Richard and Judy

Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan were long the British equivalent of Oprah, better known as just Richard and Judy. But they’ve moved over from their popular big-time TV morning show to a “tiny audience on the digital channel Watch,” notes Nicholas Clee, and the British book industry is fearful of losing the kind of sales they inspired — particularly of huge, mega-selling hits by big celebrities. (See this earlier MobyLives report.)

Of course, as Clee notes in a commentary for the New Statesman called “How Celebrities Saved, Then Killed, The Book Trade”: “Some people will welcome these developments. The industry has cultivated an unhealthy obsession with celebrities, they argue, to the detriment of proper books and authors. Richard and Judy may have created careers and selected some excellent books, but they have gained too much influence. Pity the new novelist who does not get their attention ….”

Except it’s not Richard and Judy’s fault, says Clee. It’s “the consequence of the conglomeration in publishing and bookselling; of the proliferation of media; and of the undermining of a cultural consensus that could tolerate, without embarrassment, such concepts as literary excellence.”