Television dreams up little that we haven’t seen before

Nobody at all considered it ironic that, in rural Ireland of the late seventies, the two most popular dramas on television both concerned big family dynasties with all of their familiar familial problems – sex and marriage, land, drink, feuds – and one was set in Leestown while the other was in Dallas.

The latter was the biggest blockbuster to come our way with Bobby and JR and Miss Ellie and Sue Ellen entering Irish homes with almost as big a welcome as that other American, JFK, two decades earlier.

But for all of their glitz and glamour, they’d never replace Tom and Mary, Benjy and Maggie, Batty and Minnie and all the gang in Johnny Mac’s pub – even if, by then, RTÉ itself was about to bring the curtain down on the Riordans.

The Montrose mandarins called time on life in Leestown – or moved it to the radio – in the summer of 1979, a year before the country became gripped in the quest to find out Who Shot JR Ewing.

Somehow we moved seamlessly from life in the small farming community in Kilkenny to the ranches and oil wells of Texas – perhaps because, at their core, they were all just country folk, even if the transatlantic crew had a little more money and a little less class.

They weren’t the only big shows on our small tellys either; there were a couple of other rural sagas that drew big audiences.

All Creatures Great and Small showed off Yorkshire in its glory – and the Little House on the Prairie brought to life the frontier families who settled in Walnut Grove in Minnesota.

Those of us who now sit in on a Saturday night instead of hitting the tiles can again relive the magic of All Creatures Great and Small, because the BBC has remastered the originals from the eighties to bring us back into the lives of James Herriot and the Farnons – Seigfreid and Tristan – with all of the ups and downs of life in the Yorkshire Dales.

There was a remake too, made by Channel 5 in the UK and bought by RTÉ, with a different cast and the same stories – only this time in high-definition and even more glorious colour.

It boasts a fine cast too – and yet it doesn’t hold a candle to the original, even allowing for the fact that the exteriors and interiors were shot with different quality film.