You can't judge a book by looking at the telly: Sunday's television now offers a choice of reading, with BBC 1's Bookworm joining shows on Sky and ITV. Anthony Quinn watches, and wonders why

WITH THE BOOKER BINGO over for another year, you might have thought that television would heave a sigh of relief and wave cheerio to all that bookchat. The novel rarely seems comfortable being talked about on the box: it is invited into the studio rather as an elderly maiden aunt is ushered into a cocktail party. Everyone is very respectful, but you can almost feel the camera itching to move it along. Poetry is something different, a nerdy, bespectacled cousin that nobody wants to talk to - but it enjoys the advantage of being quotable, in a way that an excerpt from a novel does not.

Put simply television is the enemy of print, but the schedulers keep trying to pal them up. Every season brings a fresh attempt to forge a relationship between the two. Some have worked better than others: Read All About It, fronted by Melvyn Bragg, and Speaking Volumes, a Sunday lunchtime symposium chaired by P D James, managed a more or less honourable truce. Channel 4's Burning Books went up in smoke: my abiding memory is of Maureen Freely talking awkwardly to Al Alvarez on a set that was perhaps designed to create the impression of Hell, but looked like a Soho restaurant that had recently gone bust. I always liked the sound of Books At My Bedside, in which a celebrity spent five or ten minutes talking about what books they happened to be reading at the time. Unfortunately, the programme usually went out around 3.20am, so I was never awake to find out what was keeping them up.

Undeterred, the schedules have kept faith with the book programme, though on the evidence of this autumn's offerings you wonder why. There are three to choose from. On Sky they have The W H Smith Book Show, hosted by the mellifluous Frank Delaney. Once you're past the shockingly awful title sequence and music - an effort in itself - the programme shuffles a conventional mixture: a rundown of the top ten hardbacks plus individual interviews with John Irving, George MacDonald Fraser, Tim Severin, and - wait for it - Jackie Collins, all basically plugging their new book. The longest slot was reserved for Ms Collins, parading an award (for what, we didn't find out) at Planet Hollywood and cosying up with Frank D in her suite at the Dorchester. Frank remarked of Collins' latest, Hollywood Kids, that its setting was 'very bizarre . . . it's rather like the Roman Empire'.

Collins agreed, citing the phenomenon of pretty girls arriving in Tinseltown and taking up jobs as escorts to male film stars. Hey - just like the Roman Empire] The interview closed, inevitably, with a question about Jackie's 'equally famous' sister, Joan.

This merely points up television's nervousness about book programmes: the feeling is that nobody will watch them unless they borrow the mask of showbiz. Over on ITV, I tuned into You're Booked, furnished with even gaudier sets and the depressingly joky ident of a policeman and a cat burglar (you're booked - geddit?). These aren't simply aesthetic errors: they betray the programme-makers' lack of confidence in the product they're peddling. Tart up the set and take their minds off the talk. You're Booked is introduced by James Whale and Linda Agran, who do a reasonably good impression of perkiness as they steer the audience between bite-size reviews, a Bookwatch Top Five and a celebrity interview apiece: he talks to Patrick Moore, she talks to actress-turned-novelist Jill Gascoine. Our hosts are likeable but lightweight: I was so relieved that they made it through the show without embarrassing themselves that I hardly cared what books they'd recommended.

Not to be outdone, the Beeb has devised a new book show, The Bookworm. This differs from the other two in that it shifts the emphasis towards the ordinary reader - whoever that is. The seven-part series visits a different town each week - first up is Haworth in Yorkshire - and garners substantial material from the vox pop. Best of all was a feature on the writer Robert Swindells, much criticised winner of this year's Carnegie Medal (the children's book equivalent of the Booker Prize) for Stone Cold, a novel about down-and-outs being murdered by a psychopath. Views on the book from Adam Thompson (12) and Lucy Manchester (10) - 'Some Nancy Drew books are scarier than this' - revealed a wit and thoughtfulness generally absent in the other two shows. A Simon Armitage poem underscored the homeless theme and rounded the programme off quite effectively. Indeed, I'd feel almost enthusiastic about The Bookworm were it not for presenter Griff Rhys Jones, whose brand of schoolmasterly prissiness is all wrong for this. One appreciates that the BBC is pitching to a broad church and might need a recognisable face front of stage - but surely they could have been a little more imaginative.

Again, there's a whiff of fear in their choice. Books can get a bit serious, so throw in 'Griff' and his convivial goonery to jolly it up. In one way, the programmers are right; books are serious, so decisions about how to present them are important if the programme isn't to die of worthiness, or indeed wordiness. At present, the only time television gets close to cracking the book problem is on BBC2's Late Review, where the round-table discussion offers a brief, vigorous exchange of bookchat that informs, occasionally infuriates, and nearly always entertains. To be honest, anything that tries to foreground books in the public consciousness, that promotes a culture of literacy, should be applauded. But the problem that won't go away for television is reading itself, which remains a stubbornly private experience. Books draw us into an individual communion with an author's voice, whereas television, as John Updike has written, 'breaks upon us like a natural phenomenon - ungainsayable, immediate, stark, marvellous, and rather bullying'. Marrying the two hasn't worked yet - and possibly never will.

The W H Smith Book Show (Sky News, 4.30pm) The Bookworm (BBC 1, 5.10pm) You're Booked (ITV, 11.45pm)