IF you were born after 1975, the news that an actor called Larry Hagman is reprising his role as a scheming oil baron called J R Ewing will mean as much to you as the 1972 Equal Opportunities Act means to Andy Gray.

You won’t understand why the fact that Hagman is to be accompanied by actors Linda Gray and Patrick Duffy is so significant, or that the plot will concentrate on the younger Ewing generations.

But what if you were one of the 83 million – yes, you read it correctly – adoring viewers who feverishly tuned in every week to see the latest installment of the Ewings’ doings? Then the news that US TV channel TNT is remaking Dallas – with many of the original cast – is sweet indeed.

Yes, the plots were ridiculous – remember the injured Pammie lying there like an extra from The Mummy, and Bobby’s “it was all a dream” death?

Remember the way in which the entire Ewing clan was forced to eat breakfast every day sitting outside in the gale force winds which whipped their hair into their mouths as they spoke? But that didn’t stop the show from becoming cult viewing – and no wonder.

The hair! (Bouffant). The clothes! (Giant shoulder pads). The setting! (The fabled Southfork Ranch, now a conference centre.) And then, of course, there were the characters: evil JR Ewing and his inebriated wife, Sue-Ellen, along with JR’s younger brother Bobby Ewing, who married Pammie, daughter of Digger Barnes, who was JR’s dad’s original business partner and sworn enemy, all living in the same house, presided over by away-with-the-fairies matriarch Miss Ellie.

It was pure TV gold, encapsulating everything about the era in which it was made: the Reaganomics, the Big Bang and rampant consumerism.

And it was different. For most Brits, soaps meant Coronation Street, the everyday story of rain-sodden, northern-dwelling folk who were more interested in the price of a bag of coal than a barrel of oil.

But in Dallas, the sun shone. They had a swimming pool. And nice clothes. And every so often, usually when the writers couldn’t think of anything else to do, the glamour of the Oil Barons’ Ball.

One of the reasons Dallas took off here was because Terry Wogan mocked it unmercifully during his breakfast radio show, pointing out the anomalous nature of much of the story, dubbing character Lucy “the Poison Dwarf” and, like millions worldwide, speculating on who shot JR Ewing.

But for its fans all this nonsense was half the fun and the stats speak for themselves.

Dallas ran from 1978 to 1991 and was translated into 67 languages.

It comfortably made it into Time magazine’s top 10 shows of all time and JR’s 10-gallon hat sits in the Smithsonian Museum as a US icon.

And can 360 million people – the number who watched the Who Shot JR? episode – really?