One of the shows I remember watching as a child, and being quite moved by week after week, was The Waltons (1972-1981), a show based on Earl Hamners Jr’s book Spencer’s Mountain, which centred on a family struggling to get by in rural Virginia during the Depression and the Second World War.
While it was wholesome and life-affirming in a Hallmark kind of way in one respect, it was also not afraid to place its characters in real peril and showed a willingness to confront important societal issues such as censorship and race relations.
What stood at its centre though was the strength of family and the way in which the bonds that creates can help people get through pretty much everything.
Told from the perspective of John-Boy Walton (Richard Thomas), an aspiring writer who later becomes a journalist, it managed to be genuinely affecting and heartwarming without surrendering its storytelling soul to copious amounts of saccharine.
Seeing everyone back together again – bar of course Zeb “Grandpa” Walton (Will Geer) and Esther “Grandma” Walton (Ellen Corby) who have both sadly passed away – was a real joy for me, even if the interviews were by necessity brief and cursory.
I think a visit back to Waltons Mountain, courtesy of a boxset or 9, may be well overdue.
