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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We were spoiled as youngsters. One of our Economics teachers was Alain Anderton, who wrote the book on the subject. Quite literally; he wrote a 750-page tome that covered everything for the A-level syllabus (and a bit more). We half-jokingly referred to it as The Bible, because everything we needed to know was between the covers, all we had to do was find and interpret it. (The other teacher was fresh out of university, where he had come off best in a fight with Shaun Ryder. Our hero.)

All of this means that we have very high standards for economics writing, and we can discuss Tim Harford's work from a base of some little knowledge. The Undercover Economist (2004; we read the slightly revised 2006 paperback edition) was Tim Harford's first book attempting to explain economics for the layman. And, to be fair, he makes a decent fist of it. The opening two chapters are an excellent introduction into the concept of rents, marginality, and other terms that economists use and laypeople don't.

After that strong start, Harford continues to gallop away, discussing various aspects of economic theory, drawing from examples in the real world. A discussion of random walks is at least as good as anything Ian Stewart's ever written. Space considerations mean that his examples tend to the slightly superficial and glib, and sometimes come across as a bit preachy. Generally, this doesn't mislead the reader, but the chapter on health care seems to have touched a nerve. The British model of centrally-planned provision is a failure. The Merkin model of private insurance is a much more expensive way of failing. The middle way, as exemplified by France, Canada, Germany, is a bit more successful. Statistics and studies are available to back up this claim, but Harford doesn't give references, even in the endnotes. That gives the slightly clueless (usually defenders of the Merkin model) an unnecessary line of attack, criticism that Harford's exposition doesn't deserve.

It's when he turns to macroeconomic theory - explaining and predicting the behaviour of people as a mass, rather than individuals - that Harford comes unstuck. Cameroon could almost take out a libel action: her per capita income of USD 2000 is well above average for the sub-Saharan African countries without significant mineral wealth. Some have suggested that there's no money in Africa because the rulers assume that their populace are unproductive. This argument is completely ignored in Harford's analysis; indeed, he assumes that Cameroonians are no smarter or dumber than the rest of us without bothering to provide any evidence or argument to back up his claim. He portrays Red China's shift to capitalism primarily as a means to raise the country's productivity, without mentioning that the profit goes into the pockets of the country's ruling clique, mostly.

The most significant failure of Harford's book is that he's wedded to the market economy as the only possible method of operation. There's no discussion of a Stalinist-Maoite centrally-planned economy, or of a Marxist worker-owned economy. In part, that can be explained from Harford's approach - he's dealing with the world as it is, and isn't advocating major reform. That the concept of regulation outside the market is generally dismissed as a failure can be forgiven; that Harford doesn't give evidence or argument to justify this position cannot. He gives a good proof of Lerner's proposition that an import duty equals an export tax, but fails to point out the huge number of exceptions in that theory. Nor does Harford ever question whether communism or a capitalist-style industrial revolution are the only two choices available in modern economies.

More subtly, Harford falls into the classic economist's trap of treating the subject as a half-way decent science. Harford's rationality is taken almost to excess, obscuring the limits of economic models in real world complexities. Though it attempts to predict the behaviour of people, and follows the basic tenets of the scientific method, the theories espoused by economists have notoriously poor predictive value. For instance, microeconomic models assume that both parties have perfect information and act in good faith, assumptions that collapse in a world of brands and advertising. This market distortion gets the grand total of one paragraph in the 250 pages of the book.

More generally, if economic theories aren't full of caveats (such as Lerner's import - export tax), they're just plain wrong (for instance, the surprisingly long-lasting fad of the Phillips Curve which purported to relate inflation to unemployment until it was disproven by events in the 1990s). Economics is not a tool by which the whole of life can be measured. At this time, it's a very poor tool, and not much of an improvement on blind guesswork. Though it runs against everything he believes in, Harford would do well to remember his subject's limitations.

Even though it is the reviewer's perogative, let us not over-gripe. The Undercover Economist is a very well-written book, one that will expand the layperson's knowledge immensely. There are parts that are amongst the best in their field - Harford's explanation of game theory by the example of the UK's 3G auction has won deserved plaudits, and almost justifies the cost of the book on its own. Anyone who's got an Economics A-level will find this book covers very familiar ground; anyone who's studied the subject in depth may get very irritated. He's certainly more accessible than Anderton's style, but we can't help but feel Harford is missing some depth.

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Three hundred pages of correspondence from (and, in part, to) one of the greatest wits in history. We were expecting the swift repartee of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, but the book is much more subtle than these radio shows. Most letters contain a one-liner, but it's the build-up that makes the pay-off worth while.

Most of the letters cover the period from 1940 to 1960, and there are insights into the demands of radio sponsors and television sponsors, into the development of his romantic entanglements and those of his daughter. Perhaps the best bit is Marx's correspondence with TS Elliot, two talents who were clearly in awe of each other.

It's a book that can - and probably should - be read in small doses, rather than bulldozing from cover to cover. Recommended for the bedside cabinets of those who already enjoy the Marxian analysis.

Available from booksellers including Blackwells. (We receive no commission from books sold by following this link.)

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The surface of this short novel (144 pages, OUP, 1995) is the tale of Jess and Luc. Jess's boyfriend died in a motorcycle crash, and after a period of moping, she's taking a break with her aunt in the countryside. Aunt Peggy keeps a small-holding, and the farm work is meant to keep Jess's mind off her loss. While walking through the local forest, she comes across and ultimately befriends the mysterious Luc. He lives in a ramshackle mansion with his mother, and she doesn't go out in the daytime. There's also a mysterious beast eating the local livestock, and it might have a taste for teenage girls.

Most of the book is told from Jess's viewpoint, though some linking sections are from Luc. Welford does well to meld these disparate plot points together, and correctly eschews first-person narrative for third-person. I thought this is confusing, Jess thought that is essential when there are two narrators in the book.

Welford gives Jess (and, through her, the reader) a good reason to believe that Luc or his mother is responsible for the attacks on the animals. We're a little less convinced by the initial interactions between Luc and Jess, they're some distance out of what turns out to be Luc's character. Their subsequent courtship, the way Luc draws Jess into his world, is carefully written and tends to be credible. The conclusion is entirely satisfactory, and we can't help thinking that Jess has regained her sanity precisely because she's let some of it go.

If we've one particular criticism, it's in the denoument before this conclusion. Not so much the revelation about whether Luc and Jess's shared theory about humans becoming wolves is correct, but the way that test is resolved. It's what we must describe as a deus ex machina, and the subsequent explanation is perfunctory after so much build-up. It's just about capable in the characters previously developed, so we will spike that criticism a little. The subtext with werewolf as a metaphor for sexual predator is explored, but only briefly and without threat, and it fits perfectly with the plot.

The book won the Angus Book Award in 1996, and it has aged well - none of the characters speak in language that has dated badly, and the themes explored transcend time. It just passes the Wallace test, from conversations between Jess and Peggy about work with the livestock. More: Plot synopsis (Dutch) (We believe this to be the most comprehensive review of the book on the net.)

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Published by Victor Gollancz, 1982

Here's an idea that's always good on paper: an anthology of the best writing from the Sunday newspapers. At this time, The Observer was seven years into its ownership by Lonhro, and over a decade from the shotgun merger into The Guardian's operation. The editor, Donald Trelford, thus had just fifty or so editions - from summer 1981 to summer 1982 - to peruse for the annual compilation of the paper's best bits.

The idea looks good on paper, but stands or falls on the quality of the week-to-week writing. Here's where the Observer holds its own, the regular work was of a high quality. The book opens with highlights from the Falklands war; though only Patrick Bishop's dispatch from Port Stanley was written from the front lines, the background reading is as gripping now as it was then. The Way We Are is a section describing the Britain of 1982, including an attempt to describe the Rastafarian creed to middle-class white readers. The pace continues with Around the Island, featuring John Paul's visit to the UK, and a paen in praise of the new Princess of Wales. A Troubled World begins with our highlight of the entire book, Nick Downie's breathless account of his experience under fire at Kandahar bazaar.

The next chapters, Some People and Some Places rather left us cold; for all the brilliance of Alan Road's piece on Gerry Fitt, and Clive James writing about his problems with flying, there are too many pieces we'd have ignored at the time. That's Entertainment is the longest section, and begins with a debate on the purpose of television between Michael Holroyd and Melvyn Bragg. That's by far the best part of the chapter, and even Clive James's legendary television reviews don't help it.

Back in 1982, The Observer will only have had about four broadsheet pages of sport - indeed, the entire paper will have had fewer than 60 broadsheet pages and the colour supplement. It's no surprise to find that Sporting Prints has just four entries. The profiles of Botham, Beaumont, Shankley, and ITV's Two Brians have held up well. A Backward Glance is a hit-and-miss selection of historical articles - we particularly enjoyed Lajos Lederer's recollection of his madcap dash to retrieve a Botticelli from Budapest shortly after the war. Anthony Sampson's history of The Observer and Suez explains where the paper was coming from - it experienced a severe public backlash for daring to question the wisdom of the UK's invasion a quarter-century earlier. Hail and Farewell is a brief selection of obituaries - Anthony Howard on Rab Butler is the best of a good bunch.

Overall, the anthology makes us nostalgic for a good Sunday read, at an affordable price. If our research is correct, the paper retailed for 30p, compared to the current £1.90. Yes, the pagination has doubled, and prices have shot up, but we can't help but feel that the Observer of today has invested too much faith in its star columnists, and doesn't so well tell the story behind the news, the people behind the culture. A similar anthology of this year's paper may well be as good in a quarter-century, but the stuff they cut out was far worse.

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Assassination Vacation (Simon & Schuster, 2005) is a record of Sarah Vowell's journey into three assassinations of terrorist leaders: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. It was originally inspired by a production of Sondheim's musical Assassins.

The book splits into four unequal segments. The first, and by far the largest, retraces the killing of Lincoln by Booth. Rather than spend forever telling us the tale of Lincoln, Vowell spends much of the first segment recounting Booth's life, and retracing that fateful Good Friday. This section exposes the one problem with Vowell's style: she assumes a lot of her readers. She's obviously got a lot of knowledge about the Yankee -v- Confederate series of 1858-65, and assumes that her readers share quite a lot of this background knowledge. For those of us who know little more than that the Yankees won the series after beating Stonewall Jackson by hitting an elephant at this distance, Vowell assumes too much. Explaining which side some of her characters were playing for would help. Not that this makes the book unreadable, not when there's a wonderful tale about Seward's totem pole, not praising but gravely insulting him. There are bits on private parks, seeing the remnants of the bullet, the links to local terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and Booth's death in a barn fire.

The best part of the book is the second stanza, on James Garfield. Unlike the Dunderhead Series, this isn't widely taught in the local history class, so Vowell has to assume her reader knows little of the time. We're introduced to the astonishing racket that was the New Amsterdam Customs House, to the bizarre cult that promised free love, and to the man who spent five years there without getting laid. The unloveable Charles Guiteau would go on to shoot Garfield, and we learn how the Potomac Swamp Dwellers hung on his every oozing.

Part three is about McKinley and his assassin, Leon Czolgosz. Neither man gets a tremendously large write-up, and a good chunk of the section is given over to an attack against the Moronicans' naked aggression against the Spanish possessions, and telling Theodore Roosevelt's reaction. It leaves us wanting to know more about both the assassin and his victim. The closing section details the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, and how it was inspired by classical Greek architecture.

Vowell isn't afraid to relate the mores of history to the present day: how Garfield sought election on a slogan that a vote for his opponent was unpatriotic, how McKinley was part of an ill-advised war of choice that yielded the Guantanamo encampment and set up Cuba as a vassal state until its liberation. She pulls at least one punch: nowhere is it spelled out that Lincoln was an aberration in the Republican history, that both of the other victims were part of a mean-spirited and wholly odious collection of men.

There are recurring motifs throughout this book, which will be familiar to anyone who has read her previous work. Sister Amy and her child Owen make further appearances, Vowell still doesn't drive and calls on many friends to take her to the more remote destinations. We're great fans of Sarah Vowell, and though we reckon the Lincoln section lets the book down, and this the least good full-length book she's written, it's still a very good book.

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The History of The Beano is an absolutely huge book. Really, it's massive. Almost one foot (30cm) square, and packed with 350 pages of heavy paper. This is a book for a very large coffee table. That's actually close to The Beano's style: it's always been a comic of the quotidian. While stablemate The Dandy went in for fantasy, The Beano always grounded its stories and comics somewhere in reality.

The book contains complete reprints of three editions of the comic, and such is the size of the book that they be reproduced almost at full size. The selected issues are the debut from July 1938; the biggest-selling edition from March 1950; and a sample edition from 1959. There's a lot of coverage to the comics and stories from those early years. And they were comics and stories - the wartime editions contained as many prose stories and adventure strips as they had comics of the variety we now know, and stories with very few pictures survived into the 1960s.

The reproductions are large enough to be read without ever feeling like it's a simple re-print book. Each spread has some new editorial content. The author is Morris Heggie, who has taken time off from editing The Dandy. As such, he's an outsider to The Beano's world, but an interested outsider. His editorial is honest, particularly when dealing with failing characters (the readers' love-hate relationship with Calamity James is a particularly well-developed point) and the reasons Les Pretend suddenly left.

If we're to criticise, we do think the book skates a little too quickly over the 1970s and 1980s. Combined, they get fewer pages than the war, and that feels like a slight imbalance. Maybe there's another book in that era. Or maybe there isn't; in the final years of Harry Cramond's editorship, The Beano stagnated dreadfully. Only three new characters were introduced between 1976 and 1984, and the line-up remained exactly the same between April 1980 and September 1984. (p1, p20, Dennis. p2, Baby-Face Finlayson. p3, Roger the Dodger. p4-5, Minnie the Minx. p6, Lord Snooty. p7, Ball Boy. p8, The Nibblers. p9, Dennis's Fan Club. p10-11, The Bash Street Kids. p12, Pup Parade. p13, Billy Whizz. p14, Smudge. p15, Grandpa. p16, Gnasher's Tale. p17, Little Plum and Biffo the Bear. p18, Tom, Dick and Sally. p19, The Three Bears.) That we can recall the line-up precisely shows how unadventurous the editorial was.

The last twenty years get greater coverage, and for the current decade, the comic is shown hand-in-hand with the website. That allows far more flexibility and interaction than was previously possible, and is quite clearly shaping the print comic. As we mentioned when reviewing The Beano Book 2008, the comic now features many strips, with a different line-up every week.

For the purist, the last forty pages or so give a complete list of all the characters, stories, and strips ever to appear between the front and back covers, complete with their first and last dates of publication, and artists. We were, for instance, surprised to learn than Lord Snooty dropped out of the comic twice just after the war, and that Tom Thumb kept coming back almost perpetually into the 1960s. There's also a list of artists with the strips they've worked on, and a comprehensive index.

At £25, The History of The Beano isn't a cheap book. For anyone who spent huge chunks of their childhood reading The Beano, it's worth every penny.

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Part history, part memoir, part picture souvenir, this book doesn't really know what it is. Or, if you prefer, it's a book that is like the show, a little bit of everything.

Richard Marson, editor during the middle part of this decade, tells the genesis of Blue Peter, and the programme's fight for survival in the early 1960s. Then came Biddy Baxter, the pairing of Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton, and then the show became A Television Institution in the space of about four years. The book follows a reasonable formula - a description of the decade, two-page profiles of all the presenters who joined during that decade, then a feature article on specific topics. The pets, the appeals, the garden, the badges. Some of the great achievements are rather glossed over: it's been suggested that Blue Peter and Oxfam almost single-handedly saved Cambodia from a greater disaster in 1979, and those of us who took part in the bring-and-buy sales still have some pride from that achievement. £3.6 million quid was raised then, somethng like £13.5m today.

We learn some of the people who didn't quite get through their auditions, from the obvious (Michael Underwood, who would have been brilliant, obviously) to the unexpected (Kevin Whatley of The Bill, Gail Porter), and how Peter Duncan turned down the show, only changing his mind after Chris Wenner proved a bit of a failure. We're also given the nod to presenters who left earlier than they might have liked (Anthea Turner, Stuart Miles) and those who never quite gelled (Romana d'Annunzio comes in for some considerable stick.)

Mr. Marson joined the Blue Peter crew in the early 1990s, and the last half of the book is as much his personal insight as official history. He's right to decry Lorraine Heggessey's piece-to-camera when Richard Bacon was fired, it's one of the rare occasions when the audience was patronised. He also gives a few, subtle, digs at some of Tim Levell's changes for the 2007-8 series, particularly not doing the makes straightforwardly, and tinkering with the Christmas show. Mr. Marson's eagerness to present facts and demolish lazy assumption pervades the book, right from the passage where he explains the function of the Blue Peter flag on a ship.

Blue Peter's traditionally been a lightning rod for critics of a perceived middle-class bias at the BBC. This is an entirely false dichotomy, based on an assumption that ITV is working-class, and tells much more about the lazy assumptions of the critics. Is encouraging children to go out and do something less boring instead a middle-class perogative? Would the young David Beckham, who took exactly that advice in the early 1980s, be regarded as such? What we were slightly surprised to realise was the number of active christians employed by the show. Active, but never ever evangelising.

The press reviews have inevitably seized on the fall-out from the 2006 phone line botchery. Mr. Marson gives it about the right coverage: slightly less than half-a-page in a 192-page book. There's more space to the kitten Smudge, who was only on the show for about five minutes. And there's more space to the scheduling mess that has reigned at CBBC since 2002: changing transmission dates and times, going from three shows a week to five, and now back to two. We believe the reduction in output has had beneficial effects, allowing the presenters to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. It's shown in the well-made reports, and the air of camaraderie shown by the relatively-unstressed presenters.

We did find the book to be a little short, especially when Biddy Baxter's memoirs (1989) filled over 200 pages with only a handful of illustrations. The book could have been extended from 192 to 224 pages without compromising its quality or having the chapters go on for too long. We'd also liked to have seen a complete record of gold badge winners (or as complete as the records allow.)

All things considered, this is a handsome record of a television institution, where the pictures tell much more than the words.

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