In January 2004, Bob Geldof appeared on the Richard and Judy daytime television programme as a special guest on an episode of their new weekly book club, loosely modelled on Oprah Winfrey's in the US. Invited to discuss Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, a little-known novel about Irish emigrants on board a ship to New York in 1847, Geldof called it "absolutely gorgeous" and "a modern masterpiece in which history never supersedes the story." He described how he raced home from a late-night gig to finish the book, and quoted entire passages from memory. Richard and Judy chattily chimed in with their own opinions. The book's sales then quadrupled, from 4,421 copies in the week before the show to 18,255, and continued to climb, totalling about 600,000.
In the book trade this is known as the Richard and Judy effect. In 2004, sales of their 16 chosen titles totalled 4,297,236, worth £25.3m in revenue. In 2005 their picks sold 3,345,622, worth more than £18.4m. According to Giles Elliott, media editor of the Bookseller, "Richard and Judy can now be said to be responsible for more than one in 50 books sold in the UK." Rodney Troubridge, fiction buyer for Waterstone's, puts it more dramatically: "The uplift in Richard and Judy titles has been absolutely amazing. For Star of the Sea, there was a 1,200 per cent increase in sales. People are often buying the entire set of Richard and Judy selections, not just one book—they trust what they are being offered. I think the old days of book reviews are over."
Judy Finnegan, the older of the two presenters, is a sexy matron whose substantial diamond cross always sits pointedly atop a no less substantial cleavage. She frequently has to rein in Richard Madeley, her more exuberant, outspoken husband. Their unscripted marital bickering has attracted millions of television viewers for the last 18 years; the current magazine-style programme is watched by a daily audience of 3m on Channel 4. The ten-minute weekly book club, says Madeley, "didn't begin life as a means of boosting the publishing industry. That is a by-product. We were just trying to make interesting television. We had actually resisted it before, but when Oprah launched hers, we wondered whether it might work here." He points to significant differences in format: "The writer is never in the studio with us. We make a short film in the location where the book is set, and in three tightly edited minutes, you get a real sense of the creativity behind the book and the personality of the author. Then we have the studio discussion, and we quite unashamedly cast celebrities for that. So you go on a carefully sculpted journey, which cunningly obscures the fact that you're talking about something which couldn't be less visual. Television and books shouldn't really go together. But we discovered that they do."
Madeley says that the Richard and Judy ethos is also very different from Oprah's book club. "We have the kind of conversation you'll have with someone on the train. You might see somebody reading a book you were thinking of buying and you say to them, sorry to bother you, but is it any good, what's it like? It has that kind of honest flavour about it." And they very often disagree about the books they feature: "Judy really didn't like The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; she felt the writer was exploiting parental fears for their daughters. I, on the other hand, thought it was a wonderful and incredibly brave book. [The Lovely Bones sold 1m copies and won the club's first Best Read award in 2004, voted for by the viewers.] Neither of us liked Monica Ali's Brick Lane. We said, it must have a lot of merit, it has been nominated for the Booker, but we just didn't see it." But those who thought that Richard and Judy represent only the lowbrow end of the literary spectrum were confounded by last year's award, which went to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, one of last year's most challenging literary novels.
The selections are not Richard and Judy's own choice. The controlling hand behind the show is its producer Amanda Ross, co-director of Cactus TV. Ross (who looks rather like JK Rowling) came up with the idea and the format, after deciding that "we needed our audience feedback to be more critical than Oprah's. Negative things can be said, and sometimes we have a heated debate. We never know what people are going to say. I choose the books; Richard and Judy themselves discover them along with the viewers. And because the concept is bigger and the selections more inclusive, Richard and Judy are, proportionately to the size of our countries, more powerful than Oprah. Our viewers know that we have done an exhaustive search for the best books on their behalf—they trust us." She points out that when the BBC tried to produce a similar programme (Page Turners), it was unable to attract more than 600,000 viewers.
How does she pick the books? "I read a lot… I come from a working-class home where we didn't have books at home. For me, they were exciting and exotic… to satisfy my appetite, my mother made me a member of a book club when I was seven. I used to get packages of books every two weeks." Ross's only criterion is that the books are "a cracking read."
Richard and Judy are now an important fixture in most publishers' minds. Alexandra Pringle, editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury, was "very sceptical" at the start, but now says "we're all struck dumb with admiration. For me, the most interesting thing was to see at what a high level the mass audience can read, what they really enjoy, not what publishers imagine. The reader cannot be patronised." Gail Rebuck, CEO of the Random House group, attributes Richard and Judy's success to "the authenticity with which the books are discussed." Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins, agrees: "It's had a big impact and has genuinely expanded the market. Anything which motivates people to not only be passionate about books but to go out and buy them has to be good for the industry."
Dan Franklin, publishing director at Jonathan Cape (of Random House), concedes that the effect is "positive"—but with a few reservations: "When you're reading a submission, you're thinking to yourself, hmm, Richard and Judy would like this… I was suddenly aware that as a publisher one is buying a certain book for that sort of reason. I do think that if you're a slightly tougher, more difficult writer it makes life even harder than it was to start with." Franklin is also worried about "an obvious tendency—perfectly understandable given the effect it has on one's figures—to become obsessed by it. There is a big problem anyway with the book trade in this country at the moment: suddenly all the power is held by very few people. The famous Scott Pack [buying manager at Waterstone's, who has just announced his departure] bestrides the world like a colossus. And Amanda Ross does the same in a way, via Richard and Judy." Will he be submitting more books to them? "God yes, there are teams of people at Random House who think of very little else. We discuss it regularly, the moment is coming up when we have to submit for the next slot. The sale of over 600,000 copies transforms your entire year and makes your life a great deal simpler if you've got that behind you in January." Despite his reservations, Franklin thinks that the fact that Cloud Atlas ("the best literary novel of that year; should have won the Booker") won Richard and Judy's Best Read is "quite remarkable… totally wonderful."
The presence of several titles on both Richard and Judy and the Booker prize lists suggests a blurring of the divide between literary and popular tastes. Minna Fry, marketing director at Bloomsbury, believes that the Richard and Judy effect may have become more important than the Booker: "Many people are put off by the Booker connection, whereas Richard and Judy, with their interesting, not at all downmarket choice of books, give hope that the market can still grow. I would stop at nothing to gain their favour…"
Literary agent Patrick Walsh thinks that Richard and Judy reach "that undefined area, roughly lower middle class, which doesn't necessarily read the literary pages or listen to book programmes on the radio. It's great to bring novelists like Joseph O'Connor to them." Caroline Gascoigne, literary editor of the Sunday Times, says that "because there is such a gap between highbrow and lowbrow in this country, I welcome things like Richard and Judy. David Mitchell's selection is very significant." Neill Denny, editor of the Bookseller, notes that "new readers are coming into the market, partly because of Richard and Judy. They are definitely part of a renaissance in British publishing."
Richard and Judy are even winning new readers for foreign titles, a notoriously difficult task in British publishing. "Half of our books are from abroad," says Ross. "The publisher of Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruís Zafón sent it to me and said if I liked it, they would bring the British publication forward; I did, so they did." And proceeded to sell over half a million copies.
Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of the Independent and a champion of foreign fiction, reads the Richard and Judy effect in a broader political context: "It connects with the reading group phenomenon… I think that in this era of ideological inertia, people really like to have something to argue about. There is a hunger for debate without rancour and, oddly, literature turns out to be a way to satisfy that."
Not everyone is full of praise. Ian Jack, editor of Granta (which pioneered the "list" approach to writers in 1983 with its set of young British novelists), says: "Whether it's good for fiction is a big question. Good for books, I suppose. But this is the age we live in. I sometimes think that we now know far more about the authors than about the books they write."
Inspired by the success of the Richard and Judy book club, in September 2004 Ross came up with a new television-based idea for the couple to promote: a Pop Idol-style competition, entitled "How to Get Published," to find previously unpublished novelists—with the prize to the winner of a publishing contract worth £50,000. Four finalists and a winner were chosen from over 46,000 submissions on the basis of a synopsis and one short chapter, and so impressed were the judges with the quality of the top entries that the publisher (Macmillan) decided to pay a smaller advance of £20,000 to each finalist and to publish all five books. All were edited by Maria Rejt, publishing director at Pan Macmillan. She believes that the fast-tracking of the writing within the context of the television show (the book had to be completed within eight weeks) will not harm the new authors, and that all will continue to write and publish: "I was looking for, and found, real voices." One of them, Rachel Zadok, was subsequently shortlisted for the Whitbread first novel award for Gem Squash Tokoloshe.
But most of those I spoke to who had nothing but praise for the Richard and Judy book club were more sceptical about this literary "beauty contest." Alexandra Pringle says that, "whenever publishers have competitions it's a way of publicising themselves as a company; it never works. You lose sight of what you're there for—promoting books and authors only."
The winner of "How to Get Published" was a 52-year-old grandmother, Christine Aziz, with a dystopian novel called The Olive Readers, set "after the demise of the American empire, when the world is run by corporations and books have been banned." Macmillan has already sold foreign rights to Germany and Spain. Joseph O'Connor, who helped to judge the competition, described Spencer Jordan, another finalist who wrote a critically acclaimed psychological novel about a man in prison (Journeys in the Dead Season) as "a future Booker winner." And so it all comes full circle: an author who owes his wide popularity to Richard and Judy (and Bob Geldof) boosts an unknown Richard and Judy discovery, with talk of future Booker success.
The current Richard and Judy book club selection has already helped place Kate Mosse's novel Labyrinth at the top of the charts. Giles Elliott of the Bookseller reports that: "The mass market paperback edition of Labyrinth more than doubled its weekly sales after being featured on the show in the last week of January. Its sales that week of 51,206 established a new record for an R&J pick, sending it straight to number one in the charts. It was the first Book Club selection to hit top spot since the first, Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, two years ago." Despite some reservations, literary Britain is learning to love daytime television.
