Television tome that needs tuning
ONE DAY IN JANUARY 1983, Rob Young volunteered to appear on TV. Along with hundreds of other wannabes, he was instructed to take up position within a giant good morning britain logo that had been pegged out on Bristol’s Durdham Downs. With a helicopter in position overhead, everyone was ordered to scatter aimlessly before coming together to reform the logo. “Beautiful!” blared an assistant through a megaphone. “The director wants you all to know he’s having orgasms up here!”
Rob Young, it seems fair to say, has all his life been similarly excited by something on the telly. Like many a child of the sixties and seventies, he was almost as close to the TV as he was to his mother and father. At once minder and mindscape, it looked after him while giving him things to look at.
Half a century on, he returns the compliment. is his impassioned, occasionally impenetrable, psycho-history of the TV of his youth.
