“…in Reform-O-Scope”

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 a yesterday’s post prompts the BBC into replacing the remainder of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle series two with repeats of h&p@bbc and we have to go and hide in a cave for the rest of our lives. 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 Linkedin 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, it’s a page from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, Methuen 1991), and the opening part of the scene that originally wasn’t in the film, but then got put back into it for the US region one limited edition release and then everyone kind of understood why they’d took it out in the first place as it really slowed down the pacing of that part of the film. Though Graham Chapman’s face in this photo makes it all worthwhile, so that’s nice, and we won’t pretend we weren’t utterly thrilled to finally get to see the actual scene in question.

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 kids in their backwards (or sideways) baseball caps are calling 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, you tightwads.