Television celebrities are paid silly money, says Jonathan Ross' sister-in-law
Amanda Ross, the woman who founded the Richard and Judy Book Club tells of a new chapter in her career in an interview with Celia Walden.
Once, during a night out in London, Amanda Ross overheard a man on a neighbouring table castigating his wife for reading a book recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club.
"The woman mentioned Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and he began to give her an ear-bashing for reading something recommended by a TV show. She let him finish, and said: 'Actually, darling, it's up for the Booker Prize'."
"God knows it's gratifying enough to look around airports and train stations and see our stickers on the front of every book," shrugs the 47 year-old.
"And when you have authors like Julian Barnes and William Boyd being supportive, who cares about pompous people like that man."
Having been responsible for an £185 million boon to the book trade, the creation of 50 best-sellers and at least 10 millionaire authors, Ross was determined not to let the club die along with the Richard and Judy Show when it was axed by mutual agreement from the Watch channel in July.
This week, the details of a new programme, The TV Book Club to be aired initially on More4 from January, were announced.
Aside from a panel of five celebrity presenters – the comedians Jo Brand and Dave Spikey, the Inspector Lynley actor, Nathaniel Parker, the How to Look Good Naked host Gok Wan and the Strictly Come Dancing contestant Laila Rouass – the format will remain the same. Publishers each put forward six books, with the resulting 800 condensed down to 10 by five in-house judges.
It unnerves Ross that the book club has been around long enough to affect a book's lifeline from the outset. "Publishers will tell me that they only bought a book because they saw it as a Richard and Judy Book Club winner, which makes me not want to pick it.
''Similarly, people will tell me, 'This is the new Labyrinth' but we've done Labyrinth – why would we want to do it again? There is no such thing as a winning formula."
Anything that is well written and structured can be a great read, she insists, "and no book is ever chucked out without me looking at it personally".
On the floor of the Kennington offices of Cactus TV, where Ross is managing director alongside her husband of 20 years, Simon Ross (brother of Jonathan), stand precarious towers of rejects, alongside a box marked "Toys".
Just as I am about to pose the question, two Tibetan terriers rampage through the room before, at Ross's command, extending themselves meekly at her feet.
As with so many powerful media women, Ross has often been painted as the stern task master – "and scary, too, which I don't like. Yes, I like high heels and have a penchant for Prada, but really…"
At 5ft 5 in tall, with tousled blonde hair and a girlish laugh, any severity is notably absent. She speaks with precision, the caveats present in her sentence structure indicating that her likes and dislikes are instinctive, rather than calculated. Yet every now and then one glimpses the toughness of someone unwavering in her aims.
"The book world is not my industry and I don't earn any money out of the club, so it doesn't matter if I'm honest and upset people, because I'm not trying to fit in."
Having grown up in a council flat in Pitsea, Essex, Ross says simply: "I used books to escape."
Television, however, was always her chosen career, and after a spell as a presenter, and years producing one of the most successful daytime TV shows of all time, Ross and her husband (whom she describes as "certainly the cleverest and funniest of the Ross brothers") came up with the idea of the book club.
"Every time a book was featured on the show, sales would sky-rocket, so we looked at what Oprah was doing in the States and came up with our own version."
Ross's absence of literary pretensions has been credited with being one reason behind the success of the club, although commendably, she has always resisted the temptation to cross over to the other side and dumb-down.
"We've been accused of picking 'literary books,'" she smiles. "The term can be scary to a lot of people, who are afraid of giving their opinion and sounding stupid – but my view is that if we've picked something on the show, people are more inclined to give it a go."
Remembering her admission, three years ago, that she had never read any Martin Amis, I ask whether she has got around to him yet. "No," she cackles. "Actually he was at [Random House chairman] Gail Rebuck's party the other night and I was skirting around him thinking, 'Oh dear, I still haven't read anything you've written' ." Has it become a point of honour? "Not at all."
Although not a fan, she defends chick-lit ("it is the only genre some people read and good luck to them"), believes ghostwriting to be "an honourable profession which has spared us some really terrible writing", and puts the recently reported demise of the celebrity memoir down to greed.
"I think we've seen the last of the big spenders in publishing for a while. There are some great celebrity memoirs out there but it's ridiculous to bring one out every two years, or when the person is too young. To make up the sales for a £2 million advance, you have to sell 750,000 copies – and that's just to break even.''
Like the swollen salaries of television celebrities (her brother-in-law Jonathan is often cited as an example), there was always going to be a moment of reckoning. "As broadcasters we were being forced into forking out ridiculous amounts of money. What kind of a person can literally be worth £50,000 for an afternoon of their time? It's wrong – it really is wrong."
Despite her progressive ideas in the book world – she is on the advisory board for Room to Read, a literacy program for the developing world and has campaigned for all the book club titles to be available in Braille – Ross remains unconvinced that electronic readers such as the Kindle will take off.
"It's just like reading from a big BlackBerry," she says. "You can't curl up with a screen, can you?"
This Christmas, once the "massive and loud" Ross family gathering is over, she and her husband may escape to the renovated house in Italy they bought six years ago – and read. "It's sad, really, because I guess the book club has ruined reading for me, in a way. But I do still feel that books are unique; nothing else exists which is completely your picture of the world."
• The TV Book Club airs on More4 (with repeats on Channel 4) from January.
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