Recycled Gold

It started innocently enough. A pal from grade school blew into town to check out my new kid and, during her visit, turned my husband and me on to “Personal FX: The Collectibles Show.”

She’d always been a TV junkie, but her tastes had matured to include this warm and fuzzy folksy morning program on which volunteer appraisers price people’s collectibles and allow them a chance to sell their wares at the end of the hour. After one show, I was hooked.

The hosts, soothing-voiced Claire Carter and the wry John Burke, made me feel good about all the junk lying around our house. The vintage ‘50s lemonade set we’d scored for a song at a West Covina thrift shop was worth 40 bucks. My husband’s cast-iron motorcycle man--purchased cheap in a Waikiki slum--could fetch a cool $650.

I started adding it all up and realized that, if we ever got in a pinch, we could sell all our scavenged possessions and live off the cash--for about two weeks.

I kept watching anyway.

The TV had never been on in the daytime before but, because I had a young mouth to feed, I was forced to take regular tube breaks. Only other nursing mothers will appreciate this, but once you have your kid positioned, it never fails: The remote is lying across the room. So when my hour of junk-shop revelry was over, I was still locked onto the FX channel, and there wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it.

Then one day, something remarkable happened. Kim Basinger walked into the picture. Popping up in an episode of “Vega$” (which follows “The Collectibles” at 10 a.m.) as a bad girl who “always moved the stones” for a couple of no-good jewel thieves, the actress had me riveted: Only Basinger could make the era’s dreaded earth-tone leisure wear look feasible.

In awe, I kept watching. Sure enough, in no time Tommy Lasorda showed up, playing a round of poker with that smarmy Jonathan Hart on “Hart to Hart.” Before I knew it, a pre-nose job Ron Palillo--a.k.a. Arnold Horshack--stalked Timothy Busfield’s punk-rock girlfriend on “Trapper John, M.D.” and, by the end of the program, both Bill Paxton and Wesley Snipes had learned to play by Crockett’s and Tubb’s rules on “Miami Vice.” True to form, this did not make Lt. Castillo happy. In fact, nothing did.

I’d stumbled on something quite fabulous. There’s gold in cable. Gold in the form of major celebrities in wicked era-specific fashions, either starring or making guest appearances in the TV genre known only by its Latin term, Rerunnis americanus.

Although this phenomenon has been going on for years on such outlets as Nickelodeon’s Nick at Night, how many more reruns of “Happy Days,” “I Love Lucy” or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” can you watch?

FX, a channel owned jointly by Liberty Media and News Corp., wisely owes its bread and butter to our more recent trash past. Zeroing in on an interesting and not-yet-played-out piece of the American TV pie--somewhere between the disco era and the demise of Donald Trump as socially relevant--FX offers more mining satisfaction.

Dan Tanna’s “Vega$” world of showgirl-assistants and the crimes they help solve proves quite intriguing. Not only is Tony Curtis playing the role he was born to play, a tacky casino owner, it’s also intriguing to view vintage Aaron Spelling (he co-produced) and bad ‘70s hair and fashion simultaneously.

It’s also amusing watching Robert Urich jet around in his cherry T-Bird, while the ditsy Judy Landers sends out red-alert reminders of why we don’t ever want to go there again. Skin tight disco pants and teetering spike heels really look good only on Barbie, or Basinger. Although Tanna was ready to throw it all away for Basinger’s character, she couldn’t change her bad-girl ways and disappeared after one episode.

There was nothing, however, in her desert stint to be ashamed of. The same can’t be said for Liam Neeson, whose guest shot as an IRA rebel on “Miami Vice” had him ambling down the coast in a--are you ready for this?--vest without a shirt underneath.

That was the ultimate sin in a show filled with mid-’80s fashion don’ts. We can forgive Don Johnson his spiked-up faux wind-blown hair, still popular in many parts of the South, and we can forgive him the sock-free espadrilles--it was Miami, for crying out loud. But Neeson’s character commits one blunder after the other. Somehow, he manages to woo Det. Calabrese while wearing a shoulder-padded jacket with an atom-splitting design that’s straight out of a Nagel painting.

Oh, well, this was the ‘80s. By far, “Miami Vice” has the best line-up of guest stars. You can catch Helena Bonhan Carter playing a junkie doctor who breaks Crockett’s heart by overdosing.

And you don’t always need a credible plot in order to have a good time. For the life of me, I’ll never understand the premises of two FX highlights, “The Fall Guy” and “The A-Team.” It doesn’t matter, though, because “The A-Team” has George Peppard and Mr. T, a dynamic duo if there ever was one. And who could tire of watching Lee Majors as the “Fall Guy’s” Colt Seavers crash and burn cars in each show?

More recent FX entries include “Picket Fences,” which gives viewers plenty of pre-Jim Carrey Lauren Holly, and “In Living Color,” which gives viewers plenty of pre-”Ace Ventura” Jim Carrey.

But it’s the old stuff that’s really worth one’s concentration. “Mission: Impossible” offers a rare FX foray into the ‘60s, a time when Greg Morris talked jive, Leonard Nimoy had unlikely long sideburns and Sam Elliot had a career. Talk about your guest stars: A dashing Bert Convy leads an entire episode.

Sadly, FX nixed “Mission: Impossible” from its line-up as of April 1, the same day it changed its logo to all caps from the not-quite-so-bold fX and began programming more movies and professional baseball.

But all is not lost, because in “Mission’s” place comes “21 Jump Street.”

Depp, Grieco--Grieco, Depp. Plus Holly Robinson and our very own Sal Jenco (the co-owner of the Viper Room with Johnny Depp).

This cultural kitsch FXcavation, to be continued.