LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a wonderful series of children's books based somewhat loosely on her actual upbringing in western states in the late 19th century. These books, in turn, were turned into a dreadful 1970s TV series titled Little House on the Prairie.

How bad was LHotP? How deep is a black hole? This series was an exercise in shameless, manipulative sentimentality with some of the worst writing you'll ever see. Here's an example of the sort of thing they did to ruin the books: in On the Banks of Plum Creek there's a scene where Laura goes to nasty Nellie Olsen's birthday party, dares to touch Nellie's new doll's dress and gets humiliated when Nellie snatches it away. That isn't obvious enough for the Cool Medium: in the TV version Nellie knocks her down too.

In one episode a newcomer persuades the townsfolk to give him their money to buy seeds for a cash crop, goes off alone and buys the corn, but his wagon crashes on the way back and when he doesn't return they conclude he absconded with their money and bully his pregnant wife, while he lies there with a broken leg throwing rocks at the birds to keep them from eating the corn.... Say, maybe the newcomer should have taken some other people with him to prevent a situation like this! But if he had, there'd be no story. (I hate plots that require characters to be careless at crucial times!)

Did I mention that the show was badly written? Indeed, its plotlines were often so anachronistic that it should have been called Little Suburb on the Prairie! One plot involved telephone gossip, about fifty years before real frontier towns had telephone networks. (Would I lie to you?) I also remember an episode about a boy dying of leukaemia who wanted to see California before he died (sob, sob) so he and Pa Ingalls sneak onto a train going west and the last scene has them on a beach in front of the Pacific surf...

As for the acting, Michael Landon always gave me the feeling that if his daughters gave him any real trouble he'd burst into tears. (And Pa Ingalls was a superb character in the books.) Don't get me started on Landon's later show Highway to Heaven, in which he played an angel who comes to earth and lectures a new mortal each week.

Just to get anal, the book Little House on the Prairie was the second one in Wilder's series, and the TV show begins with the third one (On the Banks of Plum Creek, so the show actually has none of the story from the book that gave it its title!

Do society a favour and destroy any TV set that's playing this horrid, horrid show!