SCANDALOUS...

Have you ever wondered just how the stories in television soap operas reach the screen?  The answer will shock you.

‘You may call this a confession if you like, but don’t call it an apology…’

TELEVISIONLAND is the tragi-comic, rags to riches story of a psychopath rising through the ranks on a television soap opera, killing as he goes.

Writing under a pseudonym, Ian Reid is a television professional with 20 years’ experience at the sharp end of soap opera production.  TELEVISIONLAND is his first novel.  This rambunctious tale of murder in successville plays out in a world Ian Reid is intimately familiar with.  The back-biting, the exploitation and the power games portrayed in the novel are drawn directly from real life.  Truth in TELEVSIONLAND is often stranger than fiction, so in that respect TELEVISIONLAND is indeed, a true story.   However, while fiction can be entertaining, truth can be actionable, so the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Ian Reid was inspired to write TELEVISIONLAND after reading Jon Ronson’s, The Psychopath Test.  Ronson’s book prompted Reid to ponder the question:  How would a fully functioning, murdering psychopath operate in the corporate environment?  TELEVISIONLAND is his answer to that question.  One surprising discovery Reid made in the writing of his novel was the similarity between the careerist power players in television and the actions of a textbook psychopath.   He found the difference to be one of degree rather than quality.  Psychopaths go further.  Simply put, psychopaths kill people while television executives, generally, do not.

The sad truth is that creatures like Jimmy Savile and Roger Ailes are not isolated cases.  Although television likes to claim it has cleaned up its act, corruption and exploitation remain rife in the industry.   Advancement in return for sexual favours is common.  And so is professional damage if those advances are refused.  That is only one of television’s many dirty secrets that Ian Reid exposes in TELEVISIONLAND.  He lifts television’s rock and looks underneath to find what is crawling there. 

Ian Reid delivers fun, shocks and insights as he navigates between the cruel and the vulnerable in the television food chain.  TELEVISIONLAND is entertaining, indiscrete, transgressive, outrageous, irreverent, scandalous and macabre.  In short, a perfect holiday read.