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9780008113322

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Reviews

`Norman writes with epigrammatic wit.' The Times `This alternative history of the idiot's 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.'

`Norman writes with epigrammatic wit.' The Times `This alternative history of the idiot's 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.'

'Norman writes with epigrammatic wit.' The Times 'This alternative history of the idiot's 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 Information

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.

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