In January 2004, Bob Geldof appeared on the Richard and Judy daytime television programme as a special guest on an episode of their new weekly book club, loosely modelled on Oprah Winfrey’s in the US. Invited to discuss Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor, a little-known novel about Irish emigrants on board a ship to New York in 1847, Geldof called it “absolutely gorgeous” and “a modern masterpiece in which history never supersedes the story.” He described how he raced home from a late-night gig to finish the book, and quoted entire passages from memory. Richard and Judy chattily chimed in with their own opinions. The book’s sales then quadrupled, from 4,421 copies in the week before the show to 18,255, and continued to climb, totalling about 600,000.

In the book trade this is known as the Richard and Judy effect. In 2004, sales of their 16 chosen titles totalled 4,297,236, worth £25.3m in revenue. In 2005 their picks sold 3,345,622, worth more than £18.4m. According to Giles Elliott, media editor of the Bookseller, “Richard and Judy can now be said to be responsible for more than one in 50 books sold in the UK.” Rodney Troubridge, fiction buyer for Waterstone’s, puts it more dramatically: “The uplift in Richard and Judy titles has been absolutely amazing. For Star of the Sea, there was a 1,200 per cent increase in sales. People are often buying the entire set of Richard and Judy selections, not just one book—they trust what they are being offered. I think the old days of book reviews are over.”

Judy Finnegan, the older of the two presenters, is a sexy matron whose substantial diamond cross always sits pointedly atop a no less substantial cleavage. She frequently has to rein in Richard Madeley, her more exuberant, outspoken husband. Their unscripted marital bickering has attracted millions of television viewers for the last 18 years; the current magazine-style programme is watched by a daily audience of 3m on Channel 4. The ten-minute weekly book club, says Madeley, “didn’t begin life as a means of boosting the publishing industry. That is a by-product. We were just trying to make interesting television. We had actually resisted it before, but when Oprah launched hers, we wondered whether it might work here.” He points to significant differences in format: “The writer is never in the studio with us. We make a short film in the location where the book is set, and in three tightly edited minutes, you get a real sense of the creativity behind the book and the personality of the author. Then we have the studio discussion, and we quite unashamedly cast celebrities for that. So you go on a carefully sculpted journey, which cunningly obscures the fact that you’re talking about something which couldn’t be less visual. Television and books shouldn’t really go together. But we discovered that they do.”

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