The Book Tower [30/01/80]

1980-01-30
26m

Presenter Tom Baker chooses six books out of the thousands that are stored in the Book Tower.

On screens for just over a decade, from 1979 to 1989, The Book Tower was produced by Yorkshire Television and found many delightful and creative ways to bring books to life for young readers.

This episode from 1980 sees longest-serving presenter Tom Baker (then still in post as The Doctor) picking several books from the dusty, overflowing shelves of the titular Tower. Across six segments, the programme presents a handful of approaches to showcasing stories on television. An excerpt from Geoffrey Kilner's Jet, a Gift to the Family is presented as a kind of photo-essay with still images of live actors, while William Steig's picture book Amos & Boris is given a more familiar treatment, with the camera zooming into the pages for a closer look at the illustrations. Later, Usborne's series of pocket-sized reference books, the Spotter's Guides, are put to the test by a group of kids both in the studio and out in the wild, and a story of Baba Yaga from Russian folklore is dramatised in a short segment that cuts between Baker's unblinking narration and scenes featuring a young actor and a talking mouse and cat.

The programme as a whole is held together by Baker, whose charming yet off-kilter screen presence is seen here in full effect. Intense, yet playful, he fits in perfectly with a heightened and somewhat eerie mood that accompanies the Book Tower's grand country manor exterior (Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire) and its chilling opening title theme, taken from Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock-classical album Variations (which also gave us the title theme for The South Bank Show). Fittingly, it's Baker who has the final word, performing a feat of storytelling by 'reading' Jan Pieńkowski's intricately-designed but entirely narrative-free pop-up book, Haunted House.

CHILDREN'S. Presenter Tom Baker chooses six books out of the thousands that
are stored in the Book Tower.

Bookworms Welcome!: Literature for Kids

Once upon a time... How television celebrates the joy of reading

The magic of reading is all in the mind, with words and pictures lighting up our imaginations and taking us on extraordinary journeys without us ever having to leave our armchairs. And yet, the relationship between books and television has existed since the very beginning, with countless stories making the leap from page to screen and back again. Picking up the baton from radio, television was the great entertainer and educator of the latter half of the 20th century. Dramatisations of literary classics and contemporary page-turners are a familiar fixture in TV schedules, but beyond the art of adaptation lie programmes that capture the joy of reading, that bring books to life and that take us behind the curtain to meet the beloved wizards and dreamweavers whose work delights us all. This is no more the case than in the world of children’s books and, more broadly, learning to read. Within this collection, you will find documentaries and discussion programmes, government campaign films and local news reports, magazine shows and more. And at the heart of it all is the power of the story and the written word, and the simple, magical pleasure of reading and being read to. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

24 videos in this collection