David Cassidy on the Web
Getting back on the happy bus
November 28, 2009
By Catherine Deveny
The Age
www.theage.com.au
Amid mullets and matching outfits, some '70s memories are happier than others.
ONE of my sons has a mullet. The hairdo not the fish. (I did recently find myself surveying the produce of a fishmonger thinking, ''Mullet, flathead, leather jacket, groper, flake. If there was a 'commitmentphobe root rat with mummy issues' that'd be a complete line-up of all my old boyfriends.'')
When I say my son has a mullet it's not a total business up front, party at the back Billy Ray Cyrus number. It's a Warwick Capper shag cross Farrah Fawcett flick hybrid. Very '70s. Put it this way, the other day I said to him, ''David Cassidy wants his hair back.''
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So the question ''Who's David Cassidy?'' led into ''What's The Partridge Family?''
If you want to treat yourself to a 1970s enema, one episode of The Partridge Family should do the trick. The show is a collision of the first wave of feminism (Bra burning! Guitars!), the Age of Aquarius (Lentils! Ponchos! Guitars!), Vatican II (Jesus Christ Superstar! Singing nuns! Priests with flares! Guitars!). But don't expect to get the theme song C'mon Get Happy out of your head without surgical intervention.
Shirley Partridge (played by Shirley Jones) was a widow. She and her five kids formed a band, wore matching outfits and travelled around in a bus. Every episode was identical. Start with a joke. End with a song. Wrap it up in some kind of moral and throw in more pants suits, body shirts, platform shoes, long white boots, miniskirts and cheesy lines than you can throw a smoked glass ashtray stand at.
(TRIVIA TITBIT! Jones turned down the role of Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch. You've got to love a woman who went for a bus over a housekeeper.)
We all wanted Mrs Partridge to get it on with the band's manager, Reuben Kincaid, Laurie to stop whining and admit she wanted to pash her brother, teen heart-throb Keith, and Danny Bonaduce (the annoying brat who made it mandatory for all TV families to have an annoying brat) to get his head punched in. And for someone to tell Tracy with the tambourine to stop dancing like a retard and her little brother Chris that when he played the drums he looked constipated.
Back in the '70s not only was there an epidemic of singing kiddies in matching clothes on telly (Young Talent Time, The Osmonds, The Brady Bunch, The Jackson Five, The Humbard Family) but plenty of non-nuclear families (The Brady Bunch, Eight Is Enough, My Three Sons, Different Strokes). I blame The Sound of Music and the Von Trapp Family Singers solving a problem like Maria with matching outfits made of curtains, brown paper packages tied up with string and a man called Gay-Org with seven kids, a whistle and a guitar.
The Partridge Family was comforting crap. It was the '70s. We didn't know any better. We were just rapt there was an alternative to staring at the fence palings and getting in trouble for losing Mum's good scissors. It's just sad that it's 40 years later and it's one of the best things on telly.
The Partridge Family, 11.30am weekdays on GO!
