Television and radio announcers have a distinctive but necessarily rather limited critical vocabulary. They use up all their superlatives on "gripping sagas", "action-packed crime-busters" and "uproarious, side-splitting" comedies, and have little left with which to package anything more genuinely youthful, imaginative and funny. It reflects rather badly on everyday programming that Douglas Adams's clever science-fiction comedies The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy are unfamiliar enough to be introduced into the domestic arena as "zany" and "madcap", and it is a comment on the mass audience that the enjoyment of such unexceptionable pleasures should be thought of as some kind of cult.

[British programmes] such as I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, Monty Python's Flying Circus and Not the Nine O'Clock News manage to thrive on this special status—on the fact that they are held at a distance from the rest of the evening's offerings. They build up...