“The Longer The List, The Fatter The Cheques”

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 banned from the internet. 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 play-by-mail game 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.

Ah, Have I Got 1997 For You (by Angus Deayton, Ian Hislop, Paul Merton, Mark Burton, Robert Fraser Steele, John O’Farrell and Colin Swash, BBC Books 1996). Now feeling like a relic of a bygone age (well, it was from the last century, we suppose), this takes the form of a diary, marking such occasions as Nick Leeson’s birthday, or events such as National Take Your Daughter To Work Day (“Lord Parkinson is highly unlikely to take his and Sarah Keays’ daughter to work, as he hasn’t seen her since she was a baby”). In amongst the months are a number of double-page features, such as “How To Fake A Photograph” (such as the Evening Standard Photoshopping a bottle of Becks out of a photo of John Prescott, then cropping it carefully so they can refer to him as a ‘champagne socialist’), or this, a handy guide to where our brave arms dealers are making money in a post-Cold War world.

We’re not sure if there’ll be a book called “Have I Got 2012 For You”, but if there is, we expect it’ll contain framegrabs of the panel laughing at whatever was popular on YouTube three months ago, and 800,000 ways in which Eric Pickles and John Prescott are both quite fat.

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 cybergoths 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? Clothing your children?