Where are the fiction book TV channels?

This is a Guardian UK article wondering where the book channels are:

The lack of book programmes on mainstream television channels is puzzling. Britain is ablaze with book festivals, beaconing the land, drawing hundreds of thousands of reading and writing pilgrims. To travel on the London Underground can be to travel in a mobile reading room. Radio hoovers up writers. Yet on television, set aside the adaptation industry, books are on the margins – Mariella Frostrup’s The Book Show on Sky and David Baddiel’s new quiz show on BBC4.

In the US we have Bookspan. Okay, Bookspan is somewhat useful to me, but I’d love to see some shows on it where better interviewers showcased the authors a bit more. Often authors left to drone in front of a camera with no expert to save them from themselves is painful to watch and I’ve been known to use Bookspan at night as a form of sleeping pill (1 hour 15 minutes is my record at not passing out while watching the channel).

I know that non-fiction is easier to sell and get media attention for. Non-fiction usually has a subject that’s easy to determine, therefore easy to define, therefore easy to explain why people should tune in. Fiction is amorphous. And yet, and yet I’m still compelled to wonder…

…whither Bookspan fiction TV? Cable TV should surely be able to do this, the channels are infinite. Even I occasionally tune into Bookspan, I would love to occasionally tune into Fictionspan.

Filed under the topic On Writing on August 21st 2007 at 8:59 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.