Radio Times (Radio Times)

Member Name: litefoot

Product:	Radio Times
Date:	06/09/00 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Comprehensive terrestrial channel listings

Disadvantages: More BBC than anything else, uninformative reviews

Radio Times is the best listing magazine around. Its been around longer than any other. Even when the market was flooded with other listings magazines in the early 90s, it was still way ahead of them in the quality stakes.

The magazine’s listings for terrestial channels have a lot of information and are attractively laid out (instead of squashing listings on to one page.) All of the information about programme schedules that you could want is here. The interviews by Andrew Duncan are always interesting, and the recent extracts from Terry Wogans autobiography alone are worth the price of admission alone (great reading for any television enthusiast).

Its not without its disadvantages though. Theres a heavy bias towards BBC programmes in their articles (so a lot of ITV and Channel 4 programmes get less coverage); the ‘highlights’ section for each day doesn’t really tell you whether a programme is bad or good; and the satellite/digital channel listings are minimal, nowhere near as good as the terrestial listings (though to be fair, there are so many channels to cover).

Television has declined in quality in recent years, which means RT isn’t as interesting as it used to be but its still comprehensive enough to be worth buying.

Summary: