Television and Books
Gascoigne is the author of Murgatroyd's Empire, a 1972 satirical novel concerning an entrepreneur who finds an island of pygmies, and trades them arms for treasure, recreating the development of European medieval weaponry and armour.
In 1977, Gascoigne wrote and presented The Christians, a thirteen-hour television documentary series on the history of Christianity, produced by Granada Television and broadcast on ITV. He wrote a companion book, under the same title, with photography by his wife, Christina Gascoigne, published by Jonathan Cape.
He wrote Quest for the Golden Hare, a 1983 account of the internationally publicized treasure hunt associated with the publication in 1979 of Kit Williams book, Masquerade. On 8 August 1979, Gascoigne was witness to the burial by Williams of a unique jeweled, solid gold hare pendant in an earthenware jar "somewhere in Britain". The book documents the search and a scandal associated with finding it.
In 1987, Gascoigne presented a documentary series of six 30 minute programmes on Victorian history, Victorian Values, which looked at how Victorian society put in place the infrastructure of the modern welfare state, also produced by Granada Television.
He was the writer and presenter for the TV series The Great Moghuls, a study of the Mughal Empire of India. The series was also accompanied by a book of the same name, again with photographs by his wife, and has been reprinted numerous times.
Read more about this topic: Bamber Gascoigne
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or books:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“No common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book, then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well. But they are not always put into the fire; and this accounts for the vast majority of miserable books over those of positive merit.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)