Uh-oh, Chongo!

Beverly Hills 90210-Season 1 - Disc 1 (1990)

Check out the episode "The Green Room" on Beverly Hills 90210 - Season 1 - Disc 1 (1990)

Sarah: The ocean’s our house, and The Green Room’s the gnarliest place in it. When you’re in The Green Room you’re riding the perfect wave.

I’ve always thought of 90210 as a live action version of the 60s bubblegum cartoon The Archies. Okay, it may be white bread, and its stars look like they’re in their mid twenties at best, but this early episode recalls how great Friday night TV was back in the early 90s.It also introduces the world to bad boy Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) – think a Rebel Without a Cause’s Jim Stark who surfs. When Brandon Walsh arrives in California from mid-west Minnesota, he awkwardly tries to befriend brooding loner Dylan. Dylan immediately lays down the gauntlet to newbie Brandon to ditch the editorial he has due for the school newspaper and go surfing. At the beach Brandon finds himself more enamoured with Dylan’s surfing buddy from the Valley, Sarah, than any Pacific waves; pity she almost drowns later on when surfing drunk – Brandon couldn’t possibly take her home to meet parents Jim and Cindy, at least not this early in the show’s run. Watch out for Brandon getting wiped out on his beginner’s boogie board, then Dylan only escaping a dumping from an incoming wave thanks to a jump cut.

Gidget

Check out the episode “Now There's a Face” on Gidget - Season 1 - Disc 2 (1965)

Frances Lawrence: You see before you, me; Gidget. For fifteen and a half years my life was complete and total ick. But then, on the 23rd of June, two things happened. I fell in love with two things: Jeff - my Moondoggie - and surfing Long before Debbie and Sue rebelled against the boys and took to the surf in the 1981 Aussie film Puberty Blues, Frances ‘Gidget’ Lawrence was hitting Southern Californian beaches with her board. Over the series Gidget develops more crushes than The Brady Bunch’s Marcia; here it’s Hill Street Blues’ Captain Frank Furillo’s turn to catch her eye (a very young Daniel J Travanti is credited as Dan Travanty). Travanti is UCLA photographic student Tom Brighton, whose purely artistic interest in Gidget’s photogenic face is assumed to be much more. It’s up to Gidget’s dad (an English professor also at UCLA) to help mend the broken heart and confirm his status as TV’s most understanding intellectual parent this side of Nanny and the Professor’s Harold Everett. The late Pete Duel is great as Gidget’s obsessed psychology student brother-in-law who sees Freudian and Jungian symbolism in her every teenage mood.

Skippy

Check out the episode “Surf King” on Skippy the Bush Kangaroo - Volume 2 (1966)

This episode’s soundtrack will have you grooving to some of the best surf instrumental stomp since The Tornadoes. En route to compete in a surf life-saving championship at Bondi, Gerry King (Tony Bonner) rescues a damsel in distress caught in a rip. Unfortunately it leaves him with broken ribs. At least post-Skippy Tony Bonner never went the ‘I’ve done other things, I’m a serious Sir Laurence Olivier type actor’ route his co-star Ken James did. Bonner’s role as helicopter pilot Gerry is up there with other TV roles of his such as Lorraine Bayly’s love interest in Carson’s Law and head of Pacific International airport Paul MacFarlane in Skyways. He has real surfing cred too, having acted in Phil Avalon’s surf flick Liquid Bridge and been the president of Manly Surf Lifesaving Club in real life.

Baywatch

Check out the episode "Armoured Car" on Baywatch - Season 1 - Disc 4 (1989)

Baywatch theme lyrics: In us we all have the power But sometimes it's so hard to see And instinct is stronger than reason It's just human nature to me

Peter Phelps is the Sun God of Australian TV (and film). He was patrolling the sands as a lifeguard on a Sydney beach when he was first plucked from obscurity and thrust in the soap limelight as John Palmer in Sons and Daughters. He has the best line in the movie Point Break when Johnny Utah and Bodhi hit (what is supposedly) Bells Beach: No one’s been out. No one’s going out. You’ve got to be ****ing crazy, man. Death on a stick out there, mate. Then it was back to the small screen for Phelpsy in Baywatch as imported Australian lifeguard Trevor Cole. Trev works the LA County sands beat after a previous gig at a private beach. In this episode he teams up in a volleyball tournament with ex-professional player Jill. It becomes a battle of revenge when Jill’s ex turns up on a rival team. This is Phelpsy’s last appearance in the iconic Hasselhoff’s beach classic; what a pity Baywatch Downunder was scuppered by snooty Avalon locals, denying him the chance to reprise the role on home sand.

Gilligan's Island

Check out the episode “Big Man on Little Stick” on Gilligan's Island - Season 1 - Disc 3 (1964)

Duke: Man, five days on that board and I'm nothing but skin and bones. Ginger: What skin. Mary Ann: And what bones.

A tsunami’s thirty foot wave carries surfer Duke Williams from Honolulu for five days, washing him up on the shore of this uncharted desert isle. Even though he’s from Topeka, Kansas, this Duke seems every much as legendary on the deck as his surfing pioneer namesake Duke Kahanamoku. While the Howells mistakenly think the visiting surfer dude is a real English duke, the Professor plots the tsunami’s return that will carry Duke back to the mainland - where he will apparently alert authorities as to the castaways’ whereabouts. Duke though seems more interested in availing himself of the island’s babes, Ginger and Mary Ann. Look out for yet another brilliant improvisation using bamboo and coconuts by a castaway – this time Gilligan builds his own set of weights to try to show up Duke in front of the ladies.

Hawaii Five-0

Check out the episode "King Kamehameha Blues" on Hawaii Five-0 -Season 2 - Disc 2 (1969)

Book him, Danno. Murder one.

The huge pipeline; the zoom to Detective Steve McGarrett on the top level of the Ilikai Hotel; hula girls and outrigger canoes: perhaps the greatest TV opening credits and theme tune ever. McGarrett and offsiders Danny Williams, Chin Ho and Kono are answerable only to the Governor of Hawaii. In a break from the drug lords and murderers, the team investigate some counter-culture dissidents (ie: 1969 American college students) who steal King Kamehameha’s robe. McGarrett takes this offence to the late King, the man who united the Hawaiian Islands, personally. The kids might think it’s a harmless prank, but McGarrett’s out for some hippy blood. Look out for the young punks’ leader Arnold Potter played by Brandon de Wilde. De Wilde was the child star, who as Joey Starrett, screamed the final words ‘Shane! Come back!’ in the classic George Stevens western, Shane.

Magnum PI

Check out the episode "Lest We Forget” on Magnum PI - Season 1 - Disc 4 (1980)

Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV:

I read once that one of the reasons the American ABC television network commissioned Magnum PI was it wanted to make use of the sets and locales left over after the cancellation of their earlier hit Hawaii Five-0. The other fact you always hear is that Tom Selleck had to knock back Spielberg for the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark because he was already committed to this TV series. Selleck’s Thomas Sullivan Magnum III is a Vietnam Vet providing security on the Hawaiian estate of a famous author. The estate, Robin’s Nest, is run by a refined Englishman called Higgins who plays a sort of Alfred to Magnum’s Batman. Magnum’s other mates include TC, a helicopter pilot, and Rick, who runs a bar. This episode sees Magnum investigating a blackmail case revolving around a potential Supreme Court judge and the bride that he thought had died in the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. It’s a stellar guest cast led by leading TV matriarch June Lockhart (Lassie, Lost in Space) and Oscar winning Jose Ferrer as the judge. Jose’s son, TV veteran Miguel (Twin Peaks, Crossing Jordan) fills in for his dad in the 1941 flashback scenes. Look out for Scatman Crothers from The Shining too.

Blue Water High

Check out the episode “The Band Plays On” on - Blue Water High - Series 1 - Disc 4 (2005)

There goes a dog-fish, chased by a cat-fish, in flew a sea robin, watch out for that piranha, there goes a narwhal, here comes a bikini whale! (Rock Lobster, The B-52s)

The best teenage surfers in Australia enrol in the high performance Solar Blue surfing academy that doubles as a real school. Now it’s time for the surf school to go rock school as the grommets get the band together and take their music elective. They even have a gig lined up at the annual surf competition. But how come their style is electronic rock? Don’t these kids know how to use a tremolo arm or bridge pickup? Is the ABC’s budget that stretched they couldn’t fly in king of the surf guitar Dick Dale to light up the screen like he did in the 1987 Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello film Back to the Beach. Surely the brain of the band, budding drummer Matt Leyland (King Island’s best sportsman since Barry Brooks) will suggest covering the twangy beach classic Rock Lobster in tribute to his dad’s crayfish business back home?

The O.C.

Check out the episode “The Heavy Lifting” on - The O.C. - Season 3 - Disc 4 (2005)

Kaitlin: Accidents don’t just happen, people let them happen.

In the final season of The O.C., Ryan has his own It’s a Wonderful Life what-life-would-have-been-like-had-he-never-been-born episode. In the background of one of the parallel universe scenes we see a poster of the successful professional surfer Johnny Harper. Alas for budding surfer Johnny, The O.C.’s reality is he remains shuffled off his mortal coil after drunkenly falling off rocks at the beach. For Johnny, it is one unrequited love rebuff from Marissa too far. This episode has the best beach memorial scene since the Cold Feet gang scattered Rachel’s ashes over Portmeirion (the home of 60s sci-fi show The Prisoner) to the strains of melancholy Coldplay. In The Heavy Lifting, Johnny’s best mate Chilli and Marissa organise a memorial service on the beach; strictly no shoes and no black. The soundtrack is less-stadium rock than Cold Feet though, with Sufjan Stevens’ For the Widows in Paradise providing the final farewell.

Seinfeld

Check out the episode “The Marine Biologist” on - Seinfeld - Season 5 - Disc 3 (1990)

George: The sea was angry that day, my friends …

The MARPOL V Treaty of 1991 banned golfers hitting balls into the sea. You wonder whether this was a result of Kramer hitting his Titleist into the Atlantic and getting it stuck in a whale’s blowhole. Naturally Kramer’s antics lead to more schadenfreude involving George. Out for a stroll along the beach with a girl he hasn’t seen since college, George goes along with Jerry’s original plan by letting her think he’s a leading marine biologist. You’d think George would learn after falsely claiming previously to be the architect who designed the addition to the Guggenheim. You just know he is going to get busted and lose the girl when she pleads with him to save the helpless mammal. If only Kramer had used new eco friendly biodegradable golf balls.