Television: A History in 100 Programmes

(Paperback)

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An entertaining and illuminating celebration of televisual history by cultural historian Phil Norman
For decades, television occupied a unique position in the national imagination. By todays standards the box was tiny, but it dominated the living room in a way its technically superior descendants never quite manage. Has the television lost its power in the internet age Cultural historian Phil Norman goes in search of such questions as he tells the history of TV through 100 ground-breaking programmes.

He celebrates the joy of the TV schedule which, in the days of just a few channels, threw up dizzy juxtapositions on a daily basis: an earnest play might be followed by a variety spectacular; a horror anthology that drove children behind furniture followed a sketch show that chewed the carpet. This riotous mix, now slowly disappearing as themed channels and on-demand services take over, gave television a sense of community that no other media could compete with.

The wonderful variety of programmes in the book includes overlooked gems and justly wiped follies, overcooked spectaculars and underfunded experiments just as much a part of TV history as the national treasures and stone-cold classics. A History of Television in 100 Programmes revels in the days when television was at the most exciting, creative stage of any medium: a cottage industry with the world at its feet.

Reviews

Norman writes with epigrammatic wit. The Times

This alternative history of the idiots lantern gathers a hundred programmes to chart eighty-odd years of televisual evolution: the early, chaotic years; the foolhardy, unselfconscious and creatively energetic years before commerce eventually knocked those fascinating corners off its character. At its best and at its worst, television is brutally honest and charmingly deceitful, sentimentally partisan and coldly dispassionate, obscenely lavish and ludicrously cheap. Its death has been predicted many times, but somehow it survives to this day.

Author Bio

Philip Norman was born in London and brought up on the Isle of Wight. He joined the Sunday Times at 22, soon gaining a reputation as Atticus columnist and for his profiles of figures as diverse as Elizabeth Taylor, Little Richard and Colonel Gaddafi. Author of the UK and US bestseller SHOUT!, he has also written the definitive lives of Sir Elton John and Buddy Holly. Named as one of the twenty Best Young British Novelists early in his career, whilst he resists classification as a "rock biographer", a musical theme pervades almost all of Philip Norman's work including the highly acclaimed John Lennon: The Life, which the Sunday Times Culture Magazine called Meticulously researched, compulsively readable book. He is married with a daughter and lives in London.