The team have a policy of ditching books that don’t grab them in the first two chapters, and operate ruthless subjectivity “A lot is my own personal taste,” says Ross “Take Star of the Sea. I wanted a classic that had been overlooked; that hadn’t sold itself.”Of the new Summer Read six, PS, I Love You, by Cecelia Ahern, has been particularly criticised. “Gerry dies before the start and the rest [of the characters] die on the page”, and, “Akin to a secondary-school essay”, being two such public denunciations “I was predisposed to hate it myself,” says Ross “The proof had an awful bright-pink cover. She’s Bertie Ahern’s daughter and there had to be connections.

But, when I started reading it, I couldn’t stop, and I cried. It just goes to show: you can’t judge a book by its pink cover.”Another factor of the Richard & Judy effect is that it brings readers, and returning readers, to books. “It’s fabulous,” says Julia Strong of the National Literacy Campaign. “Television is a popular medium and using it to promote reading is important.” Ross agrees that this is part of the show’s grass-roots power. “We know that it gets people reading who have never read before,” she says. “Recently, we heard from a man of 60 who hadn’t read a book for 40 years, but had enjoyed A Gathering Light on the Summer Read list, and said, ‘Now I’m going to read loads of books’.”Just as Delia Smith showed people how to cook, the R&J show may become an entry point for non-readers (“If it is, I find that worrying,” says George Walden. “We’ve had compulsory universal education for 100 years, and if we think that it’s good that people read at all, then God help us.”)Oddly, over the Pond, Oprah Winfrey’s book club has changed.

Jonathan Franzen famously insisted that his The Corrections be removed from her literary circle, and she herself has claimed that it has “become harder to find books that I feel compelled to share”. She now plugs the classics, and has recently sent Anna Karenina to the top of the bestseller list.”The key difference between Oprah and us is that she makes money out of it,” says Ross “Ofcom rules mean that we can’t make any money So we are more critical, less mass-market. It can’t help but have an influence if you’ve going to make money.” So far, the R&J show hasn’t had a Franzen moment. “Zo?eller was slightly bemused, as she’d been out of the country and didn’t realise that Richard and Judy had metamorphosed,” says Ross. She does now.Meanwhile, the club is smudging the boundaries between literary and commercial fiction “There are influential people in the publishing industry who understand what’s happening,” says Ross.

“Take Gail Rebuck of Random House, who has an incredibly wide and varied selection of authors, from esoteric to ‘gold block’. She told me that R&J had awakened them to the fact that you can have a massive hit with a history book.”Ross is soon to work on the next Book Club list, and the industry is beating a path to her door to get their titles included. She is constantly asked to extend the Club all year round, and from next January, she is increasing the list to include 12 books. But she is concerned not to dilute the effect.The net result has not only been good for books – Richard and Judy’s careers have taken a huge surge in credibility, as has the whole derided notion of daytime TV. No longer may we write it off as cheap makeover telly for the welfare-dependent.