Rich Hall's You Can Go to Hell, I'm Going to Texas

This programme contains some strong language

How to explain Texas?

Well, it's the home of NASA.

And also The Big Texan Steak Ranch,

home of the 72 ounce, eat it all and you don't pay,

T-bone extravaganza, replete with a quarter-acre of salad

and a baked potato the size and texture of a sofa.

Texas has given us Bill Hicks, Cormac McCarthy,

and George Bush Jr.

It's home to some of the savviest people on the planet

and also some of the most inept.

Texas could put a man on the moon, but they couldn't manage to get

a president down the street without him getting shot in the head.

Thus, it's hard to explain Texas,

or why, when Texans leave Texas, they feel the need

to brag about how they're from Texas.

After all, people from Bognor Regis never strut around

bragging about how they're from Bognor Regis.

It's because Bognor Regis has no identity whatsoever.

Texas has an identity, even if it's primarily mythical.

# The stars at night

# Are big and bright... #

Countless films have been set in Texas.

More often than not in these films, Texas is not just the setting,

it's the stage.

It's arrogant and proud and overtly masculine.

Bigger than any of the characters inhabiting it.

Texas has to be bigger and better than the other 49 states.

The question is, why?

Texas is huge, it is the biggest state in the nation.

I don't know what they're talking about when they say Alaska's bigger.

I've never seen Alaska, so I know that Texas is bigger.

I got that right that I can do that.

# Money, money! #

Its pro-business, anti-tax, fiscally conservative.

Its internal economy is larger than Australia,

slightly behind Russia.

It leads the nation in energy use

and alcohol-related driving deaths

and carbon dioxide emissions

and in Baptist churches.

It's staunchly religious and wildly consumptive,

often at the same time.

In August of 2012, a man named Ernesto Garza from Beeville, Texas

sat down to his breakfast

and noticed the image of Jesus staring up at him from a burrito.

When the Beeville Picayune News

printed a picture of the miraculous burrito,

it was obvious that several bites had been taken out of it.

See, only in Texas would a man look at a burrito and say,

"That's the image of Jesus,

"but that is a good-looking burrito.

"I'm just going to eat around Jesus and then call the paper."

It runs very deep into your soul.

Maybe being a Texan is the biggest thing.

If Texas comes off a little brusque, that's because it is.

They don't have a lot of regard for your personal space.

Texas is your friend,

but it's the kind of friend that calls you up late at night

to ask if it's OK to hook up with your ex,

helps itself to seconds without asking,

that kind of friend.

You don't have to be born in Texas to be a Texan.

Why, if you move to Texas, you are a Texan.

If you're just travelling through Texas,

as long as you are in Texas, by God, you're a Texan.

They're not overtly concerned with what goes on beyond their borders.

As far as Texas is concerned, there's only two states in America.

There's Texas and there's TAFT.

And TAFT stands for "this ain't fucking Texas".

# And I'll ride that pony fast

# Like a cowboy from the past

# Be young wild and free

# Like Texas in 1880

# Just like Texas... #

Only in Texas could they turn an anti-littering campaign

into a declaration of identity.

Most other states aren't quite as emphatic

about their rules for behaviour,

but for the record, don't make eye-contact with Mississippi,

don't call Oregon after 11:00pm,

and don't you wish your girlfriend was hot, like Nevada?

There are more Texans in the US Armed Forces

than from any other state,

so you could say that one of the underlying characteristics

of being a Texan is they like a fight.

You could add to that that Texans are stubborn,

and in any situation you can always rely on a Texan to stand firm.

This is never truer than when Texans meet Mexicans.

On March 6, 1836, here at the Mission San Antonio de Valero,

also known as the Alamo,

311 men gave their lives, so that someday they could build

a Guinness Book of World Records Museum

right on these hallowed grounds.

The purpose of this rebellion,

the purpose of the Texans' revolution is to fully restore

their Federal Constitution of 1824.

Every student in Texas is required

to spend his or her seventh year studying Texas history.

What makes Texas Texas isn't its history, it's its myth.

Its history and myth is so intertwined

that it's impossible to envision the truth about this place,

so they don't need to know all the history,

they merely need to invoke that single eternal rallying cry,

"Remember the Alamo."

'185 men fighting to their deaths

'against a horde of 7,000,

'in the most savage hand-to-hand combat in history.'

'And you will always remember the Alamo!'

Texas was once part of Mexico

and ever since a couple of hundred tenacious young men

took on half the Mexican army in the name of independence,

the Alamo has been a story close to every Texan's heart.

Even Texans who don't know the Alamo story

know that there is something called the Alamo

that they're supposed to be proud of and, for some people,

it's the pop culture that they know and not the real history.

We, kind of, have to use it as a starting point, to say,

you know, John Wayne really wasn't at the Alamo.

The true participants of the Alamo were seen as heroic figures,

the most prominent of which, of course, is Davy Crockett,

immortalised in film and song and story.

With him was Jim Bowie, of knife fame.

They were led by William Barret Travis

who penned the immortal words...

They fought off the Mexican army for 13 days.

All but two men paid the ultimate price.

'It's here at last.

'The monumental history-making motion picture...'

In film The Alamo has been made twice.

Ironically, both are incredibly forgettable.

The 1960 version, directed by John Wayne,

and starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett,

is an elephantine, strident,

historically-muddled treatise on patriotism

that was released to coincide

with putting Richard Nixon in the White House.

It's my turn.

That idea bombed - so did the film.

It's hard to play a legend when you are a bigger legend

than the legend you're supposed to be playing.

I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to listen tight.

When I came down here to Texas, I was looking for something.

I didn't know what.

There's right and there's wrong.

You got to do one or the other.

You do the one and you're living,

you do the other and you may be walking around,

but you're dead as a beaver hat.

Hollywood should have known to leave the story alone after that.

After all, why are we supposed to cheer for a bunch of Texans

who are fighting for independence

when we know that less than nine years later they'd sell

their grandmother down the Brazos to be part of the US of A.

But in 2004, we get the touchy/feely

Disney touchy/feely stone version of the Alamo.

This one claims to be more historically accurate,

which in films means it's only a matter of time before

one of the characters does a voice-over

as he's penning a letter home.

Like Glory or Braveheart, we sit around for two-plus hours

waiting for the inevitable battle

and wondering just how many Celtic pan-pipe players

can you employ for one movie soundtrack?

Billy Bob Thornton takes over for the Duke,

playing Crockett as some kind of glad-handing, toothy good old boy,

who's never far removed from his own celebrity awareness.

If it was just me,

simple ol' David from Tennessee...

..I might drop over that wall some night and take my chances.

But that Davy Crockett feller,

they're all watching him.

That version tanked, as well,

possibly because tetchy post-9/11 Americans weren't too keen

on seeing a film about martyrs holed up in a religious site

that begins with the word "Al".

Still, it's a rite of passage for every 13-year-old kid

to be dragged into the cinema by his dad

to watch Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett get bayoneted.

They never point out that the Alamo wasn't about religious freedom

or taxation or removal of a maniacal despot,

it was about men fighting to own land

that didn't belong to them in the first place,

but don't tell that to Texans.

# And the 180 were challenged by Travis to die... #

Why these men had even come to Texas in the first place can be summed up in two words -

cheap land.

Houston's call to arms,

published in American newspapers, was very clear on the subject.

# Hey, Santa Anna, we're killing your soldiers below... #

Jim Bowie from Kentucky was a slave trader

and a land speculator who knew an opportunity when he saw one.

Davy Crockett was a coonskin cap wearing hillbilly politician

from Tennessee, who had just been humiliated in an election back East,

like Mitt Romney.

William Travis, who was born in South Carolina,

and who happens to be my great- great-great-great-uncle,

or so I'm told,

had deserted his pregnant wife, young child and a mountain of debt.

For the record, I am nothing like him.

I've never deserted my mountain of debt.

What they thought was,

"I really don't think we are going to have to die.

"People are going to come and help us."

And the tragedy is that people are coming,

Travis is sending out his letters, people are responding.

They just don't get here in time.

The Alamo was a monument to heroism, not intelligence.

It's fairly obvious that Travis's men didn't have to die here.

It wasn't even a strategic position,

it was just a mission turned into an army barracks.

They could have abandoned it at any time and joined up

with General Sam Houston, who was desperate for recruits.

Newspapers back East had a page one story on their hands

and they mined it for all it was worth -

an epic tale of Davy Crockett

and his stoic counterparts fighting to the death. Thermopylae.

And that is the core of Texas character, even today -

us versus them.

So the Mexicans came, the Texans were slaughtered

and to this day Travis's words still fill Texans with misty-eyed pride.

In 1999, America's Ryder Cup team was in danger of losing to Europe.

George Bush Jr sent a copy of Travis's "victory or death" letter

to the golfers. A Texan golfer named Justin Leonard read those words

and promptly went out and sank a 45-foot putt and America won.

The men at the Alamo did not die in vain.

A month after the massacre, Texans rallied under General Sam Houston

and crying, "Remember the Alamo,"

defeated General Santa Anna's entire army at the San Jacinto River.

The battle lasted 19 minutes.

Santa Anna turned all of Texas loose and it became independent.

Now that it was a nation, Texas could set about

getting rid of anyone that got in the way of its expansion.

# That's right, you're not from Texas

# That's right, you're not from Texas... #

Mexicans, Tejanos and native people were forcibly removed

and a plea for real Americans to come to Texas

was issued by the new president, Sam Houston,

who, yet again, offered land to anyone back East

who was fed up with the rat race

and wanted to be part of making Texas a great new Republic.

# ..Texas wants you anyway. #

The Texas that John Wayne was fighting for in 1960

isn't the same Texas as today.

For instance, San Antonio has a population of almost two million.

It's 45% Hispanic.

It also has huge communities of Guatemalans,

Salvadorans and er...

Palestinians, other Arabs, Chinese, Vietnamese.

In 2011, the most common name for newborn boys in Texas was Jose.

Still its border is patrolled like a military DMZ.

The history of Texas's expansion has always been about selectivity,

kind of like its memory.

# So screw you, we're from Texas

# Screw you, we're from Texas

# Screw you, we're from Texas.

# We're from Texas, baby

# So screw you. #

I think when I think about what's most important to me, whether

it's being a Jew,

or being an American, you know, being a Texan...

Maybe being a Texan is the biggest thing.

It isn't the faint of heart that come to Texas.

But it's those people who are bold,

and that really has an effect on the development

of the Texas personality,

because of who did come here.

# Rump steak is sure a sender

# Rump steak like Momma made

# Big, juicy, nice and tender

# The rump steak serenade... #

So your father had an idea to build this place.

He did, he moved in from Chicago

and when he first came down here he wanted to put

a Western-style steakhouse that cowboys would go to.

He had the idea of cashing their payroll cheques

and serving them 25 cent beer, which meant that they started drinking,

they started spending most of their cheques while they were in there.

Then he noticed that half of them

could eat monstrously big sizes of food.

The us versus them, undermanned and overwhelmed Texas mentality

still applies today in the form of meat.

At The Big Texan Steak Ranch, they'll attack

a 4lb slab of steak as if it was Santa Anna's army.

This is a 72-ounce challenge at the Big Texan.

Four pounds of meat.

You have to take the challenge to eat this, a baked potato,

-four shrimps and a salad.

-Three shrimps.

Three shrimps, within an hour.

If you do not finish it within an hour, it costs 72.

# Rump steak is sure a sender

# Rump steak like Momma made... #

That's about half.

I've only eaten half of this steak.

So much pressure!

There's no profile of people that do it.

I've seen a young man that was 11 years old eat the 72-ounce steak.

I've seen a grandmother that was 68 years old do it.

I've seen one man ate two of them in one hour.

Did someone put you up to this?

I was just driving down the road and saw the sign and I had to stop.

-You got a long way to go.

-I feel like...

I'm going to be eating steak for the next couple of days.

It's the mystique of Texas. Is everything really bigger in Texas?

Do we really eat a lot?

Do we really own oil wells and ride horses to work?

Well, of course we do! Always have, always will do

but it's a challenge.

It's like the battery on your shoulder, come knock this off.

Are you a real cowboy? Are you a real Texan?

Are you big enough to be a Big Texan by eating one of these steaks?

# Whiskey River take my mind

# Don't let her memory torture me... #

Somebody should have told me not to do this.

I've all my fans at home, watching on the Internet.

You see the genius of the Big Texan steak is that it appeals

to Americans by making them a mouthwatering offer

and far too late they realise they're in way over their heads.

About 2005 this exact economic model was adopted by bankers

and mortgage lenders in America,

which goes a long way toward explaining why our current economy is in the dumper.

# I'm drowning in a whiskey river... #

What does it mean to be a Texan?

The right to wear a hat like this,

a shirt like this,

and a kerchief like this.

It's being proud of the state.

That's the honour of being Texan, the bragging rights.

CHEERING

I ate two thirds of it.

It's still bigger than my face.

Texas was bigger than me today.

The 72-ounce steak challenge is a uniquely Texan experience.

It exists not only because of the huge Texas psyche

but also it's because it's in its history.

# Out on the plains

# Down near Santa Fe

# I met a cowboy

# Riding the range one day

# And as he jogged along

# I heard him singing a most peculiar cowboy song

# It was a ditty

# He learned in the city

# Comma ti yi yi yeah

# Comma ti yippity yi yeah... #

Texas is and always will be the home of the cowboy.

Those images of cowboys herding their cattle on vast plains

are embedded in cinematic history

but it's not just movies, it's also the reality.

The cowboy wouldn't be anything without his horse or his cattle.

It all started with one breed.

If the Longhorn cow was a car, it would be a Land Rover.

They were the first true pioneers of Texas,

left behind by the Mexicans when they retreated across

the Pecos River after their surrender at San Jacinto.

They're nimble, mean, savvy.

They're the first to know when storms and blizzards

and blue northers are coming. They eat like crazy,

then they hide in the underbrush

and they use those clown stickers to protect themselves

against coyotes and cougars and other predators.

The Longhorn will for ever be associated with Texas.

She continues to represent the romance of the American Old West.

She seems to be the perfect cow, except for one thing.

OK, how come in every cowboy film you see,

where the cowboys are surrounded by Longhorn cows,

are they never eating a goddamn steak?

It's always stew.

It's because the Longhorn cow is the stringiest, rubberiest,

most inedible cow there is.

All you can do is disguise the taste.

Now, Longhorn cattlemen of course, in their defence will tell you,

"Oh, it's lean, it's fat-free."

So is a tyre tread!

Still, if it wasn't for Longhorn cattle,

Texas wouldn't be here today.

Back during the Civil War, Texans went to fight for the Confederacy.

While they were gone, as the war raged,

all the domesticated cows they left behind indulged in a four-year orgy.

By the time the Texans came back they were everywhere

so, while the rest of the defeated South suffered,

At least Texans were able to sell inedible beef

and itchy, scratchy hides to the victorious North.

See how that works?

Cowboys realised that with intensive crossbreeding with European cattle,

the beef was a better quality,

made them ten times more money up North.

All they had to do was get the cantankerous suckers past 800 miles

of roaring rivers, canyons,

badlands, rustlers,

bureaucrats who turned them back because they carried ticks

which caused bovine influenza, also known as Texas fever,

also hostile Indians,

not so hostile but financially scrupulous Indians

who charged than ten cents a head to cross their land

to ultimately reach the nearest railhead at Abilene, Kansas.

This route became known as the Chisholm Trail.

Chisholm. Leave your smutty asides at the door, Britain.

CHISHOLM, named after the Cherokee traitor and wrangler Jesse Chisholm.

That's right, the first cowboy was an Indian.

OK, maybe not the first cowboy...

..seeing as how that term was invented by the Brits 150 years

earlier as a translation of the word "vaquero", as in buck-a-roo.

During the Revolutionary War the term cowboy was used to describe

loathsome Americans who sided with the Brits.

Today it's a term used to describe loathsome Brits who put up siding.

Ha-ha!

Still, Jesse Chisholm was the first cowboy with solid business acumen.

The guy knew his stuff.

In 1948, Hollywood wasn't ready for a story about an Indian becoming a cow entrepreneur,

so it conveniently replaced Jesse Chisholm with John Wayne.

Howard Hawks' Red River is still considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made.

The story opens in 1851 with a wagon train

heading west from St Louis to California.

Among the travellers is Thomas Dunston, John Wayne.

As wagons travel through North Texas,

Dunston is impressed with the land

and decides he'll leave the wagon train and head South

with two cows and one bull to start a ranch.

Give me ten years and I'll have that brand

on the gates of the greatest ranch in Texas.

Ten years and I'll have the Red River D on more cattle than you've looked at anywhere.

I'll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country.

Good beef for hungry people.

Red River is a stunning Western,

stocked with grizzled galutes on horses and yodelling cowboys

driving streams of cattle across spectacular countryside

and tough-talking set pieces between noble men of principle.

But you don't have to look too closely to see that at the movie's core

lies the unstated assumption that it's the white man's right to take what he wants.

When Dunston decides he wants to settle,

he does the same thing to the Mexicans

that the Mexicans did to the Indians before them.

He just flatly lays claim to the land

and lets his guns do the necessary paperwork.

Tell Don Diego, tell him that

all the land north of that river's mine.

Tell him to stay off of it.

-Oh, but the land is his.

-Where did he get it?

Many years ago by grant and patent,

inscribed by the King of all of Spain.

You mean he took it away from whoever was here before? Indians, maybe.

-Maybe so.

-Well, I'm taking it away from him.

Others have thought as you, Senor. Others have tried.

And you've always been good enough to stop them?

Amigo, it is my work.

Pretty unhealthy job.

Get away, Matt.

Sorry for you...

Come on, he called the man "Senor". He called the man, "Amigo".

He called the man "Sir"

and John Wayne still shoots him.

It's Dunston's sense of entitlement that both the audience

and the film-makers just take for granted because after all,

when the Duke is talking, ethics don't mean squat.

Right? Right.

Yeah.

# As I walked out one bright sunny morning

# I spied a young cowboy loping along

# His head was shoved back

# His spurs was a-jingling

# As he come near me singing this song

# Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies... #

Countless trails were blazed across Texas in the second half of the 19th century.

The Old Pecos Trail, the Shawnee Trail, the Butterfield Trail.

Cowboys were romanticised in pulp novels for readers back East,

and wildly exaggerated.

I hate to burst your bubble but cowboys did not engage in gunfights.

They carried a Colt .45 by their side to fend off predators

and rattlesnakes but the high noon shoot-out is pure pulp fantasy.

Who would agree to do that?

"Hey, you know what, you're an asshole.

"When we get to the end of this trail ride in 20, 30, 40 days,

"we're going to stand in the middle of the street

"and pull our guns and just shoot wildly at each other.

"Yeah.

"Then we'll see who's an asshole."

"That's genius, that's...

"Yeah, that's a great idea, yeah, let's do that. Yeah."

A Colt .45 was only accurate up to about three yards.

Almost every saloon owner made cowboys surrender their weapons at the door.

The craziest thing most cowboys ever did was just get drunk

at the end of a trail ride and run up and down the street yelling.

An entire era of the range rider only lasted about 20 years.

As railroads advanced, the cowboy's trail shortened.

The truth is the cowboy officially died in August 1878

when a man named Gustavus Swift figured out that if you put ice

in the top of a boxcar, you could refrigerate beef for transport.

The age of the wild and free cowboy was gone.

Ranches were the new thing.

These ranches grew, and the biggest of them all

belonged to the King family.

It consisted of 825,000 acres,

which covered six Texas counties, that's bigger than Cornwall.

Even today, ranches cover a vast part of Texas

and play a significant role in the state's economy.

-What's the best thing about being a rancher?

-It's just the lifestyle.

Wide open spaces

and animals and, you know.

Actually what we do hasn't changed a lot.

There's a little bit of technology, like cell phones

and stuff like that and the Internet and things.

-What did you used to do?

-Before you had cell phones, how did you...?

You didn't...

You would watch and see where the guy next to you was

and you would just take your time and make sure you cover the country.

I don't know that it makes us any better cowboys, though.

The rancher has always had to battle to survive.

If it's not wildfires, it's banks.

If it's not banks, it's dust storms.

If it's not dust storms, it's drought.

It was really tough last year.

If it hadn't rained this year we'd have been through here,

but we're going to make it now

and we'll be able to bring some cows back. We're going to be all right.

Texas has a lot of ranchers.

It also has a lot of pseudo-ranchers.

When George Bush Jr claims to be a cattleman,

when he uses that cowboy vernacular, usurps that cowboy image,

he's actually resorting to the most predictable of Texas class distinctions

cos big swinging dick Texans don't buy Ferraris or yachts.

What the hell are they going to do with a yacht in Texas?

No, they spread out their insecurities

over 200,000 acres of land and they put some toy cattle on it,

and they have created an instant distinguished genealogy

and a connection to the past and a hell of a photo op.

It is the most disgusting kind of sentimentality

cos it has nothing to do with real ranching.

Why don't we ask George Bush Jr or Ted Turner if they've ever

stood in a barn at three in the morning in January,

knee-deep in placenta,

with their elbows shoved up the impacted uterus of some brood cow.

Or slapped patches of Levi's jeans, using Krazy Glue, onto the eye of

a cow with pinkeye while the mamma's three feet away wanting to kill you

because basically you're putting superglue onto a calf.

I can tell you from experience, there's a huge difference between

being a rancher and owning a ranch.

The seat of Texas manhood is, and always will be, in the saddle.

That might be its greatest or its worst distraction,

its obsession with symbolic frontiersmanship.

Its riders, intellectuals, ranchers, oilmen, politicians

and musicians share that core ideal, to perpetuate symbolism.

They'll never give up on being cowboys.

Early cowboys were riders first and last.

They were broken in body, twisted in spirit.

They worked the trail for four months,

got paid 40 at the end of it,

burned all their clothes, blew the 40 and started again.

They were bruised by debt, loneliness, failure,

disease and untimely death, one of the most tragic figures imaginable.

Out of tragedy comes pathos. Pathos transcends to martyrdom.

Martyrdom creates heroism.

And that is how Texas will forever see itself.

If you believe the stereotypes, Texans are loud.

Many of them possess bulbous features, but they are vigorous,

so on the surface they're pretty much like the Irish.

The difference, of course, is in what lies underneath the surface.

In Ireland it's potatoes.

In Texas it's petroleum.

The discovery of oil not only changed Texas for ever,

but changed the destiny of the entire world.

Texas was about to give us a new stereotype,

the Stetson-wearing, loudmouth, cigar-smoking oil baron.

'Just beyond Beaumont is this obelisk honouring Spindletop,

'the first producing oil well drilled in the state.

'Here on January 10, 1901,

'black gold gushed from the reserves of Texas.

'The beginning of a tremendous oil empire.'

In the early part of the 20th century, oil was just a nuisance.

It got in the way of farmers who were drilling for water,

stank up the marshes of East Texas.

Spanish explorers had used it to waterproof their boots.

Snake oil salesmen sold it to cure indigestion.

As far as refining oil - ah, hell, that was something

they did way up in Pennsylvania, not here in Beaumont.

But a one-armed ex-juvenile delinquent born-again Christian

named Patillo "Bud" Higgins had spent some time in Pennsylvania,

saw that oil was a fledgling industry

and he remembered a 15 foot high mound on the outskirts of his town.

The residents of Beaumont had concluded it was just a salt dome

because it was covered in salt.

But Patillo "Bud" Higgins believed that underneath that salt was oil.

Higgins had no formal understanding of geology,

in fact he quit school at the age of 12.

But for some insane reason, he envisioned all of Texas running on kerosene lamps,

never mind that Edison's incandescent bulbs were already lighting up cities back East.

In 1892 Higgins wrangled a cheap lease on the salt dome

and convinced a water-well driller to sink a drill bit into the earth.

Well, they hit salt and quicksand,

so Higgins found some more investors.

They drilled, they hit salt and quicksand.

For nine years Higgins kept poking holes into his stupid hill,

running out of money and then convincing various rubes they should invest in his project.

Finally, at the end of 1900, in a last-ditch desperation attempt,

Higgins took out an ad in a national magazine to lure more drillers.

One person answered the ad.

A Croatian salt miner named Anthony Lucas.

Lucas had once been a captain in the Austro-Hungarian Navy

but somehow he'd ended up mining salt in Louisiana.

Lucas arrived in Beaumont

and Higgins more or less turned the entire project over to him.

In Pennsylvania, up to this time, if oil was found it was usually around 50 feet,

but Texans don't generally do things half-assed,

Lucas and his team drilled to over 1,000 feet.

The drillers that were on that rig,

they had to solve so many problems to bring that well in.

There were layers of quicksand, layers of rock, layers of quicksand

and even so, you had to have new ways to get through the quicksand

because nobody had dealt with that

so they developed ways to do all of that.

Those were very creative men.

And then on January 10, 1901,

as two of Lucas's hired hands pulled up a drill to replace a broken bit,

the ground suddenly began to shake.

The first drilling mud bubbled up out of the hole

and just shot into the sky,

followed by rocks and then the rotten-egg smell of natural gas,

then the drill casing itself.

1,100 feet of pipe just hurtled straight up into the sky

and slammed down like a javelin.

They come out and they start cleaning everything up.

It's mud, it's water, it is not oil

and the rig just starts shaking again.

And the youngest one of those drillers was a fellow named Al Hammill.

He went over and looked down the hole and he could see the oil.

I walked over and looked down the hole there

and there this frothy oil was starting up.

It was just breathing like, you know,

coming up and sinking back with the gas pressure

and each flow a little higher, a little higher, a little higher.

What shot out of that hole next would change Texas

and the world for ever.

That's right.

Water!

Not water, oil, this is just a cheap recreation.

It was the future.

Cars, locomotives, jetliners, and barbecues and lawn mowers.

And tankers and shady wheelings and dealings with sheiks

and tyrants and dictators and presidents.

It came up in a huge gusher and it covered everything.

And Lucas was downtown, someone called him,

and he said, "What is it? What is it?"

And they said, "Captain, it's oil."

And it kept coming out of the ground for almost ten full days

and it's too much.

No-one had ever seen a gusher like Spindletop.

Higgins had hoped he might get 50 barrels a day from the dome.

It shot out more oil than all the wells in America and Russia combined.

By the time it was brought under control and capped nine days later

it had created a 38 million gallon lake of oil.

It was too crude to be refined into kerosene but it made fine fuel oil.

That is what changed the world.

It was a quantum leap.

Nobody had ever seen oil in that quantity

and it just burst upon the scene,

January 10, 1901, and nobody knew what to do with it.

And the only way you are going to make money out of that oil

was you have to figure out new ways to use it.

So it set off this creative...energy, I guess would be a good word for it,

and people started looking for ways to use it,

otherwise everyone is going to go broke.

When Spindletop came in in 1901, there were 3,000 cars in the US

and 131 miles of paved road.

There was one train belonging to the Santa Fe Railroad that ran on oil.

Within five years, every train in America ran on oil.

The navies of Germany, Britain, and the US, had converted their ships to oil.

There were 50,000 cars on the road and there was no turning back.

It redefined our way of life

and we do say that it changed the course of world history.

It made us veer real sharply in a new direction.

Overnight, the mosquito-infested backwater of Beaumont

turned into a boom town, an orgy of mud, blood, speculators,

hookers, pimps, thieves, dreamers and schemers.

It went from a population of 9,000

to over 50,000 practically overnight.

Charlatans, conmen, legitimate oil men came in, of course,

but you had saloon keepers, streetwalkers.

We had a boy with X-ray eyes who advertised

that he could look into the ground and see oil under there,

and actually he did find one well

and then he decided that he'd better stop because he shouldn't abuse such a gift!

It redefined Texas in terms of big oil

because many more fields were discovered after Spindletop.

That was just the beginning.

Everybody got the oil fever and they just began exploring.

# Striking oil is easier than spitting here in Texas

# Oil comes up no matter where you plan

# But I'll bet you never caught a Texan... #

Call it petroleum, black gold, Texas tea,

dinosaur juice, for the most part it was still snake oil.

Texans knew one thing about oil -

how to get it out of the ground.

They didn't have the money, the equipment to refine or transport it,

so that's when all the pilferers and plunderers

and petrol profiteers of Pennsylvania showed up

like carpetbaggers of yore.

They laid pipe, they put up storage facilities,

they sucked up leases and they generally fleeced Beaumont

for everything they could get their hands on.

They gave themselves epic names like the Sun Oil Company,

the Texas Oil Company, Gulf Oil -

just to let these backward yahoos know who meant business.

One company took the ironic approach,

called themselves the Humble Oil Company.

Later they would change their name to Exxon.

The Spindletop discovery started an oil fever

that spread through Texas.

The state was overrun with people looking to make a fortune.

Oil seemed to be everywhere.

Spindletop brought the first huge diversification of the economy.

Because, as the oil industry grew, ultimately by the 1930s

it would generate more money than agribusiness.

Millions of dollars worth of oil were being popped out of the ground every year.

It was there for anyone to take.

Imagine for a second growing up as a young man in Texas in the early 1900s.

There was no culture, no academia,

school is just a place you sit in until it is time to find a job.

The rest of America is expanding and industrialising

but all Texas has going for it is it's big and it's full of oil.

Many of these entrepreneurial young men became wildcatters.

They were true independents, speculators,

prepared to borrow a fortune from the bank

and then risk it all drilling for oil on nothing more than a hunch.

There has to be that sense of adventure.

If it's missing, you don't want to go into oil.

You could lose your shirt drilling for oil

and more oilmen failed than succeeded

because of the extremely high risk,

particularly before science could do much to limit risk.

And even then you could lose money on the economics of it.

You might find it, but you wouldn't get your money back.

When you're dealing with Mother Earth,

you don't know what she's going to do,

or what curve she's going to throw at you.

A lot of the wildcatters didn't care if they got rich or not.

What they wanted was to find oil.

The search was the interesting part for so many of those men - and some women.

Nowadays the most popular poker game in the world is Texas Hold'em.

The players are dealt only two cards,

then they bet on five communal cards.

Everyone knows what's on the table.

The winner is the one who can make the most of the paltry hand he's been dealt.

With the right amount of bullshit,

you can draw some people in and scare other people away.

All in.

And that is what the Texas oil business was in the 1900s,

one giant game of Texas Hold'em.

Bluster and bullshit,

jackpot or bust, winner go home.

It wasn't hard making a fortune.

It was hard keeping a fortune.

Call.

All in.

Dead man's hand - eights and aces.

How about three Kings?

One of these young men figured out something very quickly,

you didn't need a drill to poke holes in Texas,

you just needed a fountain pen.

Any fellow with an outgoing nature and a bit of savvy

could talk some weather-beaten rancher or a lonely old widow into

signing an oil lease on their property in exchange for

a percentage of vast imagined wealth right underneath the soil.

Leases were the currency, the Monopoly money of the oil business.

They were traded on muddy backstreets amongst grimy oilmen,

hucksters and flimflam artists.

They were won and lost in poker games.

Their values rose and fell on nothing more than speculation or rumour.

It wasn't hard to get a mineral lease,

particularly during the 1930s

because farmers were in such tough shape during the depression.

The lease was signed and ordinarily there was a bonus paid at the time.

Then the lease contained clauses relating to

how the owner of the minerals would be repaid for every barrel of oil

and how often he'd be paid and that kind of thing.

That looked awfully good to farmers, anywhere in Texas, to ranchers too.

Probably only one in 1,000 leases ever led to drilling.

Only one in 100 drillings ever produced oil

but when a well did come in, boom!

Shak-a-lacka! Kerching!

It fuelled another flurry of trading and speculation.

These early day wildcatters were go-for-broke.

Any one of them would have pissed in the Bacardi Breezer of

your modern-day dotcom or hedge-fund cowboy who imagines himself

to be a rogue and a risk-taker.

Thank God I live now and not then because I surely would have

gotten into this myself and I probably would have lost my shirt.

And did it pay off for many?

Yeah, it sure did.

So, if Texans appear to be reckless and arrogant, it's all

because of that communal stuff that shot out of the ground in 1901.

I should have recognised you from that painting.

The caricature of the Texas oilman quickly evolved.

He was a suave, Stetsoned maverick, sipping bourbon

and revelling in the adrenaline of the game itself.

Have you never heard of a wheeler dealer?

He is a fellow who borrows millions, makes millions, spends millions.

The wheeler dealer never loses but...

Taxman loses.

He usually does on a Henry Tyroone deal.

You have got me all wrong.

You don't go wheeling and dealing for money, you do it for fun.

Money is just the way you keep score.

Or a high-rolling, white Stetsoned dimwit with no

sense of anything except how to spend his money.

Say now, Henry, whatever it is you are onto, I'll take a fourth of it.

And I'll take an eighth.

I'll see your eighth and I'll raise your fourth.

The wheeler dealers and their hilarious wheeler dealer friends,

Phil Harris and Chill Wills.

Let's high ball it to New York.

Yee-ha!

In truth, quite a few oilmen did fit this stereotype.

The danger lay in the fact that with money comes influence.

If Texas were ever to erect a Mount Rushmore of oilmen,

it would consist of these four men.

Roy Cullen, HL Hunt, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson

all, at one time or another, were the richest men in Texas

with a combined wealth running into the billions.

Their lives constitute

a kind of petroleum-based Lord Of The Rings.

Starting out in the filthy oilfields, their power stretched

to every aspect of American business and politics.

Directly or indirectly, they put two Texans in the White House and,

if you choose to buy into the conspiracy, removed one.

They invented the Dallas Cowboys, the Astrodome and the Super Bowl.

They were spectacular philanthropists,

cut-throat poker players,

mush-mouthed aristocrats,

hayseed Richard IIIs,

shit-kickers with dust on their lizard-skin boots,

doling out pulled pork barbecue to the minions.

They transformed Texas' economy into one of the richest in the world.

Not one of them ever went to college.

Three of them never got past the sixth grade.

Their idea of refinement was to accumulate lots and lots of shit

and show it off to the world. They were the Kanye West of their day.

And, much like Kanye West,

the president thought they were a bunch of jackasses.

So they responded by having the president killed.

At least, that's what some people believe.

The death of JFK brought an evil new dimension to the Texas men.

It began in the minds of conspiracy freaks

and underground writers

and a counterculture suspicious of all things corporate and powerful.

According to some people,

the oilmen had Vice President Lyndon B Johnson in their pocket.

There is a story that the night before JFK's assassination,

Murchison hosted a party.

Johnson attended and, on leaving, apparently said these words,

"After tomorrow, those SOBs will never embarrass me again.

"That's no threat. That's a promise."

The idea that a cabal of nefarious tycoons

could assassinate a president and plot a right-wing takeover?

Just an idea too juicy not to take hold of the imagination.

At this point in time,

can you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald

killed present John F Kennedy by himself?

Don't make your decision until you see Executive Action.

In the last two years, the Secret Service has

established 149 threats against Kennedy's life in Texas alone.

Yet they sent him into hostile territory with no more

protection than you or I would arrange for a favourite dog.

Two terms for JFK, two for Bobby and two for Ted.

Which makes action now imperative.

-What kind of action?

-Executive.

I'll take it from here, Bob.

The Texas oilman might be dumber than a bag of wet mice

but now he was a right-wing nut job,

intent on taking over the world or, even worse, destroying it.

Well, boys, I reckon this is it.

Nuclear combat, toe-to-toe with the Ruskies.

HE SHRIEKS

Of course, not everyone buys into that theory.

These guys are all over the map in terms of their

political affinities and their loyalties.

I think Cullen would have had a lot of trouble supporting

Lyndon Johnson, frankly.

And I don't think he would have been at all happy to

think of Johnson in the White House.

The only one of the big four I'd really say almost certainly

would have liked to have seen that would have been Richardson

but he died before it happened.

I think they have got the spotlight on the wrong area there.

..and asking the people of Texas to put their confidence

in the Democratic Party once again.

Essentially, no-one will ever really know

if these oil barons helped facilitate JFK's death.

We stand for the things in which...

But it has left a big stain on the reputation of the Lone Star state.

..yes to the future.

There are times that the history of this state

leaves a great deal to be desired.

I was in Europe right after the Kennedy assassination

and, oh, Lord, you didn't want to say

that you had been anywhere near this place.

And I'm...

I was horrified too. Just horrified.

We stand for the things in which they have always believed.

And I believe, in 1960, they're going to say, "Yes," to the future.

They're going to say, "Yes," and put their confidence in our party.

The simple trickle-down economic truth was that,

by the middle of the last century,

Texas was cash-rich but impoverished in every other way.

Like generations before them,

they had grown up surrounded by raw nature, hardship, deprivation.

No-one ever got rich quick selling cattle.

Oil changed all that.

But the transition was too much for Texans to take.

They had always expected the wrong things of money, thinking

if they just spent unstintingly they could overcome intellectual

or sexual poverty.

So they went to town. Yee-ha.

Just waving munificence and seeking desperately for that one single

purchase that would seal their value in the eyes of the world.

MUSIC: "Breakfast In America" by Supertramp

# Mummy, dear, Mummy, dear

# They've got to have 'em in Texas

# Cos everyone's a millionaire... #

New Cadillacs, ranch-style houses, wall-to-wall carpet,

shiny appliances, cowhide furniture,

steer horn chandeliers, cow poke bric-a-brac.

Everything big and gaudy, everything Texas-sized.

People in Texas like to brag that in Texas you can get in your car and

drive and drive and three days later you're still driving through Texas.

The proper response to that statement is to reply,

"Yeah, I had a piece of shit car like that myself once."

The ultimate stereotype of the raw, hard-living, bourbon-swilling,

fist-fighting Texas cash-tosser was Diamond Glenn McCarthy.

No other oilman rocketed into the public's imagination like him.

He was the Texas id embodied in one man.

An Errol Flynn knock-off,

rubbing elbows with Howard Hughes and Hollywood stars,

brawling, drinking and gambling his way from Buffalo Bayou

all the way to Sunset Boulevard.

When he wasn't drilling,

he liked to tool around in his private plane

or his four-wheel Jeep,

shooting rattlesnakes and armadillos with a Colt 45.

Yep, the man exuded pure class.

Mr McCarthy belongs to a breed known as the Texas oil millionaires,

almost all of whom were poor wildcatters before

they struck it rich in oil.

I was 26 years old and I made a million and a half dollars.

By the time he was 33,

he was thought to have been worth 300 million.

That's three quarters of a billion in today's currency.

And, like most men with gargantuan egos, he decided to create

a legacy for himself - his own Taj Mahal, his own Eiffel Tower.

Probably no hostelry has become so famous in such a brief period

as Houston's fabulous Shamrock Hotel.

McCarthy's hotel took three years to build and cost him 21 million.

It opened on St Patrick's Day 1949

and it was decadent in every way imaginable.

It was to have a two-storey lobby covered in emeralds,

a five-storey parking garage,

the largest theatre in all of the southwest and a swimming pool

with green-coloured water big enough for water skiing.

He wanted to have the biggest hotel in town partly

because that was a challenge to the Houston establishment.

It's a mentality with him, I think, not economic practicality.

He also had a roughly life-size oil painting of himself

put by the downstairs elevator.

For its gala opening night, Glenn McCarthy hired

both a Santa Fe railroad train

and a charter plane to bring in stars from Hollywood.

Dorothy Lamour was there as hostess.

So was Robert Ryan, Kirk Douglas, Errol Flynn, Ginger Rogers,

Lou Costello, Stan Laurel,

Edgar Bergen and his wooden puppet Charlie McCarthy,

no relation to Glenn.

It was all Klieg lights and taffeta, dripping diamonds and mink stoles.

There were 10,000 onlookers lining the streets, trying to get

a glimpse of Hollywood and Texas royalty.

The festivities began

when a drunken cowboy actor named Red Barry

yanked the shoe off of an oil baroness named Anne Justice

and began drinking champagne from it.

NBC radio was there, broadcasting it throughout the nation.

When Dorothy Lamour stepped up to the mic at precisely 8:30 PM

to begin the broadcast, 3,000 tipsy Texans started braying

and wolf whistling and nobody listening on the radio could

understand a single thing that Dorothy Lamour said.

Then a broadcast technician interrupted transmission and

uttered the only intelligible thing that anyone at home could hear.

His words were, "They're fucking it up!"

The NBC broadcast broke down and went off the air.

The next day, in the eyes of the world, Texas had arrived.

MUSIC: "Mr Big Stuff" by Jean Knight

# Tell me, who do you think you are?

# Mr Big Stuff... #

McCarthy managed to keep the hotel running for five years.

Not once was it ever full.

In 1954, it was seized by insurers and given to the Hilton hotel chain.

In 1984, the greatest hotel ever built in America was donated

to the Texas Medical Centre.

And then they knocked it down.

# Mr Big Stuff

# You're never gonna get my love. #

Well, I didn't have any old friends in the oil business.

When McCarthy died,

obituaries went out of their way to describe the man as charismatic,

flamboyant, charming, unabashed - characteristics that

presumably disappeared when they stuck him in front of a TV camera.

When newsman Mike Wallace interviewed him in 1957,

McCarthy was slightly more animated than the smoke

drifting out of Wallace's cigarette.

All right, Glenn, as far as mixing between White and Negro,

you are against it.

You've said you just can't breed a prize bull with a scrub heifer.

And you've said it frequently. What do you mean by that?

Well...

It could be a long explanation.

Why?

To try to explain what you mean by that. You...

When you...try to raise registered cattle,

you attempt to put registered bulls with registered heifers.

Are you suggesting that the White is a prize bull

and the Negro is a scrub heifer?

I'm not saying it in that way. I don't believe...

'He was kind of deflated in terms of his prominence

'by the time Wallace interviewed him.'

He had really long since tired out the establishment in Houston.

Again, his boisterous quality and flamboyance

and his tendency to show up and be loud in the wrong places

at the wrong times - he had worn out his welcome, I think.

How a monosyllabic, racist oil-lionaire

who somehow confuses integration with cattle breeding

ever managed to magnify himself in the eyes of the world

is pure Texas mystique.

That's always been Texas' best PR stunt - mythologising itself.

Larger-than-life characters make Texas larger than life.

Now greatness returns to the screen.

Glenn McCarthy's most lasting imprint would never be a hotel,

it would be the fictionalisation of his persona.

The 1956 film Giant, directed by George Stevens,

based on the Edna Ferber Novel,

modelled its protagonist Jett Rink on Glenn McCarthy.

Rink, played by James Dean,

is a hired hand on a cattle ranch run by Bick Benedict and his wife,

played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.

In the film, the class delineations couldn't be more obvious,

more black and white.

It's almost as if the film was written by a British person.

When his tiny plot of land produces a wildcat strike,

Rink's fortunes change instantly.

James Dean is full of coarse animal vitality.

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor are stalwarts of Texas ennui.

That sure is a beautiful animal.

Beautiful.

Because Hudson's character

Bick Benedict is clearly based on the patriarchs

of the King Ranch and Jett Rink is based on the wildcatter McCarthy,

in one single scene we get to see the transition

of old cattle Texas to new petro-Texas.

The contrast couldn't be more obvious.

My, you sure do look pretty, Miss Lynnton.

You always did look pretty.

Just as pretty now. Good enough to eat.

Oh, you're testy, Bick.

Testy as an old kook.

If nothing else,

that scene emphasises why wealthy Texans seem to prefer white.

Because it disassociates them from the filthy enterprise that

made them rich in the first place.

If the film had ended right there,

it would have made a very succinct point.

Instead, it goes on for a couple more hours,

charting this interminable curve of family dysfunction

that would eventually spawn night-time bombastic soap operas

like Dallas and Dynasty.

"Dye-nasty." Not "Dinasty."

Dynasty.

Jett Rink becomes rich overnight

and then turns into a lonely, drunken shell of a man.

The Benedicts grow old

and eventually learn something about dignity

when Bick Benedict comes to the aid of some Mexicans who are being

treated unfairly by a diner owner.

You too.

Hold on a minute.

He never stood so tall as when he crawled.

The film consists of lots of fistfights

and dusty Texas vistas and James Dean leaving method pauses

between his lines that would have given Harold Pinter time

to go out to the kitchen and make himself a sandwich.

I'm going to tell my husband I've met with your approval.

Well, now...

I wouldn't do that.

No, I...

Remember, in Hollywood,

the term epic is always a euphemism for turgid.

In the second half of the film,

when Liz and Rock and James are supposed to look aged,

it would appear as though George Stevens

had hired a gay, colour-blind, Kabuki make-up artist.

Liz and Rock have blue hair

and age lines painted on with a grease pencil.

James Dean appears to have been spatula-ed

and bears an uncanny resemblance to George Bush Junior.

Realising this was what he was going to look like later in life,

James Dean opted to go out and die in a car crash

right after the filming.

Texans, of course, were outraged

by the portrayal of themselves in cinema.

The rest of the nation lapped it up

and gave Stevens an Oscar for best director.

The movie Giant probably sums it up for me.

-I would agree with Edna Ferber or the Yankees on that one.

-Really?

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of Texans don't think so, they think it is simplistic.

But it is a movie. But it's...

There is a movie that will affect you, like Doctor Zhivago,

which will...

You know, I mean... Or Scarface.

-I mean, you walk out of there, you are in another time.

-Yeah.

It just kind of went on a bit. It kind of really got...

-Well, it's a big, epic story.

-Yeah, but she...

-Edna Ferber.

-But what did people in Texas think of Edna Ferber?

-They don't like her.

They think that, you know...

-She was a big, highbrow New Yorker coming down...

-Maybe.

Nonetheless, she was able to write...

It went from paper right to James Dean and got it right.

And the scene in Sarge's cafe there is fucking... You don't beat that.

That's a great scene.

Plus the song The Yellow Rose Of Texas is almost impossible to top.

-It's just a great song.

-Yeah.

# There's a yellow rose in Texas that I am going to see

# Nobody else could... #

The history of Texas is almost entirely male-dominated.

In fact, if you were to google "notable women of Texas" or,

more specifically, "singular ladies of Texas", guess who comes up first.

That's right, Beyonce.

Of the 417 Texas women listed as notable, 287 are actresses,

111 are singers

and only 19 are listed as activists,

philanthropists, first ladies or criminals.

An old saying about Texas - it's hell on horses and women.

You don't have to look far below the surface to figure that

a place founded by itinerant soldiers of fortune,

mythologised by drifting cowboys and fattened by wildcatters and

good ol' boy type tycoons might just be a little bit sexually repressed.

You know, there are only two things more beautiful than a good gun -

a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.

You ever had a good Swiss watch?

From the first women who arrived here and for generations

afterwards, Texas was never going to be an easy place.

Men who expressed themselves with their work found it very hard

to relate to women. They were mutually frightened of each other.

The Texan's code prepared him

to think of women not as they really were, but as some

naive idealisation to which they could never conform.

This shakes a man's confidence and accounts for a lot of his riding off

into the sunset on a horse or behind the wheel of a Cadillac.

This sense of estrangement was captured perfectly by

Peter Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show,

probably one of the greatest films ever made about Texas.

Anarene, Texas, 1951. Nothing much has changed.

The film uses the closing of the town's only movie theatre

as a motif to symbolise the changes

that were happening to Texas in the 1950s.

The theatre is owned by Sam the Lion played by Ben Johnson.

I heard about the ball game last night. 121 to 14.

He is just about the only self-sufficient

and self-satisfied man in town.

I'm not sorry for you.

The rest of the town is infected by a general malaise.

Basically, the only thing that reminds anyone they're alive

is infidelity.

-What do you think he'd do if he found us?

-Shoot us, probably.

But, Mama, it's a sin, isn't it, unless you're married?

-You know I wouldn't do that.

-Don't be so mealy-mouthed.

In Anarene, the nourishing myth of the West

is just blowing away in the dust.

Against this backdrop, we meet two high school seniors named Sonny

and Duane who both fall in love with

a calculating high school beauty queen named Jacy

who, for lack of anything better to do,

manipulates just about every boy in town.

Oh, quit prissing. I don't think you did it right anyway.

I'll stay with her all night one of these nights too. She done promised.

-You won't either.

-Yes, I will. Why shouldn't I?

In the end, Sonny has an unresolved affair with the coach's wife

and Duane goes off to fight in Korea.

There are two deaths in the film and no babies are born.

We're left to think of Anarene as some half-remembered

backdrop from an old movie set.

The film is a stunning portrait of a small town

reeling from the furious transition that has always been part of Texas.

You wouldn't believe how this country has changed.

I reckon the reason why I always drag you out here is probably

I'm just as sentimental as the next feller when it comes to old times.

Old times.

In Hud, another film based on a Larry McMurtry novel, Paul Newman

plays a small-town Texan, angry at the world changing around him.

He wants to be a gunfighter but there is no-one left to fight

so he drives around town in a big Cadillac getting into brawls

and having affairs with women,

using the only seduction technique that he understands.

Don't you ever ask?

Honey, the only question I ever ask any woman is what time

is your husband coming home?

Hud is a lost man in the changing West.

This is most notable in his prize possession - a Cadillac, a machine.

Old Texans related to horses

and a horse was something you had to depend on.

But poor Hud is resigned to parading around town with a status

symbol - a car he can barely afford,

but the only thing that separates him from anyone else in town.

In Texas, sex and money are generally interchangeable topics.

Naturally, if you combine these two potent elements,

you come up with the ultimate Texas caricature - the uber-Texan,

the Texan we all think of if we think of Texas at all.

And that man, of course, is JR Ewing.

Oh, don't be too sanctimonious... Rudolph Millington.

The lady and I were together.

The lady and I are in love.

Say, do you have a young man named Rudolph Millington working for you?

Well, I hate to be the one to tell you

but he has got no character at all.

I'm afraid you are out of a job, Mr Millington.

Hold it right there, Rich.

Are you actually trying to tell us that a vindictive, one-dimensional,

crude, sexually dysfunctional star of some cheesy night-time

soap opera is actually the ultimate representation

of the modern Texas man?

That's exactly what I'm saying.

JR Ewing is the metamorphosis from cowboy to urbanite.

Oh, he uses a chequebook instead of a handgun,

drives a Cadillac instead of a horse, but underneath is the same

frustrated, ambivalent, emasculated Texas guy.

The Western has never been a responsible genre.

It took JR Ewing to step the Texan's image down

from myth and romance - a load of old bullshit -

to caricature - a new level of bullshit.

But at least it knew it was being ironic.

Dallas has always been a town that celebrates wealth

and ostentation over culture.

Those who live there are downright suspicious of anyone whose

politics are not like their own.

MUSIC: "T for Texas" by Johnny Cash

# T for Texas

# T for Tennessee... #

But the true political heart of Texas isn't in Dallas.

It's 200 miles south in Austin.

# ..T for Thelma

# The gal that made a wreck out of me. #

Texas likes to think of itself as the big wide open

but 80% of it is urban.

60% of those people live

in the triangle between San Antonio, Houston and Dallas.

Still, it practises an empty state kind of politics.

In other words, we don't need your help, Mr Federal Government,

cos we have big hats.

It leads the nation in petroleum, agriculture, natural gas, chemicals.

It is last in health care.

It has the highest unwanted pregnancy rate in America

but schools don't teach sex education, they teach abstinence.

This is the mandate of Governor Rick Perry,

the immaculately coiffed Republican from Big Springs, Texas,

who likes to name his cowboy boots.

The one on the left is called Freedom.

The right one is called Liberty.

And he announced to the nation in 2012 that

God had told him to run for president.

Perry failed to get the presidential nomination which,

if nothing else, proves that God's advice is not always that sage.

Which comes a little too late for Abraham.

However, on the subject of sexual abstinence, Perry is focused

and succinct to the point of denying his own existence.

-Abstinence works.

-But we are the third highest teen pregnancy...

We have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all

states in the country.

The questioner's point is it doesn't seem to be working.

I'm just going to tell you from...

I'm going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works.

'I ran against Rick in 2006. I ran as an independent for governor.'

People were very worried about me being a comedian,

about having a clown in the governor's mansion at the time

and now I think they realise we've had one for the past 12 years -

Rick Perry.

The Aggies and the women are all telling Rick Perry jokes, you know?

I mean, it's... In the whole state,

there's not one young person that wants to grow up to be Rick Perry.

Still my definition of politics holds.

Poly means more than one and ticks are blood-sucking parasites.

Whatever you think of his policies, the fact is

the people of Texas keep voting for Rick Perry to run their state.

God knows why.

# Oh, say can you see

# By the dawn's early light. #

Sometimes you get the sense that for all its outward optimism,

Texans cling far too much to their memories.

They can't help but believe that maybe yesterday was better

than anything the future can offer.

And no nostalgic notion of Texas is more dramatically packaged

than gridiron football.

Certainly it isn't necessary to remind football fans that the annual

Cotton Bowl game is one of the great sports classics of the year.

NFL and college football has always been a big pull.

They can draw upwards of 80,000 fans to their games

and they all manage to behave themselves immaculately.

And through it all, the crowd, though definitely partisan,

plays the role of the sportsman to the visiting team.

But only in Texas does this obsession extend to high school.

The phenomenon known as Friday Night Lights.

If that sounds vaguely extraterrestrial,

it's because it is.

If you were to fly over Texas on a Friday night in the autumn

you would see an amazing luminescence.

Thousands of football stadiums, lit up, full of students, CEOs,

hairdressers, dry cleaners, ministers,

even future presidents, all sitting in the stands

watching 16-year-old kids try to kill each other.