Why Watching The Dick Van Dyke Show Is Good For You
Maybe this has been motivated by the man himself reaching 100 years of age, and not physically diminished like Jimmy Carter for instance. Or anyone who meets that mighty milestone with no idea of who they are or what there is to celebrate. More like Australian actor Vince Ball, who at 102, spent more than half a century acting. Or as Wikipedia volunteers, “Vincent Martin Ball, OAM (born 4 December 1923) is an Australian retired actor of film, theatre and radio active in the industry for nearly 55 years…”
Read aloud, ‘radio active’ would be heard as a compound word, which detectably, we all are. Millions of people exceed fifty-five years of that (including Dick Van Dyke), without being mentioned in Wikipedia at all.
It’d be useful for this free, online encyclopaedia to value the significance of properly placed commas. As a card-carrying fan of the much maligned Oxford one, there are decidedly too few commas in the world. It’s no wonder we don’t understand each other anymore.
A long, long time ago (this is insanely brilliant) Richard Ayoade directed Vampire Weekend’s music video Oxford Comma. It’s a nice touch of almost-useless information to have. He has also directed Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, even though he’ll always be Moss from The IT Crowd to me.
And no doubt to many others.
2025 has been called a ‘hinge year’ by some. ‘Unhinged year’ would be markedly more apt, but apparently we’re all too delicate for reality now. With ‘unalived’ as one of the stupidest words in modern usage, we now have lists of words and phrases that have apparently been ‘cancelled’. In what may be news to the deranged, it’s always going to be the Gulf of Mexico to me.
This hinge year gave us glimpses of a new inhumane order that really isn’t so new.
We’ve been unstoppably slipping down an icy slope of heartlessness and brutality since at least the Twin Towers. Grief is advertised, monetised and franchised; scapegoat hunting is an international media sport. Weaponising fear has created more wedges in society than the national sum total served with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce in an Aussie pub.
It’s a lot to deal with. And most of us can’t.
Putting aside Plato and Aristotle (respectfully; you can’t just elbow those cerebral giants out of the way), staying informed of world events has been considered a virtue since at least the Age of Enlightenment.
Being well-versed in the goings-on of the world at large in the 17th century made perfect sense. It was literally the size of a planet and not a cyber one, with the means of communication unaltered by even the telegraph. News and information were fairly contained and finite. The devastating 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora was barely reported in Europe, being that it happened on a narrow peninsular of the island of Sumbawa, in the far-off lands of the then Dutch East Indies.
To this day, it was the biggest volcanic activity in the history of humankind, and ten times the volume of Krakatau (if “Krakatoa” is on the banned list).
About 128 billion tonnes of pyroclastic material blasted into the atmosphere. It immediately wiped out the local inhabitants and with them went the entire Tambora language. The ‘year without summer’ followed, with disease and years-long famine in North America, western China and Europe. The dreadful weather in Geneva indeed inspired 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to go all gothic, pen Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and publish it anonymously until putting her Shelley name to it thirteen years later.
A whole lot of important and remarkable stuff went on, that very few knew about.
Now a whole lot of absolutely unimportant and completely unremarkable stuff goes on every second of the day, and almost everybody knows about it. Two tossers kiss-cammed at a Coldplay concert had social media shock waves reverberate the earth dwarfing Krakatua to a discreet burp, and mainstream news reported it. Five months later one of the participants started giving interviews. Why you’d want to revive what should never have been given breath in the first place is anyone’s guess.
How is being an unwilling witness to the unvirtuous, a virtue? Who decided on the wholesale piracy of privacy? When there’s rectitude in looking like a dead person while you’re still alive, is worth even asking anymore?
It’s creepy. Fourteenth century skelators like this would have been accompanied by the black plague – not black Amex. Socially they’d shunned, not hashtagged. (Or more correctly, “hatch” tagged – and therein lies the sloppiness we embrace.)
Like the ‘lipstick index’.
This is an economic theory that’s been around since 2001 with the premise that lipstick sales go up when the world is falling down a hole. An affordable luxury to mask and muzzle internal mayhem.
It was originally put forward by global cosmetics visionary Estée Lauder’s son and chairman of the Estée Lauder Corporation at the time, 68-year-old Leonard. Emerging in the wasteland of 9/11, it proposed that in the aftermath of an horrific event or mass financial free fall, when spending drops, what bucks the trend is lipstick.
So much so, that the M•A•C subsidiary of ELC had to put on extra shifts to meet the demand.
Lipstick to put on a pig, really; because the index isn’t true. It was a throw-away remark by Lauder that’s never been substantiated. Media marketed the madness.
Trends are to the beauty industry what prized fungi is to truffle hogs. Whether they’re wearing my-lips-but-better ‘Fleshpot’ or not. Cosmetics aren’t recession-proof. They can be low on the high end, high on the low end and often don’t follow hard data projections. Those sales in 2001 were hiked not by disaster but by the newness of the M•A•C brand.
What bleakness brings is a proven sales spike in romance novels. Which is what we have at the tail end of 2025. What a shock. (Not.)
Personally, the end of the world could be well on its way, and I could no more read a book of this genre than lose 15 kilos in three days to livestream the last minutes of life as we know it.
The Dick Van Dyke Show, which originally aired from October 1961 to June 1966, is the way a romance novel should be – in talking book form, accompanied by black-and-white moving images with all the crap taken out and great writing slotted in there instead. Quality dialogue, brilliant storylines, and on-screen chemistry between the leads that hasn’t been beaten in 65 years.
Thank you, Dick Van Dyke (Rob Petrie) for your unrivalled physical comedy, and the television magic and spellbinding chemistry created with Mary Tyler Moore (his wife Laura). Carl Reiner as Alan Brady is something to behold; along with the core of supporting actors Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley), Rose Marie (Sally Rogers), Morey Amsterdam (Buddy), Ann Morgan Guilbert (Millie Helper) and Jerry Paris (Jerry Helper).
For the generation that grew up during the ’60s and ’70s and their parents, familiarity is its enveloping comfort.
The furniture and gadgets you know the colour of, and the feel. Chicken paprikash. The milkman. One income families. Costumes for the school play made by your mum. Always eating at a nicely set table. Washing up and talking; spontaneous invitations. Recipe cards. The landline and singular tv, when missing a show meant you missed it. Stylish dressing, even when you weren’t going out. The regular dinner parties, card nights and socialising at home with friends and neighbours, where kids were in bed by 7pm and doors were locked only at night.
We can’t lock anything now.
Privacy policies to allow the sharing of data use “ambiguous language” making it impossible for consumers to identify what data is being shared, and for what purpose. Harder still, is figuring out where data is held and how to opt out of its collection.
Typically, a privacy policy consists of almost 7,000 words and takes 29 minutes to read. The only “ambiguous language” in any episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show is shared for the purpose of laughs and snappy exchanges in less than 29 minutes.
It’s an effortless classic of masterful themes and dialogue between a multi-talented cast of characters. Game-changing and genre shattering. Always punching up and never down. You only have to see Yetta from The Nanny in her 30s, or Klinger delivering coffee and donuts to prove that Neighbours should have been canned more than twice.
What can’t be explained, is the recent horror experienced by the Reiner family. As nice as it would be to avoid mentioning it altogether, it’s impossible in the context of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It’s where it all started. Like father like son. Neither should’ve been so marvellously talented and so genuinely humble, but they were.
The world has crumbled.
The ‘lipstick index’ is a lie, but its psychological equation is true: when people feel they have less than they need, more is spent on small, beautiful things. It can be money, or time, or thought. Dismissing it as frivolous and stupid is an easy mistake to make. Treasures of any kind, things that bring their own brightness, always help cut through the suffocating dark.
We need The Dick Van Dyke Show more than ever.
Even if you weren’t even close to being born when it brought new meaning to sitcoms, immerse yourself in it. Know that the behaviour depicted between the characters is pretty much how it was then – respectful, welcoming, and not without its conflicts. To hold its social norms to today’s standards is to miss the point. It’s a helluva show for when the world feels like hell.
It occurred to me that one of the most appealing aspects of the series is being able to watch the results of a collaboration of the creative and the talented, without knowing their opinions and politics that are absorbed like microplastic in the present-day waft. It helps them forever remain entertaining characters with impossibly not impossible lives, conversations, relationships, observations and lessons in life.