BOOK ‘EM DANNO…

If you don’t know the answer to our title question then you obviously don’t remember the classic TV cop show Hawaii Five-0. Allan Bryce looks back at the original and best small screen incarnation of the exploits of Honolulu’s

Colour telly arrived in the UK in July 1967 but as anyone who is old enough to have been around in those days will remember, early colour sets were too expensive for the working class audience. Whenever I broached the subject of my parents getting one they responded with the familiar refrain of “They haven’t got the colour right, yet.”

To be fair they may have been right, and anyway, most programmes were still being broadcast in black and white. I remember that BBC 2 made a real fuss over screening Wimbledon 1967 in colour, but that was of little interest to me.

Three years later, in late 1970, myself and a few of my mates wandered in to Westcott Club, which was sort of like a poor man’s British Legion for our regular game of snooker and we noticed that for some reason all of the tables were free. That reason was because the club had installed a big screen (well, 27” WAS big in those days) and everyone was sitting round it watching, wait for it… Hawaii Five-O.

I was already a big fan of this brand new cop show and of course its exotic locations really came alive in colour, even if it still wasn’t right yet. We gave the snooker the elbow, stocked up on pork scratchings and pina coladas, and settled back to be transported to the Aloha State in company with Steve McGarrett, Danny “Danno” Williams and that Chinese bloke whose name I could never remember off the top of my head.

The very first episode of Hawaii Five-O aired in the UK in July 1970, and it was a big hit with me from the start. I knew it was going to be great because of the theme tune, which I still think is one of the greatest of all time, up there with Lalo Schifrin’s Mission:

Impossible, Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn and Jerry Goldsmith’s Man From UNCLE. But it’s very possible that the bold and brassy Hawaii Five-O might be the greatest opener ever written for an action series.

Clocking in at a tight 60 seconds, the Five-O theme was written by New Jersey-born composer Morton Stevens, who got his start in the 1950s as arranger and conductor for $200 every time the show aired, but accepted a one-off payment of $5,000 instead, a decision that was to cost him a fortune because the series went to 12 seasons and was in reruns for decades before returning is the ten-season re-boot. By the way, since you’ve been dying to know, Helen Kuoha-Torco was the uncredited woman shaking her hips in the opening credits.

Helen Kuoha-Torco, the original Tahitian dancer from the pilot episode, whose hips will go down in television history.Sadly she passed away in 2018

Sammy Davis Jr. He then went into composing various scores for network television under the tutelage of Jerry Goldsmith. It apparently took him just 11 minutes to compose his most famous bit of music, the Five-O theme that won him an Emmy Award.

Mind you, he had some brilliant visuals to compose that opening theme to - that rolling ocean wave, followed by a series of unique and distinctive shots, from the pre-drone-era zoom in on Steve McGarrett spinning to face the camera while standing on a hotel penthouse balcony, via a fish-eye view of a 747 at Honolulu Airport and a start-stop close-up of a dancing hula girl. All of this was inter-cut with snapshots of distinctive Hawaiian landmarks, finishing on the flashing blue light of a speeding police motorcycle. Wow!