All in the Best Possible Taste: Growing Up Watching Telly in the Eighties

by TomBromley (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.35

  It's the early 1980s and TV-land is a weird place to be ...There are only three channels! Everything stops at midnight! There's no Breakfast TV, no daytime telly ...and the biggest prize on TV is not Chris Tarrant's million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye. As Tom Bromley suggests in this hilariously funny and entertaining walk down memory lane, all that was about to change. Coming our way were new channels, 'yoof' TV, Dynasty, Dallas, TV-AM, Charles and Di, Scott and Charlene, talking cars and a Royal It's a Knockout. By the end of the decade we were primed and ready for satellite TV, multi-channels, rolling news and incredibly ...you could watch TV all the way through the night! And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. From Fame to the Falklands War, Live Aid to Loadsamoney, All in the Best Possible Tastetells the story of a childhood spent with his mum, dad and three siblings and that other all-important family member; the TV.

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $3.35

  Television past, as LP Hartley might have once said, is another country. And, in the early 1980s it certainly was a different beast. There were still only three channels to watch; the evening's programmes finished with the playing of the national anthem; and the biggest prize on TV was not Chris Tarrant's million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye ...But as Tom Bromley suggests in this funny and warming memoir, all that was about to change: The 1980s saw the end of the original golden era of television, and the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial channel for almost twenty years and by the end of the decade, Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television was vying to become Britain's first multi-channel provider. The result of all this was that slowly but surely, British viewers had more choice than ever before and the cost of this choice was the erosion of television as a shared national event. And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. Television played a large part in Tom's childhood. His first word was 'two', as in BBC Two, and his earliest childhood memory is seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete. With great humour and affection, Tom Bromley tells the story of a childhood spent with his three siblings and that other all-important family member; the television set.