My Weird Collection: How I started to collect TV listing magazines

Collecting is a very human thing. Some collect stamps, other collect coins, some collect magnets, spoons or little glasses and other collect even more eccentric things.

I myself have a collecting habit which is quite unique. In the last 20 years, since I was a kid, I collected television listing magazines in the like of Radio Times (UK) and TV Guide (US). Even if readership numbers are down from a peak a few years ago, they still remain popular in readership in many countries.

I have a collection of these magazines from about 35 different countries at home and I tend to look more for a diversity of countries rather than any vintage television magazines. Most of them were collected through my travels, others through friends who travel to a given country as they are generally affordable and easy to find in any newsstand being mass produced. For some countries, a website like eBay is the only option possible as they have went out of print a few years ago in the age of online television listings.

In some countries they are more difficult to find than other. In China, it was my tour guide who guided our tour group through China, who was the interpreter at the newsstand who found one, which looked like a newspaper. In India, even if there some Indian TV Guides available as smartphone apps, I had no luck finding them any paper version of them in any newsstand. In some countries like Malaysia, they are easier to find at hotels because they offer them for guests in order to help them enjoy their in-room television. Other countries I traveled to only have television listings in daily newspapers.

Japan is a weird country for television listing magazines in the sense where they are sold in vending machines in some cases. Vending machines are an integral part of the Japanese landscape and they really sell everything from beer to bananas.

These magazines perhaps all have the television listings part in common, but each of them is different in size and scope based on the country they come from. Some of them are in full colour, other are in black and white. Some are published every week, two weeks or even have one month of programming in some cases. Some only have a some part for TV programming listings while others have no content in the magazine other then television programming listings. In some countries, like communist Vietnam, they only have the programming of one television channel (which is the VTV state television channel) in the magazine but in other countries you have programming from channels from many different countries or languages. This is akin to the situation in the UK up until a few years ago when only the BBC was on the Radio Times and ITV was on the TV Times.

And yet, in many cases, they are not only a TV listing magazine in my collection but a souvenir of a given trip which makes it even more special. The TV listing magazine is also a souvenir of the week where it was published because it tends to have programming and articles which mirrors current events and popular culture trends in the country when it was published.

Like most other collections, my off-colour collection is special is because each magazine have it’s own story with memories and anecdotes related to each of them. This is how something which may seems as trivial become a prized collection.