The late seventies and early eighties were the heyday of the TV ‘mini series’. What is a mini series I hear you asking? Well, they were short TV series with only a few episodes. You rarely hear the name ‘mini series’ these days but they are still about. I mentioned some time ago about the series ‘Until I Kill You’ about a girl, Delia Dahmer, who unwittingly invited her lover to move in with her, not knowing that he was actually a serial killer. I started off this post as usual writing from memory, firmly convinced that the mini series was an eighties phenomenon. So, imagine my surprise to find that the first series on my list was broadcast back in 1974. OK, hasty change of this week’s blog post title from Mini series of the Eighties to Seventies and Eighties and here we go.
QB VII
Image via listal.com
QB VII was one of those huge television mini series that really felt like a major event when it was broadcast. It was based on Leon Uris’s bestselling novel and came out in 1974, with Ben Gazzara and a young Anthony Hopkins in the starring roles. The story kicks off with a libel case brought by a very respected Polish-born doctor who insists he’s been wrongly accused of being a Nazi collaborator. Anthony Hopkins plays the doctor and Ben Gazzara plays author Abraham Cady who feels it’s time to write about the holocaust. Adam Kelno, the doctor played by Hopkins, is only mentioned in a short segment of Cady’s book but as he has already been cleared of any war crimes by an earlier court, he feels free to sue the author.
The story starts in the courtroom, in Queen’s Bench VII but as things go on, the story keeps slipping back into flashbacks of the Second World War and that’s where the real core of the story is to be found. Anthony Hopkins, still fairly early in his career at that point, is especially good, as is Ben Gazzara.
Ben Gazzara was a graduate of the Actors’ Studio, the New York acting school that taught ‘the method’ to actors like Brando, Dean and Montgomery Clift, although at the time I only knew him from the TV series Run For Your Life about a terminally ill man trying to get the best out of the last years of his life.
Anthony Hopkins went on to star in many classic films and is perhaps most well known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.
QB VII had a big, serious, slightly grand feel that so many 1970s TV series lacked, like here was a really important story to tell. It was the kind of show you’d settle in to watch properly, knowing you were in for some real epic TV and out of all the mini series here, I think this was my favourite.
Rich Man, Poor Man
Based on Irwin Shaw’s bestselling novel, it followed the very different fortunes of the Jordache brothers, Rudy and Tom, played by Peter Strauss and Nick Nolte. Set against the backdrop of post-war America, it had a bit of everything: ambition, money, family feuds, romance, betrayal and more than its fair share of trouble. Rudy becomes a wealthy, ambitious businessman and politician, while Tom is a rebellious, tough-minded drifter who pursues a career in boxing. Their rivalry, romances, family troubles and contrasting fortunes unfold over several decades, making it as much a story about family as it is about wealth, ambition and class.
Nick Nolte played Tom; rough around the edges, unpredictable and forever getting himself into scrapes while Peter Strauss’s Rudy took a rather more respectable route to success. What made the series so addictive was that it wasn’t simply about getting rich; it was about two brothers taking completely different paths through life and discovering, rather painfully, that money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness. It was classic 1970s television at its most gloriously melodramatic and millions of viewers were hooked. Fifty years later, I can still remember the sad ending which I won’t give away here.
The series was broadcast in nine parts in 1976.
Captains and the Kings
Captains and the Kings is another wonderfully grand example of the television mini series at its most ambitious. Based on Taylor Caldwell’s novel, this 1976 series follows the fortunes of the Armagh family, Irish immigrants who arrive in America with very little and gradually build a huge fortune and political influence. Perry King, Richard Jordan and Jane Seymour were among the impressive cast and the story has all the ingredients you could want from a sprawling family saga; poverty, ambition, romance, betrayal, politics and plenty of money. Like Rich Man, Poor Man, it’s really a story about the American dream, although here the journey from humble beginnings to wealth and power comes with a darker side.
I’m tempted to think the story was based on the Kennedy family or at least inspired by them. The parallels are pretty striking. The Armaghs are Irish immigrants who arrive in America with very little, build a huge fortune and then use their wealth to enter politics. The family eventually produces a charismatic young politician with presidential ambitions. That certainly sounds familiar. There are also elements involving political influence, wealth, family loyalty and the pursuit of the White House that inevitably bring the Kennedys to mind.
However, Caldwell’s story is much darker and more conspiratorial than the Kennedy saga.
I remember reading the book which was a very enjoyable read. The book opens with an introduction telling us about a meeting of very important people who get together to decide the political direction the USA is about to take. The members of the group are not politicians but a group of very rich men and the author mentioned they were a real group of people and they clearly inspired the story the author is about to tell.
Richard Jordan plays Rory Armagh, the ambitious Irish immigrant who claws his way from poverty to wealth and political power. The performance won him a Golden Globe and made him a familiar face to TV audiences.
He appeared in many films including Raise the Titanic and the sci-fi classic Logan’s Run. His career was cut short when he developed a brain tumour and he died aged only 39 in 1993.
Kane and Abel
Kane and Abel was another of those sprawling television dramas that seemed to arrive with the promise of several evenings of proper escapism. Based on Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling novel, this 1985 mini series starred Peter Strauss and Sam Neill as two men born on opposite sides of the world and into completely different circumstances, whose lives become increasingly intertwined through ambition, wealth and rivalry. Strauss plays William Kane, the privileged American banker, while Neill is Abel Rosnovski, a Polish immigrant who rises from poverty to build his own business empire. The two were born on the same day and their lives take dramatically different paths but an early encounter sets them on a lifelong collision course. As both men build powerful business empires, their rivalry becomes increasingly bitter, driven by ambition, pride, revenge and a determination to outdo the other.
It’s big, glossy and unabashedly melodramatic story, with fortunes made and lost, family feuds, business battles and enough twists and turns to keep you coming back for the next episode.
There is something wonderfully nostalgic about these old mini series; they knew how to tell a big story and more importantly, how to make you wait until the following week to find out what happened next. In today’s digital age, viewers would probably binge watch the whole series in one go.
Those are my four US mini series. There are probably more but they were the ones which have remained firmly stuck in my memory. All were adaptations of successful novels and perhaps their secret is that they were too long to be made into a film but not long enough for further seasons.
Which one is ripe for a re run on one of today’s many digital TV channels I wonder?
Tv programmes of course cost money, quite a lot of money in fact. Back in the 1990s when I was fresh from a video production course and hoping to actually get a job in the TV industry (I never did) I was told an hour of television costs £100,000. What it costs nowadays is anyone’s guess but then again, it’s so easy to make a TV show in 2026. One of my favourite programmes is Canal Boat Diaries, an entirely self-shot show which has graduated from YouTube onto the BBC and can be seen quite regularly on the U-Yesterday channel. Does that mean an hour of TV is worth more or less than that 90’s figure of £100,000?
We watched The Crown last year while staying in the Loire valley even though we don’t normally watch much TV on holiday. This year in Lanzarote, we spent many an evening watching Emily in Paris, another Netflix show. I’d found it by searching on the internet for good TV shows to watch on Netflix and Emily came up so we thought we’d give it a go.
Just to backtrack a little, we rented this same house back in May and usually, the only time I put the TV on is to watch F1 racing. May is the usual month in the calendar for the Monaco grand prix, one of my favourite races of the year. There is actually plenty of talk recently about cancelling the race as nowadays, the F1 cars are faster and much bigger and so there is very little room left to overtake.
Both Liz and I had been suffering with bad colds and hers was getting worse with a bad headache and a loss of taste and smell. We did Covid tests and Liz was positive. My test was negative which was a surprise but then I haven’t had the headache or the loss of taste. I’m not sure when Liz was exposed to Covid, after all we haven’t been out much lately apart from some last minute shopping and a visit to quiz night at a local pub, the Lord Derby. Anyway, we were of course condemned to a minimum seven day lockdown so that meant no work on New Year’s Eve and no going out either.
Lockdown may have finished on December 2nd in the UK but if you live in a tier 3 region, like me, it’s still going on. OK, I understand the need for the lockdown, I know we have to prevent the virus from spreading but that doesn’t stop the whole thing being a pain in the neck. No quiz nights at the pub, no restaurant meals out and so on. Not only that but why does the virus have 2 separate names? Is it Covid 19 or is it Coronavirus? And where does the 19 come from? Was there a Covid 18? Does this mean there have been 18 previous versions of this insidious plague? If so, why have we never heard of them? We, the public, need to know.
Another old show repeated currently on the CBS justice channel is The Fugitive starring David Janssen as Dr Richard Kimble, falsely accused of the murder of his wife. The show ran for four seasons but as viewer ratings began to fall, the series was cancelled. It was then that the producers hit on what at the time was an unusual idea. Instead of the show just ending, they decided to make an actual finale. Yes, they would wrap up the story of Kimble’s wife’s murder. Kimble had been searching for the supposed one-armed man he had seen leaving the murder scene for the past four seasons, now he would finally find him!
I do like my food. Like everyone I have my likes and dislikes, for instance, I’m not a great lover of fish although I’ve been known to eat cod, hake, calamari and even mussels. Good food though is more than just ingredients or produce and a good chef is in his own way as much of an artist as a great painter or a poet. I do love watching great TV cookery shows and although I am not a great cook, I have sometimes tried to follow the advice of various TV cooks who have inspired me to make something exciting. The results will not be spoken about here but getting back to those TV chefs, who is your favourite?
Some people are born to do certain things. Winston Churchill was a born leader, and Clark Gable was born to play Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. As for me, I was born to watch TV. My old dad used to call me ‘square eyes’ because I was glued to the television, or so it seemed to him.
As I was away last week enjoying the delights of Southport I was a little rushed when it came to putting together a new post for this week. A couple of weeks back I wrote about my 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 