First watched : 5th February 1977
My mum had been watching this on Saturday nights after we'd gone to bed for a while . I've got a Boots Scribbling diary for 1977, the only year where I religiously kept it up for the full twelve months , and the entry for 5th February 1977 reads "Mum let me stay up to watch Starsky and Hutch " which would indicate it was the first time. This of course coincided with David Soul ( Hutch ) being at the top of the UK charts with Don't Give Up On Us Baby. The irony of Hutch getting all that teenybop attention was that. if the 11-13 year old girls at my school were anything to go by, it was Paul Michael Glaser ( Starsky ) who was the real heart-throb.
Starsky and Hutch emerged a couple of years after the demise of Alias Smith and Jones and transferred the idea of two young male buddies to a crime-ridden neighbourhood of 1970s Southern California and put them on the right side of the law as police detectives. It broke new ground by making them subordinate to an Afro-American police chief, Captain Dobie ( Bernie Hamilton ) . The series also tapped into contemporary urban black culture with the character of streetwise informer Huggy Bear ( Antonio Fargas ) and a jazz funk soundtrack including the memorable theme tune.
Soul and Glaser were capable young actors who hadn't quite capitalised on early breaks. Soul was best known as the leader of the vigilante rookie cops in Magnum Force while Glaser had a good role in Fiddler On The Roof as a student revolutionary. They gelled perfectly as the unlikely pair; Starsky being an impulsive Jewish New Yorker and Hutch a more laid back mid-Westerner.
The series quickly established itself as both the most exciting and the funniest - the episode where they're hunting a supposed vampire is absolutely hilarious - of the seventies detective shows. However after the second series ended in 1977 a widespread concern about the effects of TV violence led the producers to tone down the action and delve into the pair's personal lives to a greater extent. While still highly watchable the series did lose some of its edge after that.
Although he approved of the changes Glaser became increasingly dissatisfied with the show and throughout the latter two series the producers struggled to keep him on board , making a number of contingency plans to keep the series going if he bailed out. Glaser's desire to quit became public knowledge and the audience for the final series began to drift away. He therefore got his wish when a proposed fifth series was cancelled in 1979.
Neither of the pair have had a particularly easy time since then. After a run in so-so TV movies and mini-series, Soul ended up in jail for alcohol-fuelled domestic abuse in 1987 although he has resurrected his acting career in England which led to his bizarre involvement in the 1997 General Election campaign in the constituency of Tatton. Glaser's preferred career as a director largely ran into the ground after The Running Man in 1987 and he lost both a wife and child to AIDS. Fargas has maintained a steady career as an actor while Hamilton more or less retired in the mid-eighties and pursued a low-key career in music until his death in 2008.
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