The Magic Box

My primary motivation for reading The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window (2021) was a result of how much I enjoyed Rob Young's wonderful Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (2010), a book about the meandering progress of British folk music throughout the 20th c......more

I now want to watch pretty much every film or TV prog discussed in this book, which must be a recommendation. If you grew up watching British TV during the author's formative years (70s-80s) and have any feeling for the fantastical, folkloric or other cultural margins, you're in for a treat.......more

Wonderful. An idiosyncratic history of British television and film with a focus on the weird. The author describes his focus as 'telemetric folklore' and that's exactly what we get. The thematically arranged chapters really help make sense of the varied curiosities discussed.......more

Rob Young’s Electric Eden was a meandering (in the best sense of the word) and comprehensive survey of the ‘visionary music’ of Britain; a book that delighted in its own freedom to wander and to explore the unexpected lanes and byways of Britain’s various folk revivals. The Magic Box does something......more

To be honest I'm not sure what the overall thesis was, or even if it intended to present one. But for a child of the 70s/80s this is just a wonderful reminiscence of (mostly) the outer-edges of popular tv. It taps into that nostalgia addiction in exactly the same way as those endless (and tbh pretty......more