“Dour, Cold”

With the OTT Book now on sale, what better time to take a look at some other wonderful telly-related books from the ages? We’ll be posting one (or two) page (or pages) from a different book each and every day until we forget to, we’ve covered all the TV-tie-in books in our collection, or we get raptured for being the most saintly and divine persons on the entire planet. Place your bets.

As pretty much all the books in question have long since been deleted by their publishers, there shouldn’t be any legal difficulty there, we hope. Unlike all those superinjunctions that we've blown wide open on our Telesoftware page which luckily no-one has noticed yet for some reason. In any case, we’re putting these scans online under the banner of ‘BrokenTV’, and no-one else. Just in case anyone starts waving their lawyers around.

Today, The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia (by David Baddiel (D), Rob Newman (R), Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, Fourth Estate 1991).

Enjoyable as this book is, the thing that really leaps out at you is the way David Baddiel and Rob Newman have insisted on make explicitly clear which bits of the book they wrote, with every single one of their entries being appended by their initial, while Punt and Dennis are happy for their individual contributions to go uncredited. Though it’s pretty clear which bits Punt and/or Dennis wrote, as they’re the ones that don’t end with “(D)” or “(R)”, and are slightly funnier.

Anyway, here’s a map about how football commentators see the world. Plus ça change, eh readers?

A page (or two) from a different book tomorrow. Until then, why not take time to have a look at the TV-related book that all the droogs are referring to as OTTTBBOTBTVWNNNTTAN (Off The Telly: The Best Bits of the British TV Website 1999-2009)? Available from Lulu.com in paperback for just £16.99 (that's just £0.00005 per word!), or £3.99 for the PDF ebook version, with any profits going to Alzheimer's charities.

Go on, what else are you going to spend your money on? Your licence fee?