In our first year on the air we featured, in a mix of documentaries, archival footage, news reports, in-depth interviews, book fair coverage and even vampirological game shows: Allen Ginsberg, Alistair MacLeod, Andrew Pyper, Anthony Bourdain, Armistead Maupin, Christopher Hitchens, Chuck Palahniuk, David Suzuki, Douglas Coupland, J. M. Coetzee, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Gilbert Sorrentino, Irvine Welsh, Margaret Atwood, Mario Puzo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Franti, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Evelyn Waugh, Naomi Wolf, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Anaïs Nin, Nick Bantock, Nino Ricci, Paul McCartney, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Yann Martel, Yashar Kemal, Naomi Klein, Austin Clarke, Umberto Eco, Jamaica Kincaid, Margaret Drabble, Brian Fawcett, Michael IgnatieV, Susan Faludi, Timothy Findley, Mark Kingwell, Peter Carey, Jonathan Franzen, Mavis Gallant, Annie Cohen-Solal, Aharon Shabtai, Janette Turner Hospital, Barbara Gowdy, Ian McEwan, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, William Gibson, George Orwell, Melvyn Bragg, William Baldwin …

I don’t sound too defensive, do I? Of course, it is possible that we had these people on the channel in a very stupid way, asking them dumb questions, misunderstanding everything they said, wrote, and stood for. But I don’t think so. More likely is that unimaginative people cannot even conceive of our full potential. You should see most people’s faces when they hear there’s a book channel, as they picture the inert tome on the screen with its indecipherable title and leaden promise, the farthest thing imaginable from exciting television, and then the author, seated with a TV host afficted with myopia and dandruff, answering academic questions in a monotone. I have a certain sympathy with this view, but I was saddened to see that in a recent season opener issue of The Globe and Mail’s Broadcast Week surveying the most intelligent new TV channels in Canada, BookTelevision was not even mentioned.

How do we address this problem? For surely the world opened up in books is infinite in its variety and potential majesty, and therefore on TV too – a place at present almost entirely unexplored, scarcely imagined, like Borges’ Uqbar with its transparent tigers and towers of blood and playing cards and mythological terrors. Now, obviously, some people will never be persuaded, but for the reachable ones our channel must be advertised as funny, aggressive, original, challenging, and respectful of their intelligence. I say, “advertise” because yes, we are marketing literacy here. That is as much my job this week as interviewing writers in Turkish prisons was last month. And so the channel must adopt all the tricks and tropes of traditional TV, with its theme music and animated openings and game shows and news shows and bumpers and stings and entertainment beat reporters and – to utterly convince the dubious viewer that this is a channel worth watching – ads; ads for expensive cars, international airlines, and computers.