Two books were released to mark Radio 4's fortieth anniversary last autumn. The other is David Hendy's Life on Air, a longer and (from the blurb) more analytical tome, albeit one that runs out of juice circa 1990. Simon Elmes is a long-serving BBC producer, and he's written a cosy book. It's just under 300 pages, and divides itself into the network's current schedule - the morning sequence, Today, the 9am sequence, Women's Hour, the mid-morning stuff, The World at One, plays and the afternoon, PM and comedy, The Archers, the evening and weekend schedules, and after midnight. If you're not going to do the book alphabetically or chronologically - and that wouldn't go with the relaxed style - it's as good a method as any, and allows the plentiful box-outs and side-notes to sit with the right section of narrative. There's a plentiful index to help find the bits you read last time but can't remember exactly where they are.

Elmes is a BBC insider, and he's taken good advantage of the corporation's copious written archives - internal programme review panels are quoted on many occasions, and a few memoranda are precised. He does follow the official line a little too unquestioningly for our tastes - we've never accepted the basic premise of the Radio In The Seventies document, and though Elmes does sell it well, he doesn't seriously consider the alternative of the BBC keeping a mixed-genre Radio 4. Neither did the Corp at the time.

We've only spotted a couple of very minor factual errors - the only one worth correcting is Elmes' implication that Loose Ends moved to Saturday evenings in Boyle's 1998 raft of changes, when it actually remained at 10am well into 2000. The evening slot was occupied by The Now Show, which merits just one paragraph in Elmes' book when its pre-launch hype - the future of radio comedy, no less - implied it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and was widely (and incorrectly) seen as a failure when it emerged seven months and many pilots later as a Mary Whitehouse Experience re-tread. Still knocks spots off The News Quiz, natch.

It's not quite good enough value to be a book we'd buy in hard-cover, but the paperback edition should be worth it. Expect easy nostalgia, and not much challenging material.

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One of the running jokes in the Adrian Mole books is his low opinion of that year's Beano Book, how it has been becoming even more childish since the early 1980s. Looking back at some of the editions he's referring to, he had something of a point - the books were little more than extended versions of the weekly paper, drawn to the same standards, and with the same flimsy plots. They weren't childish, The Beano is never childish, but nor did they have a tremendous amount of depth.

A quarter of a century on, it's interesting to note how the publication's incremental changes have affected The Beano Book. No change on the front cover - the comic's lead figures Dennis, Minnie, and Danny are present and correct, in a two-pane visual joke concluded on the back cover. The endpanes give the front covers of all the annuals and Monster Comics since 1939, showing the dominance of first Big Eggo then Biffo the Bear until the mid-70s, Dennis since, and the amazing similarity between the covers early in the present decade.

Inside the book, there's been a subtle change. No longer does each weekly strip appear twice, once in the front of the book, once in the back. Instead, some of the more popular characters appear as continuing stories throughout the book - in particular, Dennis is involved in a running battle with Walter's Wimpbot. General Jumbo and Billy the Cat have been brought out of retirement to appear in the last few annuals, and combine for a thoughtful little story. It's not directly played for laughs, and gains from that fact.

Most characters get only the one strip, between four and six pages in length. The little details of Tom Patterson's artwork has been a particular highlight for a couple of decades, and it's best displayed in The Neds. The title characters are stereotypical chavs, going to the Tracksuit and Cap Exhibition, which is an excuse for an intricately detailed full-page picture poking fun at the stereotype. It's the most politically incorrect thing we've seen in the comic for decades.

While The Beano deliberately eschews direct satire, there are other subtle nods to the state of the real world. Both Jumbo's and Dennis's adventures contribute to a debate on technology, and Calamity James invites the reader to consider whether humanity really is as superior as it likes to think. Robbie Rebel is a case study of the futility of nihilism, and Minnie the Minx attests to the power of good humour. But the emphasis isn't on deep philosophy, but on fun and frivolity, with running jokes that don't exclude the casual reader, and some hideously awful puns and jokes.

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Kate Thompson is an Irish author, whose previous works won that country's national children's book prize. This side of the sea, no prizes. Reading this book, first published in 2003, it's easy to see why.

Jack is an orphan boy, apprenticed to a blacksmith. After an accident causes his horse to lose a load of coal, Jack decides to run away. He fishes a metal egg out of the river, and finds his way to Bastable, the alchemist of the title. Bastable gives Jack a brief review of the mysteries of his art, but Jack is soon on his way again, for reasons that are never made clear. Up to this point we're almost halfway through the book, everything's been described in detail, and the whole adventure is falling into a reasonably familiar routine.

We catch up with Jack in Yorkshire, where he gets into further scrapes - caught stealing from a man's pocket, found in a stable by a farmgirl, and spending three chapters arranging the removal of a thoroughbred horse from a bog. The horse belonged to a wealthy landowner, who has (rather rashly) promised the estate and his daughter's hand in marriage to the person who returns it. Jack claims the reward, and we proceed at a dizzying rate through his education, rejection of the claims of alchemy, and ultimate flight back to London, where he completes his work with Bastable.

So, what's our problem with this book? There's a grinding change of pace - while the first half of the book is complete in little more than a week, the second half covers almost three years. In particular, we see so little of Jack after his years on the estate but before his return to Bastable that we can't be sure what his changes are down to. Thompson would have us believe that Jack was left unaltered by learning to read and write, by managing his own estate for years, by being treated as the landowner's son. That's not credible. Nor is the timing - for thoroughbred horses and alchemy to coexist stretches the bounds of credulity. Far too many characters are used to advance the plot as quickly as possible, and Thompson never returns to these devices - in particular, Jack should have sought council from Nellie.

Overall, it's not a ludicrous book, and it does reach from A to Z without too much trouble, but we can see why Thompson hasn't been nominated for awards in the UK.

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In the middle part of this decade, television history website Off The Telly ran an extended series of essays, chronicling the history of Saturday night television. Over 42 parts, from October 2001 to September 2005, The Glory Game painstakingly traced the rise and rise of Saturday night television since the arrival of colour television. This was a landmark piece of writing, one of the most comprehensive surveys of a genre every created. In its own lifetime, it spawned a one-off documentary on the subject, and looked set to become a standard reference work on the topic.

Then, barely three months after the series completed, it was gone. Vanished. Completely deleted from the web. It was as if the 150,000 word project had never existed. Here's the reason why: the authors had signed to write this book. Rather than re-tell the story in approximately chronological order, or grouping subjects based on their content, they've gone for a straightforward A-to-Z of programmes. It's an entirely valid decision, and it promotes dip-in-dip-out reading, but it loses the consistent thread of the original essays. The underlying story, the narrative of Saturday night television, is lost.

Though the publishers have catalogued it as general humour / nostalgia, anyone expecting a bland recitation of the received wisdom about Saturday television will be disappointed. The authors write with verve and flair about their topic, pithily condensing many hours of broadcasting into a couple of pages of authoritive prose, perhaps accompanied by a pertinent picture. Their enthusiasm for the subject is clear, even when this goes against the lazy stereotypes of modern thought.

The Black and White Minstral Show, for instance, receives a broadly sympathetic write-up: modern eyes concentrate on the blacking-up aspect of the show, and choose to ignore the vaudeville elements, or its massive popularity almost throughout its twenty-year run. Noel's House Party is remembered mostly for its five good years and its influence on subsequent shows rather than its unwatchable final series. Only the most hopelessly derivative shows are written down: Simply the Best is rightly slammed as the worst elements of It's a Knockout and Gladiators, with the humour of neither.

The book's coverage concentrates on the well-remembered shows, ones that are definitively Saturday night. That explains a strong bias towards BBC1 and ITV, and the almost complete absence of BBC2 programmes - let's be honest, what has BBC2 ever bought to Saturday nights? The balance between recent and ancient is neatly struck, the variety shows of the late 1950s are documented in fair detail, while both ITV's recent run of flop shows and the BBC's lottery tie-ins are reduced to one or two examples. There's no Celebrity Wrestling, and the entire post-2000 history of In It to Winning Lines Around the Set Against 100 Wins is condensed into one paragraph.

Williams and Kibble-White have done their best to make the book work for serious scholars - each show's entry begins on a page of its own, includes precise airdates and an episode count, and the book contains a comprehensive index. However, the book comes to a very abrupt halt, going straight from the last alphabetical entry (You Bet!) into the index, without any discussion of how the shows have evolved over the last half-century, or supporting documentation such as viewing figures or even a simple arrangement of its subjects into chronological order.

As the introduction observes, much of Saturday night television is disposible, and will rightly be forgotten by the end of the week. This tome mixes such transience and the permanence of the history book in the right proportions to make a readable and authoritative cocktail.

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