Fast forward, now, to 1999: the recombination of my experience at TVO and the considerable juice of Moses Znaimer and his team at CityTV, plus the academic bona fides of Dr. Ron Keast and Canadian Learning Television in Edmonton, won us the bid for a TV license from Canada’s regulatory body, the CRTC. Astonishingly, there was fierce competition for this. You would not imagine a book channel to be the most lucrative proposition – not when you could have gone for the sex channel or the speed channel or – and this one surely has greater potential – Jewish Television, with its Sabra Price is Right show and its twentyfour- hour UJA fundraiser, and its Klezmer music nights, and its Yiddish kitchen sink dramas, and more WWII retrospectives than even The History Channel, and – a real cost saver – nothing at all on between Friday sundown and Saturday evening. But books? Not likely. Why bother, especially when it’s also an exercise in inevitable punishment, since television is usually blamed for the demise of the book itself ?

I announced my suspicion earlier that few of you subscribe to BookTelevision. Well, if you haven’t yet, you’re not alone. A senior bureaucrat at the Canada Council we’d invited to discuss the Governor General’s Award the other day asked what format the show might take – since, he confessed, he didn’t subscribe to digital TV. "Well," I said. "Since this is the only book channel on the planet, a real first, don’t you think it behooves a Canadian – particularly of your high cultural office – to support it?" I can be a little touchy, I admit, feeling that this venture, while worthy in the extreme, could not suffer more from obscurity and neglect. (Oh, by the way, if I do pique your interest and you decide to subscribe, I will throw in a discount on any Nair hair-removal product with every subscription.)

It’s quite amazing to think of the barrage of disdain that’s been aimed at television from the start. Lee Loevinger himself, the Commissioner of the FCC between 1963 and 1968 in the US, once commented, "Television is really the golden goose that lays scrambled eggs. It is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar." Television is something absolutely everyone feels qualified to criticize, regardless of their profession. Remember Frank Lloyd Wright, he of the immortal, "Television is bubble gum for the mind." And then Groucho Marx (though he can be forgiven for obvious reasons): "I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on I go into the other room to read a good book."