Hello and happy new year. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast, the first episode of 2024. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to

James Meek, novelist, journalist and a contributing editor at the LRB. He has a piece in the latest

issue of the paper on the new TV, or the old new TV. It's a review of Pandora's Box,

the greed, lust, and lies that broke television by Peter Biscan, which covers, as James puts it,

the time some perhaps premature nostalgiaists are already calling the golden age of television

from the debuts of Oz Sex and the City and the Sopranos in the 1990s to the recently

finished succession. Hello James, and thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure.

So there's a story here about money, about the way TV is funded and the way that's changed over

the decades. And there's also a story about technology and the way that's changed. And then there's

a third story about the TV shows themselves. There, of course, those three stories are

interrelated or intricately interwoven, as is sometimes

said, of the plots of TV drama.

And it's perhaps hard to remember now what TV was like 30 years ago.

Well, it is a bit strange to be talking here in London, and you and I grew up in a British TV environment about the American TV

environment of the of the 80s. I suppose that's where where this story begins. But we were very

much influenced by it in our, well, of course you're somewhat younger than me, but in the limited channel world of the British

TV in the 80s, of course, we were subjected or privileged to watch an enormous amount of

American TV of varying quality. And the way that the system worked in the 1980s was that it was in America was that it was very much dominated by the networks.

The broadcast networks, you can pick up with an aerial, to put it crudely.

And the three networks were ABC, CBS and NBC.

And they were the shows.

They were the ones who produced the shows, put the shows And it were broadcast in a particular way they were funded in a particular way they were funded by ads they were broadcasts with these

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