ABSTRACT
This is a piece about TV Westerns, about their history certainly but, more centrally, their survival over time in people’s affections and memories. They seldom feature in today’s TV schedules and seem unable now to offer the remake possibilities of the other small screen series like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek that developed alongside them. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, they were massively popular both in America and Britain. Reflecting this shift, I am interested in how, back then, they became embedded in people’s daily lives and then in acts of remembering and re-remembering functioning in what Annette Kuhn has described as that ‘never ending process of making, remaking, making sense of, ourselves – now’ (Kuhn, 1995 : 16). My particular focus is on how TV Westerns have been remembered by the boys (now men) who grew up with them, and what I have to say bridges three areas of critical writing. For a start, in addressing people’s experiences of the genre, I have concentrated on the processes of TV viewing rather than specific programmes and texts and have drawn on the TV audience research that has followed (perhaps most obviously) from David Morley’s arguments in Family Television (Morley, 1986). In addition, my consideration of how TV Westerns have been used and reused over time connects recent writing about TV and film memories (Stacey, 1994; Kuhn, 1995) with attempts to understand masculinity in terms of performance and masquerade (Cohan, 1997).
