By Dave Riley
The Korean War — remember that one? Carefully euphemised by the Pentagon as a "police action", it began in June 1950 and ended in July 1953, by which time the total of dead, wounded and missing was approaching 2 million soldiers and civilians. Some police action!
Of course, it was all about drawing the line against communism, about hotting up the Cold War, and it had enough gutsy fanfare in it to last to the Vietnam War — not the French but the US version — well under way by the mid-'60s. That was another "police action" — more devastating than its predecessor, but cut from the same cloth.
By the time MASH began on September 17, 1972, the charm of fighting the Reds had soured. Three months to the day before the debut, a burglary had taken place at the Watergate building in Washington and the US public's attitudes to the war, its government, even its president, were undergoing a dramatic change. The timing was perfect.
Dr Richard Hornberger's original novel, upon which Robert Altman's movie M*A*S*H was based, was not notably antiwar. The shift in emphasis to make MASH antiwar and anti-establishment began with the film and continued with and was emphasised by the TV version.
The television series, after a shaky first season, was to run for 11 years and build a phenomenal following. The final episode, which ran for two and half hours, drew an audience in 1983 variously estimated at between 85 and 125 million in the US alone.
But MASH refuses to go away. Its 251 episodes have kept cropping up in a whole series of repeats over these last 20 years. Currently Channel 10 is running new prints of old episodes. It is good to be back in fond company.
The many stories of the 4077 MASH field hospital have become an integral part of popular culture. The consistently high standards of writing, production and performance which MASH achieved depended on values that were enthusiastically upheld as much by its massive audience as by its cast and crew.
Although set in Korea in the McCarthyite '50s, MASH was the most contemporary of programs. It sometimes forayed into issues of class, race and sex more keenly than most of its peers and served always to remind us that the world really has changed dramatically.
For some the series is discounted by Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce's rampant lechery, but a greater failing is the program's cocooning of the action away from the lives of the Koreans. It is Mum's boys and Mum's apple pie that take the battering in these televised hostilities. The locals merely add ambience.
An incision in the soft underbelly of red blooded Americana is perhaps MASH's best legacy. While it never quite discovers imperialism, it accurately diagnosed the Vietnam Syndrome for all to see. MASH's war — which lasted for over a decade — was just another US offshore battlefield. Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq ... the 4077 MASH was merely renting the space.