A fond childhood memory of mine is the family gathering round the television on Friday teatime to watch Happy Days with sausage cobs. Channel 4 used to show it in its six o’clock comedy hour along with another American sitcom and when they moved it to Wednesday I would video it for Friday viewing. It has stood up to the ageing process as a quality comedy in my opinion, mainly because as a ‘period’ piece it can’t become dated. It has been quite some time since I last saw an episode as they don’t tend to be given repeat runs nowadays, not even on Comedy Central or some other such channel. For my birthday yesterday Mandi bought me series one on DVD and I was up most of the night watching it.

There are some strange differences in the first series that were ironed out in future series; perhaps they weren’t quite sure how they saw the programme initially. Little changes such as the design of the Cunningham house jumped out at me, along with the fact that the diner didn’t have an owner and the theme tune was ‘Rock Around The Clock’ by Bill Haley and The Comets.

It was originally intended that the series centred on the exploits of Ritchie Cunningham and his friends, and as such the first name you see is Ron Howard. Tom Bosley was another ‘name’ used to sell the show and the person probably most associated with Happy Days, Fonzie, was a minor character with the actor Henry Winkler’s name appearing in the end credits as a co-star. In the first episode he barely had more than a line of dialogue. It wasn’t until viewer feedback dictated it that Fonzie became the show’s focal point. The first episode was a little hit and miss with too much emphasis placed on establishing characters.

Happy Days gave birth to the television industry’s favourite derogatory expression ‘Jumping/Jump/Jumped the Shark’, used to describe an ailing television series that paints over the cracks of the loss of quality with elaborate storylines and situations. This of course refers to the first three episodes of the fifth series in which the entire principal cast pitching up in Hollywood, and Fonzie accepting a challenge to do a water-ski jump over a caged shark in the ocean. A lesser known expression that also came from Happy Days is ‘Chuck Cunningham Syndrome’. Although I had heard of the character I had never actually seen an episode with him in. in the first series he is the oldest of the Cunningham children, obsessed with basketball and the academic opposite of studious Ritchie. As a character he doesn’t, in my opinion, add anything to the show which is an opinion undoubtedly felt by the writers because he was written out and never mentioned again.

Although he would gain popularity in the future as I have said, Fonzie was a strange figure in series one. Having not seen this side of the character before, I can now see how he was based on (or inspired by) the character of John Milner in American Graffiti. I have always believed him to have been older than his uncool friends, but in one episode he enrolls in the school and it is eluded to that he is the same age. A skilled mechanic and popular with the women, Fonzie gives advice when approached by Ritchie and they seek his approval in the form of a thumbs up (very ahead of his time to use a thumbs up gesture forty years before Facebook). In the school episode he comes across as a tragic figure that has dropped out of school and now hangs around the diner clinging on to the respect of the clever kids. He’s probably still there now offering advice from the toilets to anyone who wants it, unless he’s been put on a register and is now no longer allowed to contact people under eighteen.

(Here is a blog from last year about how the cast of Happy Days are technically too young to reunite in the present day).

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