Somehow, discovering the fact that the "Bionic Man" Lee Majors is seventy years old today makes me feel suddenly very old indeed.
For despite the fact that everyone likes to have selective memories about the quality TV of their youth - I, Claudius, Ascent of Man, Civilisation - it was actually trash TV programmes like Kung Fu, Alias Smith & Jones and the Six Million Dollar Man that we were really watching...
Lee Majors (Steve Austin), all butch and rugged (in real life the young Harvey Lee Yeary was a US football graduate), would spot the baddies with his bleeping bionic eye, chase after them with his bionic legs, and then manage to hit people with this bionic fist that could crush steel plate - all without shedding a drop of blood or killing anyone!
Nothing in any of the plots was in the slightest bit plausible nor memorable - a bit like the A-Team a decade later - but we were hooked! Then came the spin-off Bionic Woman; and there were even a bionic boy and a bionic dog! Oh, the joy.
In "real" life, too, Lee Majors' marriage to Charlie's Angel Farrah Fawcett captivated our need for Hollywood royalty - the "Posh and Becks" of the mid 70s. When the marriage fell apart, and the Six Million Dollar Man was cancelled, however, his star faded - despite a hit US series called The Fall Guy in the 80s (which I never watched; I was far too busy being a young slut by then) - and now Mr Majors has reached that inevitable "cult" status, destined never to shake off his past.
But never mind, eh? We all have those denim-clad, impossible, cartoon-book memories to fall back on...
And here's the man himself singing the theme tune to The Fall Guy. A proper budding David Hasselhoff:
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