"Television, reveals cultural historian Horrocks in this compact chronicle, has tangled roots. . . . Along with sets, from Baird’s 1928 ‘Noah’s Ark’ televisor to today’s ultra-thin screens, Horrocks examines the technology’s military uses, the ethical furor over content, and its uses as a symbol in art, film, and literature."
— Barbara Kiser, Nature
“Horrocks offers a glimpse into how television sets developed from the meeting between technology and culture, becoming both familiar and alien objects in our lives. He asks that we look more closely at them and, in doing so, see them afresh. At a juncture when the future of the television set is being called into question with the arrival of smaller, portable screens, this is a timely contribution. Dotted with interesting vignettes, The Joy of Sets is a wide-ranging and well-researched book, which provides an unconventional perspective on TV.”
— Emily Rees, Times Higher Education
"Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets."
— Nathan Bierma, New Books Network
"From the start, Horrocks argues, television was 'inseparable from its material form.' (The key to the book is found in its subtitle, with its easily missed definite article; this is a cultural history not of television but of the television.) It was inseparable from before the start, in fact. The author begins not with claim and counter-claim about which national hero-inventor made the whole thing possible—if you think it was John Logie Baird it says more about where you were brought up than about the history of television’s invention—but with television’s prehistory."
— Times Literary Supplement
"[This] study brilliantly investigates the impact of the remote control and the way in which TV was portrayed—sometimes menacingly—in art film and literature. . . . The book is beautifully illustrated, containing many fine color pictures of TV sets from the 1920s to the present day. There are comprehensive notes and the title benefits—unlike similar publications in this under researched field—from a thorough, six-page, bibliography. However, the real strength of this title is that it encourages the reader to think about the television set as an object of popular material culture and an inspiration for art as well as a mere technical receiver of images."
— Radio User Magazine
"The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television hides a useful survey history of the TV receiver behind a tongue-in-cheek title. With a strong British bias, this offers a breezy survey of receiver design, primarily in Britain and the United States over the last eighty years or so. . . . This centers on the receiver as an art object, albeit a useful one."
— Communication Booknotes Quarterly