Cheap and cheerful TV mag (TV Choice)

Member Name: charliebrown

Product:	TV Choice
Date:	18/11/01 (2813 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Simple, Clear layout

Disadvantages: No padding articles to go with it

TV Choice is a cheap and cheerful TV mag that for 4 ten pences will provide you with your weekly listings ... and very little else.

Arriving in newsagents each Tuesday, the magazine opens with around 20 pages of general articles and advertisements on the weeks coming attractions. You can expect three pages of soap news, with brief resumes of the happenings in each soap for the previousweek, plus an idea of what is coming up this week. There is also a regular page for kids TV, though this is banal and uninspiring in the extreme, I doubt any kids will read these pages. The film reviews are reasonably detailed, with a rating system based on 4 stars, and a nice idea of a big tick denoting a film suitable for family viewing. Naturally, only terrestrial films are mentioned.

The listings themselves are well laid out, with two pages for terrestrial channels, and then four more pages for each day giving the digital listings (though no details come with these). Videoplus codes are given, where appropriate, and each channel has it's own colour to make searching easier. The comments on analogue programmes can sometimes be quite witty, which is nice to see.

At the back of the mag you will find little apart form a quiz page and a letters page, though the letters rarely get any form of editorial comment, which is a shame.

The overall impression, is of a mag which serves its purpose very well, but provides little extra content, though this is reflected in the price. If all you want is to know what's on the box tonight, and don't buy a daily/weekend newspaper, then TV Choice is great. Just don;t expect it to provide you with a weeks worth of reading material - you may want a copy of Hello to go alongside it!

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