200 Little House On The Prairie

First  watched  : 3  January  1975

In  my  first  term  at  Alice  Ingham  RC  Primary  ( Sep-Dec 1974 )  the  end-of-day  read  was  Little  House  on  the  Prairie  by  Laura  Ingalls  Wilder. Just  after  Christmas  BBC1   screened  a  TV  movie  pilot   for  a  show  based  on  the  book  and  its  sequels.  I  don't  know  whether   someone  at   the  school  had  got  wind  of  this  or  it  was  just  a  coincidence.

I  didn't  welcome  the  show  with  unbridled  joy. At  the  time  my  preferred  reading  at  home  was  Tove  Jansson's   Moomin  fantasy  series  so  Wilder's  "real-life"  ( but  see  below )   account  of   growing  up  poor  but  honest  as  a  settler's  daughter  in  the  mid-West  didn't  float  my  boat. I  was  also  getting  to  be  a  bit  resistant  to  anything  that  could  be  regarded  as  "improving"  literature  and  we  were  clearly  supposed  to  admire  the  Ingells'  fortitude  in  withstanding  natural   disasters  and  economic  hardship.

The  books  were  written  by  the  ageing  Wilder  in  the  1930s    as  a  way  of  recouping  losses  suffered  in  the  Wall  Street  Crash. Unable  to  interest  publishers  in  an  adult  account  she  rewrote  her  tales  in  a  simpler  style  for  children, helped  to  an  extent  which  is  still  being  debated  , by  her  socialite  daughter  Rose  Lane  who  already  was  a  successful  writer  although  her  mother's  success  would  eclipse  her. The  books  are  loosely  true  although  characters  have  been  composited  and  her  husband  Almanzo  Wilder's  age  was  altered  to  make  him  look  less  like  a  cradlesnatcher.

The  TV  series  took  its  basic  premise  from  the  first  book  in  the  series  then  became  selective  about  which  incidents  it  wanted  to  dramatize  and  introduced  new  plot  lines  of  its  own.  It's  got  a  reputation  for  being  ultra-saccharin  but  there  was  some  comedy  as  young  Laura  developed  a  rivalry  with   affected  schoolmate  Nellie  Olsen.  The  episode  I  remember  best  is  the  genuinely  scary  one  where  Laura  adopts  a  friendly   raccoon  which  is  then  thought  to  have  rabies.

Here  in  the  UK  we're  not  best  placed  to  judge  the  programme   because  the  Beeb  lost  interest  in  it  after  the  first  series  of  24  episodes   and  didn't  buy  the  subsequent  eight.  We  never  saw  the  arrival  of   final  sibling  Grace  or  the  trauma  of  eldest  daughter  Mary  going  blind. The  first  series  was  repeated  on  Saturday  mornings  in  1976  and  hasn't  been  screened  since  although  the  memory  lingered. In  1981  a  new  girl  called  Laura  entered  our  school  and  immediately  acquired  the  nickname  "Ingalls". In  the  US  it  finally  finished  in  1984  with  a  TV  movie  which  ended  with  the  settlers  blowing  up  the  town, a  storyline  inspired  by  the  contract  the  producers  had  made  with  the  landowners  to  restore  the  land  to  its  original  state  when  the  set  was  no  longer  required.

Mary  and  Laura  were  both  played  by  actresses  called  Melissa  ( Sue  Anderson  and  Gilbert  respectively).  Anderson  was  much  prettier  and  had  a  sexy  role  just  after  leaving  the  series  in  the  horror  film  Happy  Birthday  To  Me    although  Gilbert  has  been  busier  as  an  actress  in  the  years  since.  The  show's  male  star  Michael  Landon ,  playing  the  impossibly  handsome  and  virtuous  Charles  Ingalls ,  came  to  run  the  show  as  a  writer  and  director  and  his  decision  to  quit  his  on screen  role  before  the  ninth  series  sounded  its  death  knell.  His  drawn-out  death  from  pancreatic  cancer  in  1991  was  a  public  event , amplified  by  fans' shock  that  this  paragon  of  virtue  had  actually  been  a  heavy  drinker  and  chain  smoker.

In  the  ensuing  decades  the  books  have  become  something  of  a  political  background. Rose  Lane  was  a  fierce  critic  of  FDR  and  New  Deal  welfare  politics  ( though  you'd  be  hard  pressed  to  find  any  reference  to  this  in  the  books  themselves ) so  perhaps  inevitably  Ronald  Reagan  praised  the  series  for  its  championship  of  upright  individualism. Liberals  have  therefore  sought  to  get  the  books  off  school  shelves  on  the  grounds  of  a  negative  portrayal  of   Native  Americans . Their  defenders  have  hit  back  that  Ingalls  Wilder  gave  nothing  but  an  honest  account of  nineteenth  century  views  that  she  did  not  share  and  that  the  books  present  children  with  good  female  role  models.  They  remain  in  print  and  popular. Interestingly , the  teacher  who  read  the  book  to  us  was  a  red-hot  socialist.

As  a  postscript,  the  last  time  I  saw  any  of  the  series  was  at  a  school  I  was  working  at  around  18  months  ago  where  a  LHOTP  DVD  was  being  shown  to  a  history  class  to  illustrate  part  of  the  American  history  part  of  the syllabus. The  school  in  question  had  what  you  could  fairly  describe  as  a  "challenging"  intake  so  I  was  quite  surprised  to  see  that  it  was  holding  their  attention.