A journey to revisit and revive the history of the ‘idiot's lantern’, ‘A History of Television in 100 Programmes’ gathers eighty-odd years of televisual evolution.Celebrating and mimicking the serendipitous joy of its scheduling jumble this book records just how much stranger it used to be, how much more brave, foolhardy, unselfconscious, creatively energetic, before commerce knocked those fascinating corners off its character. At its best and at its worst, television is brutally honest and charmingly deceitful, sentimentally partisan and coldly dispassionate, obscenely lavish and ludicrously cheap.This varied hundred explores those overlooked gems alongside justly wiped follies, overcooked spectaculars and underfunded experiments that are as much a part of TV history as the national treasures and stone cold classics. They can tell us just as much, and sometimes more, about the nature of television, those who crafted it and those who lapped it up, from the days when television was at the most exciting, creative stage of any medium: a cottage industry with the world at its feet.