in the public eye" before 1993, as one Wikipedia writer recently stated, ratings of 12.5 to 15 million viewers in 1978, when the show was still not fully networked at prime time, would seem to disprove that statement.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, actor and comedian Max Wall took roles in several soap operas. In 1978, he was Harry Payne - a friend of Elsie Tanner's in Coronation Street; in 1982 he was Uncle Wally in Crossroads - Walter Soper - Arthur Brownlow's cousin; and his brief stint in Emmerdale Farm in 1978 saw him cast as Arthur Braithwaite, Sam Pearson's old acquaintance.
