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For television viewers of a certain vintage there was only one Queen Mother, and it wasn't the ancient human gin bottle who shuffled off her immortal coil in a blaze of hagiographic genuflection three years ago.
Though they could both lay claim to presiding over thoroughly dysfunctional families, the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon really could not hold a candle to one Miss Ellie Ewing of Texas, whose brood made the Windsors look like Mormons.
And now she's dead, too. Barbara Bel Geddes moved onward and upward this week. And, this being real life and not an episode of Dallas, we can safely assume she is gone for good, not to be replaced by another actress for a season or two, and certainly not to re-appear in the shower in a year's time with the explanation that it was all just a long, badly written dream sequence.
Dallas-ophiles will know of what I speak, and others will surely be familiar with the broad details of a show whose dramatic absurdity - like Shakespeare on acid - set the template for everything that came afterwards.
You can trace a line from Dallas through to Desperate Housewives, with pitstops along the way at Knots Landing, Melrose Place and any number of other soapy cul de sacs, and realise that the Ewings of Southfork gave birth to much more than big hair, shoulder pads and a belief in the redemptive power of being a right bastard to your relatives.
Dallas existed in a world before pop culture became so thoroughly ghettoised that it ceased to be a shared experience across the globe. We are all just demographics now, consuming within our own age bracket, income level, racial group, gender, sexual orientation, postcode and shirt size, but there was a time, for better or worse, when a song, a book, a movie or TV show could lay claim to the attention of vast swathes of the Western community. It still happens occasionally - Titanic, The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter - but generally the days of the communal obsession are long dead.
The question of who shot JR transfixed the world in 1980; it's hard to imagine anything remotely similar occurring today. To return to the royal theme, it is said that Queen Elizabeth even requested that a copy of the programme be flown from the US to London overnight after its American screening and held a family viewing at the palace.
The Windsors weren't alone; Dallas was famous for clearing restaurants from Beirut to Benoni as the addicted abandoned social obligations to stay home and feed their habit.
Silly it might have been, but boy was it fun, and few were immune. I watched it during my high school years; my English literature teacher, who by day would tutor us on the works of Steinbeck and Fugard, confessed it was compulsory viewing while she did her nails; I recall a very elderly family friend admitting she watched it religiously just for the sheer pleasure of shouting at the wicked JR, the character to whom Dallas owed much of its success.
This was due in no small part to Larry Hagman's ability to turn a man of cartoonish venality into one of the great anti-heroes. Following the actor's rule that if you play it like you believe it, the audience will too, he created a villain for the ages, even achieving the rare actor's feat of banishing from the public mind his previous iconic turn as an astronaut with a genie in a 1960s sitcom. Most television actors get one shot at immortality; Hagman somehow contrived to give himself two.
But he was well aware that JR could not exist in a vacuum; he just wouldn't work without a vast collection of people to be mean to, and it was the genius of the Dallas writers that they constructed a near-perfect set of foils for the mean bastard in the middle. They gave us Bobby, Pam, Sue-Ellen and Jock - or as their names were rendered in Texan, Barby, Payam, Swellin and Jark - and many others besides, including the incomparable Miss Ellie. She was, as one obituary for Barbara Bel Geddes put it, "the kind of mother one has always longed for, or had nightmares about.
Without batting a tearful eye she automatically gave absolution to her children, husband and in-laws for their seemingly endless cycle of chicanery. The family was all; one felt she would have forgiven Hitler if only he had been a Texas Ewing".
On the face of it, the Dallas writers never really gave her much to do beyond staring mournfully into the middle distance as the mayhem raged around her, but Bel Geddes, a resourceful actor of vast experience, somehow found layers where there were none apparent.
She'd had lots of practice playing roles like that, most famously alongside Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's Vertigo; there was always something going on underneath. Just a wife and mother?
Well, yes, but Hitchcock also once cast her as a housewife who beat her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb. As the same obituary noted, audiences surely sensed there was more to her than met the eye. As the world wondered who shot JR, there were many who suspected it was his mother.
It wasn't. That honour fell to the character of Kristen (played, in a delicious moment of casting perversity, by Bing Crosby's daughter Mary). Kristen was the wayward, homicidal and eventually suicidal sister of Sue-Ellen, the show's other emotional anchor, played with such expressive gusto by Linda Gray that one often felt her eyes and lips might take off and fly around the room at any moment.
If Bel Geddes was Dallas's rock, as Larry Hagman said on her passing, Linda Gray was its sponge, absorbing so much emotional abuse (and booze to go with it) that you feared she might dissolve into a puddle of gin on a weekly basis.
They really don't make them like that anymore.
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