TV Cream

Films: C is for...

Cagney and Lacey

Eh? No colons? Why, it’s the original TVM! With Hotlips Swit instead of Gless. But no Detective LaGuardia, sadly, and we don’t think *that* theme tune is anywhere to be seen either, although we’d welcome confirmation of this.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Cindylover1969

    July 12, 2010 at 7:12 pm

    *That* theme tune is indeed nowhere to be seen, neither in the pilot movie nor indeed in the first season (the one with neither Hotlips nor Sharon Gless – the latter was first choice but she was still tied up with “M*A*S*H” at the time, thus clearing the way for Meg Foster and her creepy eyes) – Bill Conti got the call when the future star of “The Trials Of Rosie O’Neill” arrived. As Conti told Jon Burlingame in the latter’s excellent book on TV music, the reason such a grim and miserable show has such an upbeat, cheerful sax-led theme tune is that CBS had scheduled “Cagney & Lacey” after the sadly-underrated-over-here “Newhart” and they wanted to hold its audience, and also to not “advertise that it’s a cop show.”

  2. paulus - bangkok

    July 13, 2010 at 5:58 am

    Not enough “wacka-wacka” guitar to be a true 70’s cop show!

  3. David Smith

    July 13, 2010 at 11:19 pm

    Presumably the “flasher bit” must have come from an actual episode in the series – as was generally the case with title sequences of this period – so wouldn’t have needed lip reading by the lazy Points of View letter-writers…

    • TV Cream

      July 14, 2010 at 10:09 am

      Actually, the culmination of that long and slightly tedious PoV correspondence (spot the tautology there) was a message from Tyne Daly herself, claiming that the shot was indeed a bit of stand-alone whimsy shot specially for the title sequence while they were on location, the ‘dialogue’ was non-existent and ad-libbed on the spot, and therefore the viewing several were, once again, wasting their time. Although that may well just have been a fib to shut them up…

  4. Cindylover1969

    August 14, 2010 at 7:55 pm

    “Not enough “wacka-wacka” guitar to be a true 70’s cop show!”

    The fact that it began and ended in the ’80s may have had something to do with it.

  5. paulus - bangkok

    August 16, 2010 at 3:27 am

    Very true! The 80’s it was. Still a shite show though.

  6. The Haj

    August 2, 2012 at 1:23 pm

    As Victoria Wood said ‘Couldn’t they repaint the ladies? It would only take Harvey the weekend to do it’

  7. Glenn A

    August 4, 2017 at 8:23 pm

    It also featured Martin Kove as some muscle flexing hard man detective, which probably set him up for his best known role as the evil Sensei Kreese in The Karate Kid. Still, a very good show for its time and I enjoyed the re runs on BBC Two a couple of years ago, but the ladies toilets, they were like something out of a Glasgow dive.

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