The Ultimate TV Guide : New Updated Edition ([Rev.] ed)

It's a TV jungle out there. Five terrestrial channels, twenty more on satellite/cable, more if you have the technology.

What you need is a guide through the tangled, forbidding forest of multi-channel, non-stop, viewer-hungry TV. And here it is. At the flick of a page, look up the programme, read a critical overview, peruse the cast.

You can, for greater viewing safety, cross-reference artists and behind camera crew (credits include producers, directors, writers) and check out their back-catalogue.

Then amaze the rest of the sofa with your erudition, before dazzling them with your grasp of totally useless trivia.

So what's included and what's not? Chronologically, The Ultimate TV Guide spans 1946 - the oldest programme is Muffin The Mule - to the present, from the age of black and white nostalgia to the hi-tech, high-definition present.

There's no news and no documentaries. All forms of TV fiction are covered - crime, westerns, sci-fi, soaps, comedy, adventure, horror along with children's TV and light entertainment (quizzes and gameshows).Of these the authors have collected the classics, the innovators, the lost treasures, the obscure objects of cult desire, the hits - the shows, in short, of screen note.

Even if it's only because, like the BBC's sand-and-sangria melodrama Eldorado, they were such total turkeys. And why not, they've also put in a few because they like 'em and so should you. (The sci-fi 'Japanimation' The Guyver comes to mind).

All have been broadcast in the UK. Completely updated in this edition for the digital age.