The day CHiPs came to Timaru

It's almost impossible to contemplate in an age of unending streamers, but we only had two TV channels to choose from when I was a kid. This meant you watched a lot of crap, but it also meant everybody you knew watched the same crap.

So when a TV show was big, it was properly big. Everybody watched it because everybody was watching the same thing, there was no other choice.  Sometimes this led to some tiny tragedies - my Nana would want to watch Coronation St and I would miss the latest episode of the Hulk, and I can still feel the echoes of the despair at missing A Night To Remember one Sunday afternoon, because I was such a huge freak about disasters.

We didn't even get our first video player until I was nine, and that changed everything. But before that, I was at the whims of adults and TV programmers.

So everybody watched Happy Days and M*A*S*H. Everybody watched the Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider and the A-Team. And you can bet your butt that everybody watched CHiPs.

It's such blatant and obvious copaganda to my old and jaded eyes, but I dearly loved CHiPs as a kid. They were almost like superheroes, with their flashy boots and helmets, and almost science fiction with their sleek bikes with all the latest technology. Erik Estrada was so ridiculously handsome, he may have been my first crush on a man. 

And I know I wasn't the only one, because the first time I got freaked out by the size of a crowd was when CHiPs came to town. It wasn't Jon or Ponch or anybody like that, just two random guys from the real life highway patrol, but the main street of Timaru was packed out in excitement, I didn't even get close to those men in tight light brown uniforms.

It was probably only a few hundred people in a small town on the arse end of the world, but it was still a big crowd, and a big crowd that came out to see some traffic cops. Everybody loved CHiPs, and I think everybody loved those boots.