Just a note about someone who influenced a generation in ways that surprised him.

We ran home from school to watch it. Every single day.

We couldn't have explained it. Dark Shadows affected my generation of teenagers at emotional levels we hadn't suspected existed. Oh, sure, it was a soap opera, for heaven's sake. Only (other people's) moms watched soap operas. The effects were cheesy – can anyone forget the Bill Baird puppet bat? The sets fell apart at regular intervals, frequently with a loud crash. You could hear the cameraman coughing. The tombstones were made of Styrofoam. They wobbled. The cast – wonderful overworked New York stage actors (many award-winners) – muffed their lines almost daily. The flies on set must have driven them mad, even if the dialogue didn't.

But under it all, there was a story. And what a story, though hard to describe. Something about there being more to reality than meets the eye. Something about love being stronger than time. Something. . . liminal, yet reassuring: the idea that no matter how weird we thought we were personally, somewhere out there was someone who would understand, and like the folks at Collinwood, accept you as family. They'd stick up for you, even if you turned into a werewolf, zombie, or vampire, or suffered from the Dream Curse. We didn't know postmodern jargon back then – words like 'subtext' and 'referencing' did not fall trippingly from our tongues. We just knew that Collinwood was a good place to be. For those of you who weren't there: Dark Shadows was our Doctor Who, Collinwood was our Tardis, and Barnabas was our Doctor. (All of them.)

Ah, Barnabas. The reluctant vampire. Canadian Jonathan Frid didn't know what he was getting into. He signed up for 13 weeks on a soap opera that had 'gone supernatural' in a desperate attempt to boost ratings. The ruse, suggested by Dan Curtis' kids, succeeded beyond the producer's wildest dreams. They couldn't kill Barnabas off, so they 'cured' him (sort of). Then the cast went time-travelling. Barnabas, the 18th-century shipbuilder, didn't want to be a vampire. Jonathan Frid, the 20th-century Shakespearean actor, probably didn't set out to be a vampire, either. But the teenagers were mobbing the stage doors. One cast member remarked that they felt like the Beatles.

The pace must have been gruelling. Those people had to learn 30 pages of script a night and produce a new show five days a week. Shows with memorable dialogue such as, ' I make it my business to know anybody whose path crosses that of the Hand of Count Petofi.'

Ah, the Hand of Count Petofi. Josette's music box and Quentin's gramophone. The secrets of Collinwood, the Old House, the family mausoleum, where Barnabas' coffin was. (Often, but not always. He moved around a bit, with Willie's help.) The real secret to that coffin, of course, was revealed by Grayson Hall, the Oscar-nominated actress who played Dr Julia Hoffman. Hall reported that one day, shortly before the cameras were to start rolling, the coffin opened, and Frid sat up complaining. 'For three years, I've been saying that this coffin is too short. I'm tired of bending my knees.' Such were the perils of television vampirism in the old days. There was a sign on the backstage staircase: 'Don't forget your fangs.'

Frid's Barnabas was courtly, avuncular, pleasant when he wasn't biting anyone or bashing Willie Loomis with his wolf's-head cane. He added elegance and tone to the proceedings. The actor was also admittedly a 'slow study'. It was claimed – by him and others – that the anguished facial expression that had won all our hearts was mostly caused by panic at his inability to remember the next line, and those wild swivels of the head involved searching for the teleprompter.

It did not matter. We forgave all, understood all, because Collinwood and its repertory company of actors had a special place in our hearts. The show ran for 1225 episodes between 1966 and 1971, and only stopped because, well, the players needed to get on with their lives. Since then, there have been the usual conventions. The actors kept in touch. In fact, some of them last saw one another recently, as Frid and other original Dark Shadows regulars spent three days filming their cameo appearances in the upcoming Burton film. Nice that they were honoured in this way.

A generation of Baby Boomers would like to honour them, too, especially Jonathan Frid. It is to him in particular that we owe the insight that everyone has secrets, and that it is possible to respect those secrets, and the privacy of others, while relating creatively in a shared universe.

Go in peace, Jonathan Frid, and take our thanks with you.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

23.04.12 Front Page

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