The Encyclopaedia of Cult Children's TV by Richard Lewis Buy at: Amazon

At a certain point in life you spend a lot of time discussing children's TV, and this book becomes fascinating.

If you grew up watching children's TV between about 1960 and 1988, you should own a copy of this book. Seriously. It's give you hours of entertainment.

It's not in a cover-to-cover read: it's an alphabetical list of shows, each with somewhere between a paragraph and a few pages of description. In that space an image of each show is created, along with some behind-the-scenes information (why Roobarb was wobbly; Hong Kong Phooey's full name revealed; Captain Pugwash myths dismissed; Rainbow ones confirmed).

One of the nicer touches is that other shows are cross-referenced in the text, which had me reading about one show only to do an "ooh!" and jumping to another. It lives up to the title of encyclopedia, but don't take it too seriously.

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