Sailing Into the Seventies

One of the many pleasures of watching dodgy streaming channels on Roku is that one keeps bumping into old TV shows that you never really watched back in the day, but seem fascinating when seen again today. This week, I've been transfixed by The Love Boat, which originally ran in the late seventies and early eighties.  I remember flicking past episodes of it when they turned up in the afternoons on ITV - as nobody got shot in it, there was no nudity and there were no car chases, it never really appealed to the teenaged me.  But seen again now, it is a fascinating time capsule of US network TV entertainment of the era: schlocky, cheesy, cheaply produced on obvious sets yet imbued with a certain superficial glossiness.  It exists in a world where nothing really bad ever happens and even the worst of characters can be redeemed by the power of love.  There are no hard edges, only soft focus.  Which, of course, is precisely why it appealed to audiences and ran for so long - it reassured viewers that all was right with the world, that everything would turn out for the best and that nobody would get hurt.  Pure fantasy, of course, with no relationship to the real world, but for an hour or so every week it allowed people to escape into a safe, cosy and predictable world.  

That said, the main thing I've taken away from watching episodes is to wonder how Captain Stubing managed to run that liner when the only crew, apart from him, appeared to be the ship's doctor, the purser, a random bar tender and the cruise director.  Oh, not to forget his grown up daughter who, for some reason, always seems to be aboard.  I mean, seriously, they are the only crew members we ever see - there's never a sight of any other officers, any deck crew, any engineering crew or even any stewards.  There are plenty of extras running around pretending to be non-speaking passengers, (the only ones with lines are the guest star passengers of the week), but none in uniform.  On top of that, the captain never seems to be on the bridge, he's instead always strolling around the decks or in his office.  Who's running the bloody ship?  Mind you, I'm not sure it needs running as, judging by the fact that the decks never pitch or yaw, just stay dead level, the ship is never at sea.  My other big takeaway is amazement at the fact that the ship used for the exterior shots, the 'Pacific Princess', has London as her home port on the stern and flies the Red Ensign, denoting that she is a British merchant vessel - I was convinced that by the seventies most of the world's shipping fleets had been registered under dodgy flags of convenience (Liberia and Panama were pretty popular), for financial and legal reasons.  (The laws which apply on a ship at sea are those of the country it is registered to - including employment law, which naturally meant that, in order to keep crew costs down, countries with weak employment laws were favoured, especially when combined with low taxes).  So, if nothing else, we can be sure that the 'Love Boat's' meagre crew were at last paid UK sea rates and had some legal protections against unfair dismissal.