Notes from a Small Screen: Watching British Television, 2015-2023

Despite what you might have read elsewhere, television in the early 21st century wasn’t all about Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Succession. So what were the people of Great Britain actually watching in the last days of the second Elizabethan age? And who will bear witness to it?

This book will. Drawn from eight years’ worth of Paul Kirkley’s Waitrose Weekend TV columns, Notes from a Small Screen offers a witty, informed and wide-ranging survey of recent British television, from prestige dramas such as Happy Valley to barely-remembered curios from the byways of broadcasting (Flockstars and Choccywoccydoodah, anyone?).

Along the way, it will seek to answer such pressing questions as: Which is the harder watch: Chernobyl, or Gregg Wallace eating a Scotch egg? Can quantum physics solve the mystery of where one series of Casualty ends and the next begins? How did a bread man become Liverpool’s most famous Hollywood since Frankie Goes To? Is Shetland just Bergerac with bigger jumpers? Do dragons even live in dens? And did Ted Hastings ever get a plumber to fix his toilet (and was the problem some bent copper)?

In addition to more than 800 reviews, the book includes a new 5,000-word introductory essay, The Last Golden Age of British Television?

Notes from a Small Screen: Watching British Television 2015-2023 is available now – order your copy here.

You can read some extracts from the book here.

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About the author

Paul Kirkley is a writer and journalist. In the course of his often unserious career, he has been challenged to a fight by Tom Hanks (who was joking), called a “pathetic worm” by Jeffrey Archer (who wasn’t), been to the pub with Matt Smith and into space with David Tennant, had his teabag squeezed by Michelle Keegan and been received in hotel rooms by everyone from Joan Collins and Jake Gyllenhaal to Jessica Ennis-Hill and Jack Whitehall (and that’s just the Js).

He’s won some awards, lost a lot more awards, and remains, to the best of his knowledge, the only person in the world to have been paid to watch Danger Mouse by a supermarket.

In addition to being Waitrose Weekend’s resident TV critic, Paul has written about television for Rolling Stone, Radio Times, The Guardian, the New Statesman, Doctor Who Magazine, TV Years, SFX and Yahoo Movies.

He is the author of two bestselling books, Space Helmet for a Cow: The Mad, True Story of Doctor Who (Volumes I and II).

He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two sons, none of whom believe watching television is a proper job. And they’re right.