Lockdown, Lowdown… This Week We Look at the 70’s Hit American TV Show Cannon Starring William Conrad

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Deciding what binge to watch can be exhausting. Discussions drag up memories and memories bring thoughts that are tinged with the past and molded by them into the golden globes of half remembered ideas and barely remembered realities. I did grow up watching a lot of TV. A lot of TV was an escape, none more so than anything from the States.
Growing up in the bleak 1970’s of the UK made American television very enticing, almost seductive.

The bleak 70’s with the discord and disruption in the UK made for fertile ground imaginatively. We had Kojak, Cagney and Lacey to follow and Hill Street Blues eventually but the tradition, in my house of me along with my dad watching an American cop show was born.

Relationships between parents and children can be cemented, I found, with the ability to like a common televisual experience. Whilst we may have loved to sit and watch on Saturday nights at 9pm, whatever transatlantic feast was on offer, there was one show that caught us weekly when it was on. At that time, I was unaware of how the whole thing worked – you know commissioning, recording and when it was time to cut the ties and the series was over.

I just thought it went on forever.

When shows disappeared from our screens, it was quite a shock and not being aware that there were such things as “seasons” and eventually things got cancelled was disconcerting.
Saturday nights were always much better in our house when, a seasoned favorite, the Quinn Martin Production, Cannon, was on.

Was it that the late William Conrad, with his oversized stomach and moustache was just like my dear old dad, that anchored the attraction? Perhaps.

But for five seasons in the UK, we avidly watched and were stuck on watching every single week, the antics of something called a private detective. We didn’t have such things in UK drama.
It was also hard to think of an even less likely hero, than William Conrad. He was much less of a chiseled action man that you could ever imagine.

The CBS originated series, filmed from 1971 to 1976, used the anti-hero look of Conrad to such great effect. Cannon managed a return in 1980 with a film, unimaginatively called, The Return of Frank Cannon, but the original five seasons remain as its best bits!

As I was unaware of the origin story of Frank Cannon, until I was writing this, excuse me, because this was down to my memory as a child of what happened rather than the knowledge that comes from being an adult with a specific interest in the show. I was surprised to find that Cannon was a widower, but not shocked to be reminded that he was a veteran of the Korean War. Given the issues around Vietnam of the time it is not difficult to see what drove that creative decision. He was highly educated with a wide knowledge of languages – I could not remember that!

What I did know and remember was that Cannon cooked. He was a gourmet chef and much of the references to his overweight size was down to affinity for his food. I also remember that although he looked incredibly unfit, he never shied away from fights with villains. Once again that playing against type made the whole show such an attractive watch.

Stories were centered around him working for a wide variety of clients and for a young kid in Scotland, the unexciting sounded quite exotic. We saw a wide variety of storylines which were always in and around Los Angeles – an area filled with dream like qualities. One of the major innovations, which I do remember and felt very space age was that Cannon had a phone in his signature Lincoln Continental. This was the early 1970’s and we had no idea who Motorola was – we found out much later, of course – but the Motorola phone in the car made the whole series appear to be quite fanciful; but also added to the mystique.

Conrad was a fantastic choice to lead and when he was nominated not once but twice for an Emmy he found himself missing out to character actors from The Waltons and Kojak. It was certainly a golden time for the television industry!

I cannot quite place when my love affair with Cannon ended. It may have been a girl, it could have been the soccer and it certainly involved growing up but there came a time when I was no longer watching. The length of a series could be extended with crossovers with other series and cannon did have the flirtation with Barnaby Jones. The end of Cannon however did not lead to an extended run of Barnaby Jones, which featured Cannon in crossover episodes. I was therefore denied, in my youth, the opportunity to see Cannon in a different environment.

Right now, there are no reruns in the UK of Cannon and having seen the tie in with another series my task shall be doubled as I will not only be trying to find where in the UK I can find Cannon, but also looking to see if Barnaby Jones ever made it UK side.

The end, of course, unbeknown to me came as it always does – ratings significantly fell in the 5th and final season. Its loss would be filled by another US drama and off we would go again in the UK, and I am left wondering just what that would have been…

This weekly look at the past in TV comes to you, courtesy of a Scot. Usually he will look at the past in terms of British television and where that is the case, a word of warning. British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programmes made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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