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Books About Television

Television presentation, history, journalism, etc. (February 2013)

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WW
WW Update
I thought it a topic devoted to books about television might be interesting.

I'll start the thread with The Universal Eye by Timothy Green. Published in 1972 (but still widely available used and in libraries), it's a lively journalistic account of the television landscapes of various countries and continents by a British author and provides a wonderful time capsule of that era more than four decades ago.

The book has chapters on: the United States, Canada, Latin America, Eurovision (the pan-European TV exchange run by the EBU, not just the song contest), the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, East-West television propaganda, the Arab world and Israel, Asia (including detailed looks at Thailand, India, Hong Kong, and the Philippines), Japan, Australia, Africa, and the future of television (which discusses the advent of cable, satellite, and videotape).

Here's a typical excerpt from the chapter on Japanese television:

Quote:
"[...] with Japanese flair they have developed simultaneous programmes and advertising; the message is superimposed over the continuing programme with no commercial break. So just as the samurai drama reaches its climax, a caption flashes up FLY JAPAN AIRLINES, BUY SAKURA COLOR FILM, or DRINK HONEY WINE, before the struggling swordsmen on the screens. Sponsors normally have three of these plugs in each half-hour. At news time, the sponsor's name is superimposed over the breast pocket of the news reader as he gives the headlines. The blending of ads with programmes may well seem the nadir of commercial television, yet in some ways it is much less distracting than an actual commercial break at the crucial moment in a film or play, especially as the ad is never more than a three, or four-word caption. It is not more worrying than a subtitle in a foreign movie."


And TV news in the Philippines:

Quote:
"In the early evening ABS-CBN run a two-hour programme called Patrol which is really just a public noticeboard for the city of Manila. All kinds of local titbits turn up. Insurance agents are advised that their exams have been postponed. Boy scouts are told where to report to a jamboree. Payment is offered for 500 cc of a rare type of blood urgently required to help a fourteen-year-old boy suffering from bone cancer; anyone who can offer a transfusion is asked to phone the studio immediately. Even photographs and descriptions of several children missing from home in the slums of Manila are given. Patrol calls itself 'the public service programme that makes a city move' and it outranks the imported Bonanza in the ratings."


Any books on television -- current or long out of print -- that you've enjoyed (or, for that matter, didn't like at all)?
Last edited by WW Update on 2 February 2013 7:27pm - 5 times in total
WP
WillPS
Dished: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting was a very interesting read - compelling in parts and interesting throughout. A steal at £2.81 delivered.

Just ordered Brand Identity for Television: With Knobs On, Martin Lambie-Nairn's book.
ST
Standby
Morning Glory - history of breakfast tv & And Finally...? The News from ITN - are both excellent reads.
NI
Nicky
Just ordered Brand Identity for Television: With Knobs On, Martin Lambie-Nairn's book.


An absolutely brilliant book - I highly recommend it. Great stills and storyboards alongside fabulous text.

Have been thinking about buying the ITN "And Finally..." book from 2005 but not got round to it yet. Does anyone have the NAT book they released in 1999? Is it anything along the lines of the 2005 book or is it just a history of news stories?
NM
Neil Miles
Dished: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting was a very interesting read - compelling in parts and interesting throughout. A steal at £2.81 delivered.


Yes Dished is an excellent book, a really detailed insight into how BSB failed.

My recommendation is this Live TV!: Telly Brats and Topless Darts - The Uncut Story of Tabloid TV. Fascinating & entertaining in equal measure, especially where they quote Janet Street-Porter phonetically with accompanying translations!
PC
Philip Cobbold
Just ordered Brand Identity for Television: With Knobs On, Martin Lambie-Nairn's book.


An absolutely brilliant book - I highly recommend it. Great stills and storyboards alongside fabulous text.

Have been thinking about buying the ITN "And Finally..." book from 2005 but not got round to it yet. Does anyone have the NAT book they released in 1999? Is it anything along the lines of the 2005 book or is it just a history of news stories?

I've got the News at Ten book. It's a bit of a mix, with a history of News at Ten at the beginning. Then it's broken up into each year between 1967 and 1998 with stuff about big stories in that year, with a little bit about behind the scenes for each year. The final chapter is about the 1999 relaunch, and has a picture of a model of the 'new' ITV News studio.
GO
gottago
Channel 4: A Licence to Be Different is a really excellent book. I borrowed it from my uni library but ended up buying it because it was that good. The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting is also quite interesting, written in the late 90s, very academic though.

Funnily enough I was in the BFI library all day today, great for wasting your free hours with their brilliant selection of books on TV.
WW
WW Update
Another interesting book is Francis Wheen's Television (known as Television: A History or Television: A World History in some markets), a richly illustrated companion to the 1985 Granada documentary series of the same name. It chronicles the evolution of television from the first experiments to the multi-million-dollar global business it had become by the 1980s. The book is organized by genre (news, sports, comedy, etc.) and focuses in large part on British and American television, while also mentioning examples from the rest of the world. It's not quite as global in scale as Timothy Green's book mentioned above, however.

http://pictures.abebooks.com/MARKRUSSELL/1307175721.jpg
Source: abebooks.com

Barbara Matusow's The Evening Stars: The Making of the Network News Anchor is about American news anchors and how they became such major media personalities. It is essentially a serious, well-written history of television news in the United States, from the fledgling first broadcasts onward, with some revealing behind-the-scenes "gossip" thrown in.

http://pictures.abebooks.com/SDENNEY/423499880.jpg
Source: abebooks.com
Last edited by WW Update on 3 February 2013 4:03am - 3 times in total
WW
WW Update
Dished: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting was a very interesting read - compelling in parts and interesting throughout. A steal at £2.81 delivered.


Agreed. Sky High by Mathew Horsman is another good read (albeit not quite as good as Dished ), covering some of the same events but focusing on Sky -- and continuing from where Dished leaves off (i.e., the BSB-Sky merger).

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511G08V7KFL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
Source: Amazon.com
Last edited by WW Update on 3 February 2013 4:42am - 3 times in total
PC
Paul Clark
Just ordered Brand Identity for Television: With Knobs On, Martin Lambie-Nairn's book.


An absolutely brilliant book - I highly recommend it. Great stills and storyboards alongside fabulous text.


I second this - had a copy myself for a number of years now. Really interesting in both the text and photos.
DV
DVB Cornwall
Worth (if you can get hold of them) a look at the BBC Handbooks and ITV Yearbooks published annually intil the mid 1980's
SW
Steve Williams
Another interesting book is Francis Wheen's Television (known as Television: A History or Television: A World History in some markets), a richly illustrated companion to the 1985 Granada documentary series of the same name.


This gets a bad review in The Television Yearbook 1985, which says it is "of use only for those satisfied with Tony Hancock's career reduced to five lines".

The Television Yearbook, though, is a fascinating publication, edited by Dick "BFI" Fiddy and published by Virgin in 1985, it was an attempt to do a proper review of the year's telly, so there are genre-by-genre essays, a diary, reviews of the best and worst programmes of the year, some rather pointless and inaccurate listings of every sitcom and drama, book reviews, the ratings for every week of the year and even articles on things like licence evasion and listings magazines. It was supposed to be an annual thing but they only did one, perhaps not surprisingly as its content is extremely esoteric for a mass-market publication, but worth looking for. The BFI did a similar thing in 2004, the Television Handbook, and the editor Alastair "not McGowan" McGown said he modelled it on that, though again there was only one.

I remember buying The Guinness Book Of Classic British TV twenty years ago and being absolutely blown away by it, I read it from cover to cover and then bought the second edition a few years later and read that from cover to cover as well, and still enjoy dipping into it even now, and I'm amazed they never bothered with any further editions after 1996.

And DO NOT BUY The Golden Age Of Children's Television by Geoff Tibballs, because it's simply Tibballs' reminiscences about programmes he clearly hadn't bothered to rewatch before writing it, hence the hilarious pasted-in apology that in fact Captain Pugwash did not feature Seaman Staines.

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