OTT returns…

…in book form.

Yep, after all-but pledging over a year ago in our comments section that he would produce a paper compendium of the best of the website, Mark Jones from Broken TV has now done precisely that.

Priced £16.99, Off The Telly: The Best Bits of the British TV Website, 1999-2009 is available here.

It weighs in at over 300,000 words and 678 pages. Any profits from this endeavour will go to British Alzheimer’s charities.

In the meantime, website TV Cream is running a competition until June 3, 2011, where you can win a special version of the book. See here for more details.

Closedown

With the recent technical difficulties and all (still not resolved at the time of writing, but our webhosts have now fallen silent, so who knows?) I’ve been prompted to make a decision about this site’s future, or lack of.

As of today – and fast on the back of Ian’s excellent and final chart of the decade - there will be no more updates on offthetelly.co.uk. However, it will remain online, as is, until its HTML rusts into pixel dust… or someone pulls the plug. I will, though, be switching off the comments in due course.

The thing is, the recent technical kerfuffle really brought it home to me that I no longer have the time or the appetite to keep this thing running. When it looked like it might be wiped off the web altogether I actually felt – well – a fair bit of relief.

In addition, I  also firmly believe OTT’s time has passed. We’ve done 10 years of this and it was lots of fun, right? Read the story »

’09 in (quite a few) lines

And here we are, at the end of the usual seasonal flurry of updates on OTT. As ever, we’re bowing out for now with our review of the last 12 months of television.

It was the year in which The X Factor notched up its best ever ratings, Torchwood turned into a critically acclaimed BBC1 ratings blockbuster, C4 struggled to produce any memorable comedy, Not Going Out and Primeval were both axed… and then recommissioned, Chris Tarrant yet again failed to nail it with a Millionaire successor, and Richard and Judy got off  the TV sofa, possibly for good.

So, 2009. Here’s how we saw it »