Coming to you live!

For most people the opposite of 'Iive' is 'dead'. For people concerned with making television programmes, the opposite is 'recorded'. The stories collected and presented in this volume by Denis Norden, Sybil Harper and Norma Gilbert all evoke the 'golden age' of television - the forties and fifties, when practically every BBC and ITV programme went out live. There were no re-takes, no out-takes, no second chances. If an actor in a play made a mistake - if he forgot his lines or walked into the scenery - the entire viewing audience were witnesses.

Those who have contributed reminiscences to this volume were not actors. They were working at that time as cameramen, vision-mixers, producers, set designers, secretaries, make-up assistants, Floor Managers, costume designers, engineers, scene-hands, dressers, producers - the people behind the scenes whose skills, hard work and resourcefulness were often the only things that kept a programme on the air when it ran into difficulties.

There are in this collection hilarious tales of things that went wrong. But often, just as fascinating and endearing are the hidden success stories - the Floor Manager who had to crawl all the way across a set to replace a missing prop and was then forced to spend an entire scene curled in a ball on the floor; why Black Rod always wrote on his script 'Wait for Mum'; how they made up the rats for 'I984'; why Richard Dimbleby was obliged to stuff his microphone up his tailcoat. And there are unexpected glimpses of stars and personalities from a new angle.

Coming to You Live! offers a rare delight. It brings the reader authentic and unfamiliar glimpses behind the screens of a familiar medium. Denis Norden provides a knowledgeable and amusing guide to this insider's tour of the various departments that make up television: Light Entertainment, Drama, Outside Broadcasts, News, Current Affairs, Commercials - while the entertaining collection of personal anecdotes provides intriguing memories of its most exciting era.

Coming to You Live! reflects the fun and enthusiasm of that time. Television may now be old enough to have its own history books, but this is the first book to chronicle its folklore.