The announcement of the annual reading list for Richard and Judy's Book Club has, in recent years, provoked a flurry of interest in the authors who have made the grade and rapid badging-up of the books in Waterstone's and Borders.
But the 10 books to be picked over by the king and queen of daytime TV, revealed at the weekend, seem to have barely dented the public consciousness this time round. That's probably because the couple have traded their teatime slot on Channel 4, where they regularly pulled in 3 million viewers a day, for the relative backwater obscurity of the Watch channel – only available to Sky or Virgin subscribers – where their viewing figures have fallen to a woeful 12,000.
Initial doubts that a daytime TV audience would be interested in modern literature were blown away by the success of the first experiment in 2004, which quickly led to seasonal book clubs for summer and Christmas. Any literary snobbishness was soon replaced by an industry buzz that translated into something concrete for the publishers: sales. Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea sold 14,000 copies when it was first released in 2002. When R&J chose it to be discussed and dissected on their show in 2004, encouraging viewers to buy it and read it along with them like a normal book club, sales went through the roof and it eventually shifted 600,000 copies. The phenomenon became known as the Richard and Judy effect, and a sticker proclaiming that a book had been chosen by the pair was a Midas touch for authors and publishers.
Just as Oprah Winfrey was credited with reigniting a popular passion for reading in the US, Richard and Judy's Book Club – masterminded by Amanda Ross, doyenne of their production company Cactus TV – is said to have breathed new life into the British publishing industry. Which makes it all the sadder that Richard and Judy have disappeared from mainstream terrestrial television. Not having the technological kit required to view Watch, I'm not sure what it's all about, but it does seem that the successful marriage of literature and TV for ordinary folks has come to a sad end.
The Richard and Judy effect was not only a shot in the arm for British publishing, but also served to dismiss the snobs who, whether overtly or by insinuation, condemned those who watch daytime TV as having no interest in reading – the subtext being that if you're around in the day to watch telly, you're probably breakfasting on Greggs sausage rolls and cooking up smack in your council-house kitchen.
Whether the books on the list – among them Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman and The Botler by Frances Osborne (wife of a certain George) – experience the R&J effect without the hosts owning the afternoon on terrestrial TV remains to be seen.
But with prophets of doom warning that the recession will hit publishing hard, the ministrations of Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan to the literary world have never been more keenly needed. Come back to the masses, R&J, before it's too late.
