When I was grow­ing up in the sev­en­ties, after a decade of main­ly black and white tele­vi­sion, there was a pletho­ra of new, colour­ful, excit­ing TV dra­mas: Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble, The Six Mil­lion Dol­lar Man, Starsky and Hutch, The Cham­pi­ons, The Per­suaders, Kojak…the list goes on.

Most of these of course were Amer­i­can-pro­duced and the indus­try churned them out to a pub­lic hun­gry for enter­tain­ment. A lit­tle-known name out­side of the TV indus­try is Iran­ian direc­tor Reza Badiyi, but he deserves recog­ni­tion from those of us who devoured hours of the afore­men­tioned shows, for Badiyi helmed lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of hours of episod­ic TV. He direct­ed more than 430 episodes of tele­vi­sion, includ­ing mul­ti­ple episodes of Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble, The Six Mil­lion Dol­lar Man, The Rock­ford Files, Hawaii Five‑O, The Incred­i­ble Hulk, T.J. Hook­er, and Cagney and Lacey.

Badiyi began his Amer­i­can career as a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, hav­ing moved from Iran in 1955 and grad­u­at­ed from Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty with a degree in film-mak­ing. He worked with direc­tors such as Sam Peck­in­pah and Robert Alt­man before mov­ing increas­ing­ly into tele­vi­sion. No-one would claim Badiyi’s work in the sev­en­ties as great works of art but, with their break­through visu­al effects, they were cer­tain­ly cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant for young view­ers like myself.

To rep­re­sent Badiyi’s oeu­vre I have cho­sen the title visu­al­i­sa­tion (i.e. the open­ing and clos­ing cred­its) for Hawaii Five‑0. If you were alive in the sev­en­ties, there’s a very high prob­a­bil­i­ty these images will be very famil­iar to you. Backed by an irre­sistible score by Richard Shores, Badiyi used dynam­ic, zoom­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, copi­ous imagery from Hawaii (the 50^th State — Five‑0 — get it?), with cool quick-cuts and freeze-frames to set the view­er up nice­ly for the upcom­ing crime-defeat­ing dra­ma. Who can for­get the fast zoom-in to the top bal­cony of the Ilikai Hotel, with Jack Lord’s Steve McGar­rett turn­ing to face the cam­era?

For the clos­ing cred­its, Badiyi chose to use these icon­ic out­rig­ger canoeists bat­tling the surf (any­one remem­ber sit­ting in a line of like-mind­ed plonkers on a dance floor, pad­dling like crazy and singing duh-duh-duh-duh duh­h­hh duh­h­hh…?)

All in all, a bravu­ra title visu­al­i­sa­tion by one of the most pro­lif­ic direc­tors of episod­ic series tele­vi­sion in the his­to­ry of the medi­um. Book him, Dan­no!