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Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television
This is the first book to comprehensively cover the earliest days of this century's most important medium and its inventors. Filled with entertaining anecdotes and rare photos, this vivid account includes remarkable stories of many TV firsts, like the first commercial, soap opera, and more.
- GenresTechnologyNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 4, 2012
If you think that television starts in 1948, or even at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, think again. Television broadcasts--attempts at television as we know it--were underway even before network radio was fully launched. This book is fascinating. I've been studying television, formally and informally, for 45 years. I didn't know half of the things in this book, which is unusual for me when it comes to a book on television. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to know the back story of how television came into being.
December 3, 2019
Overall, this is a highly entertaining read. While I took issue with the layout (omitting the photo pages from the book's flow was an odd choice) and the editing (which let slip more and more errors as the text progressed), it's definitely worth reading. Tons of funny little stories come to light throughout.
March 2, 2011
The foibles and anecdotes of TV before the "Golden Age" in the 50s; yeah, this is a fun book. The writing style is incredibly accessible, it's funny because there was so much going wrong (as with any new technology or endeavor, or technological endeavor), and it's really interesting to read about all of this stuff that was going on when most people only think of the wars and the Depression in this time period (20s-48).
It's held back from being five stars because I felt that there wasn't much connection between chapters--Ritchie would mention a name or an incident in chapter 5 that he'd spent four pages discussing in chapter 2 as if it was a new bit of information, for example. Did he expect the reader to skip around a lot within this instead of reading it straight through? This may be an editing problem, as well, and that was also a thing--lot of editing mistakes, in terms of typos, setting goofs, and the like. Also, I felt like this was written either for people who lived through the 50s or have read other television history books, because often Ritchie would mention a name and say something to the effect of, "And people think she got her start on this show, but here she is in bad make-up in the 30s! Wow!" And I would be unimpressed because I have no idea who that person is, having neither lived through the 50s nor read about the television on back then. My knowledge of that time consists of Howdy Doody and the Abbot and Costello show, really, so I felt kind of lost sometimes.
But this is a fun, fast read with a lot of interesting information and some really hilariously painful stories, as well as very candid assessments of the politics of inventions and creating media empires. I'd be interested to see what Ritchie would have to say about the comparison between TV then and now, what with the digital revolution and the steady degrade of programming toward a lot of the same types that they tried in the early years; after reading this, "Minute to Win It" and "Mom Swap" make more sense, actually. This was written in '94, though, so it's slightly dated--but definitely still worth it.
It's held back from being five stars because I felt that there wasn't much connection between chapters--Ritchie would mention a name or an incident in chapter 5 that he'd spent four pages discussing in chapter 2 as if it was a new bit of information, for example. Did he expect the reader to skip around a lot within this instead of reading it straight through? This may be an editing problem, as well, and that was also a thing--lot of editing mistakes, in terms of typos, setting goofs, and the like. Also, I felt like this was written either for people who lived through the 50s or have read other television history books, because often Ritchie would mention a name and say something to the effect of, "And people think she got her start on this show, but here she is in bad make-up in the 30s! Wow!" And I would be unimpressed because I have no idea who that person is, having neither lived through the 50s nor read about the television on back then. My knowledge of that time consists of Howdy Doody and the Abbot and Costello show, really, so I felt kind of lost sometimes.
But this is a fun, fast read with a lot of interesting information and some really hilariously painful stories, as well as very candid assessments of the politics of inventions and creating media empires. I'd be interested to see what Ritchie would have to say about the comparison between TV then and now, what with the digital revolution and the steady degrade of programming toward a lot of the same types that they tried in the early years; after reading this, "Minute to Win It" and "Mom Swap" make more sense, actually. This was written in '94, though, so it's slightly dated--but definitely still worth it.
February 18, 2014
The late film director Michael Ritchie wrote a fine book about the origins of television. This book has been on my shelf for years and I just now got a chance to read it. It is very enjoyable and highly entertaining.
September 22, 2016
It amazes me to know that the inventor of incubator and the TV was the same. :-)
January 6, 2017
An entertaining and informative look at a specific medium's rocky transition from a lab experiment to a full-fledged form of mass communication.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews