TV Cream

TV: L is for...

Love Boat, The

LOVE, EXCITING and new. Come on board. We’re expecting you! Good old Aaron, serving up another long-running format purely in order to shoehorn famous faces into the same programme for almost ten years. Staple afternoon ITV filler, with GAVIN MACLEOD, FRED GRANDY and BERNIE KOPELL setting a course for adventure, their mind on a new romance. JACK JONES crooned the, as you can see, unforgettable theme.

11 Comments

11 Comments

  1. Cindylover1969

    May 25, 2010 at 5:06 am

    A pre-Lois/Wisteria Lane Teri Hatcher was one of the “Love Boat Mermaids” in the final season (when they also binned Jack Jones’s version of the great Charles Fox theme and got in a new one from Dionne Warwick). The less said about BBC1 plaguing afternoon schedules with “The Love Boat: The Next Wave” the better, methinks.

  2. Richard Davies

    August 31, 2010 at 10:30 pm

    Channel 5 dug out some episodes of this a few years ago, along with some of Charlie’s Angels.

  3. Glenn Aylett

    May 13, 2022 at 5:58 pm

    Jack Jones( no relation to the union leader of the same era) made a career out of cover versions and television themes. I have in my loft an LP called Bread Winners, where Jones does some decent MOR covers of Bread’s greatest hits and has a dedication on the sleeve notes from David Gates of the soft rockers. Also Jones was a regular at the London Talk Of The Town for many years.

  4. Richardpd

    May 13, 2022 at 10:49 pm

    Jack Jones made a cameo in Airplane II: The Sequel when Ted Striker escapes from the mental hospital & is singing the Love Boat theme by searchlight!

  5. Glenn Aylett

    May 14, 2022 at 1:34 pm

    I was interested to learn Jack Jones was born in 1938, not the 1920s, as I thought, and is very much alive. He has made a tidy living from television themes, covering other songs and from cabaret, having a Vegas residency for many years. And yes, I remember his cameo in Airplane 2.

    • George White

      May 15, 2022 at 7:47 pm

      His father was Allan Jones, noted crooner of the previous generation, who was in a few Marx Brothers films.
      And he was initially a teen pop singer of the 50s, before maturing.

      One of those US cabaret stars who probably found work easier to come by in Britain (see also Buddy Greco)

  6. Sidney Balmoral James

    May 14, 2022 at 7:19 pm

    Jack Jones was indeed a regular cabaret performer here in the TV Cream era, and still touring until recently I believe. He also of course appeared on Morecambe and Wise, with them in drag as backing singers. He also appears in a terrible British horror film The Comeback.

    • George White

      May 15, 2022 at 7:56 pm

      I actually like the COmeback, it might be my favourite of Walker’s films, if only for the utterly barmy cast – Jack Jones, Pamela Stephenson, Pete Walker regular Sheila Keith and (SPOILER) – Bill Owen as the supposedly mysterious killer who resembles Compo in drag and lace gloves, Richard Johnson, David ‘Bosley off Charlie’s Angels’ Doyle, Holly Palance (daughter of Jack and the nanny in the Omen), Peter Turner (who wrote the memoir Film Stars Don’tDie In Liverpool about his relationship with Gloria Grahame, adapted with Jamie Bell as Turner), Jeanine Pettibone-St Hubbins (wife of Spinal Tap frontman David), and Penny Irving of Are You Being Served? (who incidentally, talking of age confusions, turned out to have cut 13 years off her age – in her ‘prime’, she was actually in her mid thirties but claimed to be born in 1955/56, but was b.1942, but here plays ‘young girl singer’)

      • Sidney Balmoral James

        May 15, 2022 at 11:16 pm

        I have a soft spot for House of the Long Shadows, which (I am ashamed to admit) my parents used to let me get from the local video shop when I was er – probably about 10! I should perhaps give The Comeback a second look – it must be twenty years since I saw it.

  7. Glenn Aylett

    May 15, 2022 at 10:36 am

    @ Sidney, he was one of those middle of the road singers who could also sing contemporary songs in an MOR lounge style so beloved of the BBC in the seventies, when they needed a singer for a big budget LE show. Yes, I recall him trying to play it straight while Morecambe and Wise sang not very well in drag.

  8. Droogie

    May 16, 2022 at 1:10 am

    My Welsh folks adored Jack Jones – no doubt because his singer/ actor dad Allan was a Welshie.

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