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.