It was put to me with much forbearance that if I knew of another source of revenue for the channel I should reveal it right away. As things stood, our new venture was haemorrhaging cash by the hour, so would I please pipe down and return to my oar. BookTelevision: The Channel – the world’s first and only twenty-four-hour literary channel. One month in, and reality had already bitten hard. I had a flashback of my father’s dubious expression over his reading glasses earlier that year, shortly before he died; I had proudly shown him our full-colour brochure, boasting not just a channel, but a bookstore, a library, and website, no less, with a library of forbidden literature called Archive 451, a spoken word and acid jazz venue we’d call The Lingo Lounge, book clubs nationwide and a creative factory that would for the first time make television ads for books affordable to publishers, create the literary equivalent of the Hollywood EPK (electronic press kit) to spare authors peddling their books on the road, and develop the literary equivalent of the rock video (reprising the work we’d done twenty years earlier with our rockumentary show, The New Music). Dad had emerged triumphant from the wilderness years of Canlit, lending this country international status, raising the bar for all future generations. He knew better than anyone how tough a row to hoe it is – he’d always said he didn’t want five little Mordecais running around – and now here was I, his eldest son, setting up a rickety literary lemonade stand.

Televison is generally thought of as monolithic, but the most accurate way to picture BookTelevision, I have had to accept, is as a corner store, a small business, an independent press, virtuous in its ambitions but something of a snake oil operation when it comes to achieving them. Here at the Living Literacies conference, as we discuss what it means to read and write in this day and age, I anticipate the cat will be skinned in many ways. There will, I imagine, be deconstruction galore – political critiques, racial analyses, class dialectic, the clash of high versus low culture, feminist perspectives, dire polemics about the death of the word, the insidious tyranny of the paragraph, the imperialism of the noun, and so on. I would simply like to offer a nuts and bolts account of how we erected a book channel. I’ll show you a glimpse or two of what it looks like, but too much would be a lazy way for me to occupy this stage. Moreover, it would likely fuel the academic’s suspicion that TV people can’t live without eye candy, and in any case, it would be against my greater interest, since I’d rather you subscribed to it if you want to see it.