Hutch

Well, it had to happen. I'm only five days into my sabbatical but have to break it, briefly, because I've just heard that David Soul has died and, with him, another piece of my childhood. The statement his wife has put out describes an "actor, singer, storyteller, creative artist and dear friend" which is all true, no doubt, but to me and anyone close to my age he was Hutch, pure and simple. No late-70s Christmas was complete for me without the Starsky and Hutch annual, and although I preferred Starsky (I had the Corgi Ford Torino, of course, with the least undercover livery of all time), Hutch was essential. Morecambe and Wise, strawberries and cream, Starsky and Hutch.

I'm not going to post Silver Lady or Don't Give Up On Us (both UK chart-toppers, don't forget) because that was the sort of nonsense girls like my sister were into, and I was a boy, into cars and American cop shows and wearing your jeans in the bath so they'd allegedly shrink to fit like S&H's (really). So instead, here's the iconic S&H title sequence. Series 1 had different music, and was clearly going for a slightly grittier, Serpico-lite feel. The TV audiences of the day didn't want Serpico though, lite or otherwise, so the show got less edgy and more commercial; here's the re-edited Series 2 title sequence with the music that everyone remembers best. He hurt his back, you know, jumping off that wall onto the roof of his car (43s in).

RIP Hutch. May your heaven be filled with go-go dancers in leopard-print bikinis that you can look at until your best mate blows on your cheek. Maybe go easy on clambering in and out of swimming pools fully clothed. Right, now back to the sabbatical. I wrote 1,100 words of fiction yesterday, you know?