Your Mom, TV, and Philip Larkin

Inside Television 603
Publication Date: 5-11-12
By: Hubert O’Hearn

Amazon saved my bacon this week. Because it tempted me with a come-hither stare disguised as an email inviting me to pucker up and purchase The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin I was reminded that this was not a week to write what I intended; an actual carefully researched examination of Idol-type winners and do their careers have legs? Into the bin with that one, until a desperate future time.

So what’s all this about then? Well here’s a clue: ‘My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there’. No, we’re not discussing Poets on TV which I’m sure would be a storming ratings success, provided the poets put on latex skin suits and had superpowers. (Who needs Thor when you can have Metaphor?)

Amazon reminded me it was time to choose a gift for Mother’s Day. Yikes! Well, it won’t be the Larkin collection - I have that coming to me anyway for free. Instead, let’s curl up on the couch, put a warm arm around the shoulder, whisper ‘there there’ and chat about Mothers on TV.

Can you pick yours out of the lineup?

When I got to thinking about it, it occurred to me how rarely TV Moms in the first Golden Age of the 1950s did Mom-like things. The birth of I Love Lucy’s Little Ricky may have been TV’s  first ratings-shattering event, but the wee laddie was rarely seen after that. He’d ghost in, be sent off to bed and that was that; until he learned to play the drums anyway. Granted there was the absolute classic episode when Lucy promised that Superman would appear at Little Ricky’s birthday party in a bout of one-upmomsmanship with that grand frenemy Carolyn Appleby. However, the children were for the most part background dressing, little cheering props.

That of course was why the 1950s were referred to as a Golden Age: Children were obscene and not heard, to paraphrase Groucho Marx. It’s not that I mind children on TV, I just feel sorry for them as people (child actors need a crusading Dickens to rescue them from the workhouse) and as characters. The small one-line joke spouters remind one, or at least me, of how in reality those splendid imaginations we are all born with get stomped and snuffed to be replaced with lines befitting adult life.

Perhaps that is why Moms doing Mom things are so rarely seen on TV, with only a few exceptions such as Michael Learned’s Olivia Walton and, um, that’s about it. Patricia Heaton’s Debra Barone was a great wife character, but name me a scene where she bandaged a cut, shooed away a monster, painted a smile on a forehead with a finger, or danced the Hucklebuck?

Those scenes tend to get left to the fathers - Bill Cosby, Archie Bunker,and Harold Cunningham got those moments. I suspect it’s because most Tv writers are men and they want to provide evidence that they actually care.

In the end, your own Mom trounces any version ever seen on any TV, from 8 inch black and white Philco to 83 inch Plasma MonsterVision. She gave it all up for you, you know. Do try and remember that. She gave up her youth, her relative freedom, even her name usually so you would get to have yours. Let’s close then with a last bit of Larkin, from his poem Maiden Name. Be seeing you and, this Mom’s for you:



‘It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.’