How to learn the best thing about Bing? By knowing the doings of the Ewings

Television has a long reach, and it makes bonds where you would scarcely imagine bonds might be. I have just returned from Namibia, and more precisely from the Skeleton Coast. The Skeleton Coast is the most extraordinary place I have visited. It is far, far from here, a place of dreams and fears, where the sky and the sea and the sand meet and make an agreement that does not take human beings into account. You cannot live on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia; you can only visit it, and each moment that you are there, you know you are there only on the sufferance of the sky and the sea and the sand.

On the Skeleton Coast the nearest telephone is 300km away. The nearest television is further. It is a wild place. It is wilderness. On the shore I saw the bleached masts of 19th century whaling ships, and jackals that roam the dunes and pick over the scrubbed bones of baleen whales. I saw hawks and gulls and lions that walk the sand, feeding on the slowest seals. There are elephants and dead men and a wind that never stops blowing from the sea. The foam mounts on the sand until the shore is like the trembling crest of some infernal beer.

The Skeleton Coast is a lonely place, but I was not lonely. I had good company. Among the company was a German man named Wolfgang. Wolfgang and I did not warm to each other. I am not proud of it, but I have an in-built prejudice against Germans. I don't seriously believe that the Maginot Line is in serious danger any more, but old habits die hard. (I mean my habit of mistrusting Germans, not necessarily the 20th century German habit of wearing grey and invading their neighbours.)

I began to feel like John Cleese

Wolfgang was in his sixties, and although rationally I knew that meant that he was too young ever to have piloted the Stuka that dive-bombed my grandfather's tank in 1944, still I looked at him askance. I began to feel like John Cleese. There were South African history buffs in camp, and whenever anyone mentioned war, I found myself, as though possessed, turning to Wolfgang and saying, "They are talking about the Anglo-Boer War, you know. Oh, yes, the Anglo-Boer War. Gee, what a war, eh? Never mind, we're all friends now."

It was, you might imagine, awkward. My companion, an individual of immense diplomacy and good sense, took me aside and said, "Will you shut up about the war already? Who do you think you are, Winston Churchill?" But could I stop? I could not.

And then the peculiar thing happened. Around the campfire one night, someone mentioned Bing Crosby. I forget how Bing Crosby was mentioned in the distant sandy hollows of the world's most desolate coast, but he was, and what's more, he was not popular. Popular opinion on the Skeleton Coast, I am compelled to report, was not in favour of Bing Crosby. Good words were spoken of Jim Reeves, of all people, and Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, with which I can scarcely argue, but Bing Crosby received short shrift. For want of anything else to say, I offered: "Bing's not all bad. His daughter shot JR, for one thing."

That received the silence it deserved, but then Wolfgang turned to me. "You are right," he said. "Mary Crosby played Sue-Ellen's sister, Kristin Sheperd, and she shot JR."

I was astonished. "You know Dallas?" I said. Wolfgang leaned forward, and his khaki safari-vest rustled slightly under the intensity of his gaze. "I love Dallas," he said.

'What was the name of the corrupt Dallas sheriff?'

Wolfgang is a Dallasophile. I too am a Dallasophile. It is currently being repeated on the Series Channel (DSTV), but my Dallas memories are vivid from the days I used to tiptoe out of bed at 9pm on a Tuesday and peer around the corner of the living-room to watch the doings of the Ewings over my parents' shoulders. Occasionally I was caught and my mouth was washed out with soap (my father would have preferred to have washed out my eyes with soap, but my mother was a gentle soul), but still each Tuesday I returned.

Sometimes I snuck outside and stood in the garden, watching Dallas reflected on an open window in the Durban summer night. I am still obscurely touched to think that my parents sought to shelter me from the horrors of the adult world by forbidding me to watch Dallas. If only they had just forbidden me to grow up, I am sure I would have been much happier.

I love remembering Dallas. It awakens in me the memory of the days when being an adult still seemed exciting. For the rest of the trip, Wolfgang and I tested each other on Dallas trivia. "Who was JR's lawyer?" Wolfgang asked. "Harv Smithfield," I replied with a smirk.

"What was the name of the corrupt Dallas sheriff?" I asked "Fenton," said Wolfgang, shrugging.

On the whole, I blush to confess, Wolfgang had the edge with Dallas trivia. For one thing, he remembered the name of the nightclub where Audrey Landers as Afton Cooper sang when she was still Cliff Barnes's girlfriend. I had to concede.

From our Dallas connection, conversation grew. We spoke about being children and seeing things we were not allowed to see. We spoke about the small sorrows of growing older. We spoke about our fathers, and dying. We never mentioned the war. Now Wolfgang is back in his small village outside Bremen, and I am on this page, fielding queries about when I am going to update my photograph. It wasn't quite like the Christmas Day the soldiers called truce to play football in no-man's land, but still it felt good.

Now I have a place to stay, the next time I find myself in a small village outside Bremen. And we have Dallas to thank.