TV Cream is a British television nostalgia site which originally appeared as The Arkhive in 1997, before adopting its current name the following year. The site, founded by Phil Norman, mainly consists of highly opinionated reviews of hundreds of programmes shown on British television (but not necessarily made in the UK), mainly during the 1970s and 1980s, though some earlier and later shows are also featured. In addition, the site features a selection of nostalgia-based articles relating to other areas of popular culture, such as pop music, film, comics, and so on.
The site is a collaborative effort. The writers include Steve Berry, Chris Diamond, Chris Hughes, Ian Jones, Graham and Jack Kibble-White, Suzy Norman, Jill Phythian, Matthew Rudd, Ian Tomkinson, Simon Tyers, Steve Williams and TJ Worthington. Some of the site's contributors were also involved with "Off the Telly" [1], a more academic television review and analysis site.
TV Cream also operates two email lists. "Creamguide" provides subscribers with a weekly mailout listing forthcoming TV programmes of interest. The second email list is the monthly "TV Cream Update" (usually referred to as "Creamup"), a well-researched magazine-type mailing examining nostalgic subjects in some depth.
In 2009, TV Cream moved from its previous domain of tv.cream.org to a new redesigned site at tvcream.co.uk. The new-look site became the home for redesigned (and in some cases updated) versions of features from the previous site, and additionally gave the opportunity for new features to be introduced; the new-look site absorbed the TVC blog, which had previously been run separately from the main site, and also allowed links to content of interest on sites such as YouTube and Spotify to be featured more prominently.
The website has produced three spin-off books to date:
TV Cream: The Ultimate Guide To 70's and 80's Pop Culture (ISBN 0-7535-1080-4) was published by Virgin Books in June 2005.
TV Cream's Anatomy of Cinema (ISBN 190554846X) was published by The Friday Project Ltd. in April 2007.
TV Cream Toys (ISBN 1-905548-27-3) was published by The Friday Project Ltd. in November 2007.
TV Cream Tuck Shop (ISBN 1906321450) will be published by The Friday Project in March 2012.