This volume challenges most standard academic approaches to the study of media. Far from criticizing broadcasting the book is a celebration of the ways in which it contributes to the overcoming of alienation and reification (the specific pathology of modernity) and thereby helps to restore the ordinary magic of everyday existence.

It bases this argument on a careful historical analysis of how programmes mean; how they are produced in such ways as to be found as sociable, sincere, authentic, eventful and so on, by any viewer and listener.