Figure 1.--In this very English scene from "Heartbeat," a school boy polishes his cricket bat. The series is set in the 1960s. |
|
HBC will list TV series alphabetically here to make them easier to find. TV shows, except for American TV shows, are generally not well know in countries other than in the countries in which they were made. They are also much more current than movies. Almost all TV shows date from the 1950s at the earliest. Costume dramas have the same problems as in the movies, but a great deal of useful information is avialible from TV shows set in contemporary periods. As non-American TV shows are not as widely distributed as movies, often little information is available on these shows outside each country. Movies are often widely distributed in foreign countries. TV shows, with the exceptiion of American programs, are generally not. As an American, we have, for example, never seen German, French, and Italian TV shows. Thus the TV pages provide a much-needed source of information on foreign programing.
Cable series often featuring shows about
children. I've entered in the titles of individual shows in "TV
Specials".
Popular teenage sitcom set in the 1950s thus providing
a few of contemporary teen attire. All the boys supposed to be high
school age. Actually older young adults playing high school boys. Ron
Howard was about 20 when the show began. Eventually a younger boy was
added, Chatchi, to include a teenage heartthrob.
"The Hardy Boys" is a populsr children's book series kind of a companien deries to "Nancy Drew". We know of five different TV series based on "The Hardy Boys" mystery books. The first series is the one we know best because we saw them at the time. One of the serials run on the "Micky Mouse Club" (1955-??) was "The Hardy Boys Mystery" series which starred Tim Considine. Tim played "Spin" in an earlier series "Spin and Marty". Another Disney mainstay, Tommy Kirk, played the other Hardy Boy brother. Disney contracted with the publishers of the book series, Stratemeyer Syndicate and Grosset & Dunlap, to produce two Hardy Boys TV serials. The first of the serials was "The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure", aired on "The Mickey Mouse Club" second season. he show was primarily watched by pre-teens. Thus Sidney decided to portray the boys as younger than in the books. They were portayed as 11-12 year olds. The script was written by Jackson Gillis who based it on the first Hardy Boys book--The Tower Treasure. It was done in serial form of 19 15-minute episodes. The "Mickey Mouse Club" was an hour show done in four segments. The seials were one of the four segments. The second serial was "The Mystery of Ghost Farm" which aired in 1957. This times Gillis wrote an original
Series based on the 1987 movie. The boy in the family is played by Zachary Bostrom who is about 10 or so.
The German documentary TV documentary film, "Die Harte Schule", depict the experiences of modern German boys and girls recreate the experiences and dress of a 1950s boarding school. "Die harte Schule" was identical to the British channel 4 documentary entitled "That'll Teach Them". A reader writes, "'Die Harte Schule' was made in 2006 and was similar but better as the the boys wear grey shorts and knee socks throughout and look very smart even though alot of them are at least 6 foot tall. The best way to view it is with Video.Google.com. and see the episodes in order. The uniforms look more English than German except for the stockings.
Not very interesting British serial about a boy and his father during the 1950s. The boy goes to a grammar school and wears short trousers at the beginning. There is a scene where he gets his first pair of longs. He wears them to school and they send him back home.
Short lived sitcom based on the cartoon character. Hazel was the family maid. A boy playing Harold (Bobby Buntrock) is involved. He appears in the introduction in a suit, presumably longs. I don't know of any interesting plot lines.
A teacher takes over a high school class of gifted children. The children are teenagers thus providing another look at teen clothing.
Heartbeat in 2001 was the UK’s number one drama series. The creator and main writer is Johnny Byrne. The series is set in the 1960s. The series tries to recreate a tranquil lifestyle and method of policing, in contarast to the more action oriented series that are more common in current television. However even the 1960s had its quotient of crime and in the following episode a visiting pair of robbers were intent on a wages snatch. The woman was as much an equal partner in the crime partnership as her male counterpart. In one series Nick meets the school teacher. A lot of the stories deal with the era when English school boys mostly wore short trousers. Series 7, episode 3, "Small Beer" had some wonderfully evocative shots in school uniform. The main storyline involved a boy who ran away from school after his "mother" (actually his Grandmother) died, for fear of ending up in a childrens' home. It was a most moving episode, and showed both Den and his classmates in school and out playing football in their uniform, and then the dramatic shots of Den running away.
Rather offensive sitcom. It has two boys, about
11 and 15 years old. In the first episode, the older brother sneaks off to go skinny dipping with older boys at school who say they have girls coming. The older boys let him jump in first, then take off with his clothes. He steals a dress to get home and gets arrested.
Widower with two boys hires a press secretary in a senator's office. He subsequently marries her and moves. The boys are about 8 and 10, but usually play small roles. They always dress in longs.
Fascinating but somtimes rather drawn out, lasting 15 hours, show chronicling a German family beginning immediately after World War I in 1919. Edgar Reitz's production is an attempt to restore a sense of continuity to 20th-century German history by presenting 63 years, from 1919 to 1982. It covers the intersecting lives of two family circles, centered on a small, fictional village. The village is Schabbach, in the Hunsruck region. The principal characters are the members of the Simon family--the grandfather is a blacksmith, the grandson will be the founder of a precision optical company. The plot is dictated by the century's constantly changing economic and political conditions, driving some members of the family to emigrate, others to form alliances with the NAZIs, others to find prosperity in the post-World War II "economic miracle." Reitz avoids the ceremonial events--births, deaths, marriages--that usually punctuate this sort of family chronicle, concentrating instead on the textures of daily existence and the shifting relationships among the characters. Though not without its longueurs (the treatment of the 1950s, for example, is largely limited to an extremely conventional tale of adolescent frustration and romantic revolt) and marked by a rising nostalgia for the "good old days" as opposed to the debased present, Reitz's project stands as a monumental work of modern film making. One reviewer describes it as "... teeming with evocative incident and Proustian detail". Some view this German TV production as one of the greatest films ever made. It originally appeared in 11 episodes. Several boys appear, but mostly in only short sequences. One nasty boy is pictured early in a sailor suit, but with
long trousers. He is seen later as a Hitler Youth in short shorts. The short pants the boys wear in the 1920s episodes are often quite long, by the 1930s they begin wearing shorter shorts. I missed several episodes the first time it was shown on PBS. Luckily I caught several of when it was reshown on another channel. One episode is "Hermannchen". It is filmed in B/W and Hermannchen wears the typical lederhosen. One interesting episode is something like "Little Hendrich". It deals with Maria's third son while he is in gymnasium? (academic high school). He probably is about 16 or so and it is set about 1960. To my surprise he wears shorts and knee socks almost all through. Even when he gets together to play jazz with his rowdy friends, including girls, he and most of them are in shorts! He usually wears lederhosen, but his friends wear a variety of shorts, some times with suit jackets. The only time he wears longs is when he is pictured
in a suit.
|
A HBC eader reports, "An American TV program which should be listed is "Hey, Dude!" which aired on the Nickelodeon cable network for 3 years (1989-91). It was filmed on location near Tucson, Arizona, at the fictional Bar None Dude Ranch, revolving around the misadventures of its mostly teenage staff.
Sixty-five 30-minute episodes were produced in the three years. One of the main actors, David Lascher, who played "Ted", was 17 when the series started and more recently appeared as a regular on the TV series "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch". The boys wore khaki shorts almost all of
the time on the episodes."
Sitcom with a rather ridiculous premise. Two boys are involved, one is a juvenile delinquent the other is a rather overweight boy. The fat boy comes from the 1950s and often
appears in shorts. The outfits vary from a black suit with black knee socks, a Scout uniform, a sailor suit, and a sports jacket worn with white knee socks.
There have been many boys (Jeffrey Davis) on this Michael Landon production. I don't know of any really interesting episodes. On one a boy is teased by his sister and his father thinks that he is a sissy. Apparently some other episodes with boys include:
"Amazing Man" with Garette Patrick Ratliff.
A television handyman proves to be a klutz at home as he continues to deal with any problem by upping the wattage/voltage, horsepower, pressure, etc. If that wasn't enough for
the long-suffering wife, she has three active boys. The boys Brad, ?, and Randy (Zachery Ty Bryan, Taran Smith, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas) are all pre-teens at the beginning of the run. In some episodes they hardly appear, but in others they are pictured throughout. To match their father they are usually pictured as standard American kids loving sports
and hating culture. The older one seems to have many of the smarty-TV-type kid comments. While the younger one has goody-goody lines. In one episode they scream, with their father, upon hearing opera. In another, however, the little one is enthusiastic about going
to the ballet, but his brothers tease him. They always wear longs. Why is it that American TV continues to keep boys in longs even though they so commonly wear shorts now adays? I have only seen one of them wear shorts briefly in one episode. Another boy was shown in out takes right before taping in shorts, but I have never seem him wear shorts in the show. Interestingly, it was when Randy was with his girl friend and his younger brothers were spying on him in the back yard. Apparently the boys caused a lot of trouble on the set, always being underfoot. So the studio hired a trainer for them. In one shot she was putting them through their paces running and exercising. The two older ones wore shorts, but the younger one wore longs. The studio also banned candy from the set to tone them down a bit, the boys complained about that.
Yorkshire Television in Britain has a schools programme. One of the best known productions was the " How We Used To Live " series. This was done as part of their terrestrial License, a requirement of the British TV setup. They had to show educational programs for schools. They produced hard copy material for teachers etc. Basically the programs are stories, aimed at secondary students--I think 14 year olds. Never seem to get a mention anywhere. The series was produced over a 10-year period and covers Victorian times to 1975. A HBC reader remembers the producyion on the orl War II era. What sticks in my
mind is WWII--1965. Gary Carp appeared in the World War II series. Who was also in
a sequel to a " Family At War ". The sequel (which I believe has been wiped) was set on Merseyside (Liverpool).
"Howdy Doody" evidently helped establish children's TV in the industry's infancy. No show has so dominated children's television like "Howdy Doody". When Howdy began there was no morning TV. Programing began with Hody as the kids came home from school. Although its target audience was about 3 - 9 in age, parents also watched the show (at least sometimes). Its contributions to commercial TV can't be underestimated. The show also illustrates contemporary children's clothing because of the Peanut Gallery. Mothers often dressed the children up in dresses and suits. Many of the Peanuts were well dressed for their visit to the Peanut Gallery at NBC's Rockefeller Center studios. A pioneer of children's TV, Bob "Captain Kangarroo" Keeshan, got his start on "Howdy", playing the original Clarabelle. Howdy Doody was on the air from December 27, 1947, until September 24, 1960, a total of 2,343 shows! Howdy began as a three days a week show, then five days a week, until production costs forced NBC to reduce Howdy to a Saturday mornings only show about 1956 until its conclusion. When the "Mickey Mouse Club" debuted in 1955, it took
a huge share of "Howdy's audience. "MMC" began at 5pm Eastern time, "Howdy" at 5:30pm. "MMC's" cartoons, and features such as "Spin and Marty" were new and appealing, and by '55, "Howdy" was showing its age. Kids who started with "MMC", or just "the Mouse" as
NBC dubbed the show, didn't change channels to watch "Howdy".
International intrigue, a wealthy U.S. businessman, Bart Adams, takes on the communist menace. Not a verywell done progrm, but I was watching once when the show was set in Salzburg, Austria. The street scenes were interesting. First I saw a boy, about 12 years old in lederhosen, but then I saw coming down the street an older boy, I would say 16-18 years old. He wore a short pants suit complete with tie!
Navigate the Boys' Historical Clothing Web Site:
[Return to the Main television alphabetical page]
[Return to the Main theatrical page]
[Introduction]
[Activities]
[Biographies]
[Chronology]
[Clothing styles]
[Countries]
[Essays]
[Photography]
[Theatricals]
[Bibliographies]
[Contributions]
[FAQs]
[Glossaries]
[Images]
[Links]
[Registration]
[Tools]
[Boys' Clothing Home]
