Television critic for the Halifax Daily News, Ian Johnston styles himself “a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers and couch potatoes.” But given the contents of Johnston’s book, this fraternity isn’t worth its couches. Who is to blame for Johnston’s condition? Aylmer, the small, dull, Ontario tobacco community where he was born? Johnston’s parents, who allowed him to develop an obsession with horror movies that apparently taught him only to be afraid of dark houses? Or the medium itself, which, in Johnston’s view, isn’t at all like real life, for if it was, wouldn’t it be cancelled after one episode?

Johnston estimates that he has watched the equivalent of six years of TV, which exceeds, he claims, the length of the First World War or the Second World War, and the period of time taken by Shakespeare to write 16 plays. Surely this is not a boast, for if it is, he should remember his Grade 3 teacher’s comment: “Sometimes he tends to get carried away by his enthusiasm and requires a settling influence.”

The trouble with this collection of profiles, interviews, rambling commentaries, and parodies is that the writing imitates the worst part of the medium it surveys. Unable to separate his life from television events – a troublesome French test is related to Dallas; Bugs Bunny to his mother’s hair spray; his father to Ward Cleaver – Johnston provides the equivalent of sound bites, commercials, promos, and banal editorials. Many of his anecdotes and profiles are witless and pointless. Some take us into areas unrelated to the medium, while others (such as the satire of the 1979 Juno Awards) dwindle to a close. The satire hits too many easy targets – beauty pageants, the sanitized world of television family life, syndicated overkill, the implausible chronology of The Waltons, and censorship – without reaching complex essences the way American critic Michael Arlen or British critic Clive James would. When, like TV, Johnston promises something significant (for example, the subversiveness of Mighty Mouse), he is no more than banal.