New ‘TV Guy’ book series looks at the funny side of setting up TV channels in frontier markets

 Phnom Penh, June 2023: A new series of memoirs by a former Reuters TV producer looks at the funny side of setting up television channels in frontier markets – and a book with a more serious behind-the-scenes look at the television news agency business.

The TV Guy series consists of three books – a couple of which have already been written. Two are set in Myanmar while the third is a more serious book based on the author’s experiences with Reuters TV.

Put It In The Chicken - Glen Felgate.
The first is entitled Put It In The Chicken and is a re-write of the inspired by true life novel From Phnom Penh with Love which was self-published a few years before.

Put It in the Chicken is now re-written as a memoir detailing some of the events and happenings that involved the author when he set up a number of nationwide TV channels during his tenure in Cambodia, which lasted from 2002 until the present.

In Put It in the Chicken Felgate describes how he broadcast Cambodia’s first international concert without sound, televises cockfighting, and narrowly escapes being kicked out of the country after upsetting an important person.

“The major difference with the first book From Phnom Penh with Love is that it is written as a memoir,” said the author of Put It in the Chicken, Glen Felgate. “I have kept about fifty per cent of the first book because those episodes were actually based on reality. I have rewritten the last half of the book. I was privileged to have a front-row seat watching Cambodia’s development over the past twenty years. While this is not a historical account, this book does give an inside view of the workings of a society that is trying to advance and take its place in the ASEAN and the world.”

Also already written and doing the rounds of publishers is Felgate’s Reuters TV memoir You Won’t Know Us By Name which follows the journey of a novice TV producer from Baghdad to Sarajevo and then Kosovo, before finishing tragically in Sierra Leone with the loss of the author’s two friends Kurt Schork and Miguel Gil Moreno in 2000. Felgate arrived 24 hours before the deaths of Kurt and Miguel and helped deal with the aftermath. The book has a serious tone.

“You Won’t Know Us By Name is a hard-hitting journalistic memoir that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the television news agency business,” Felgate adds. “It covers a rarely seen and talked about area of broadcast news and shows the realities of covering top stories for one of the world’s biggest news agencies. And while much of what happened is 20 years old the principles of covering news are still the same today.”

Felgate’s other book As the Crow Cries is based in Myanmar where the author worked in 2013 and again in 2017. As the Crow Cries is being written with wry humour and is a tongue-in-cheek look at one of the world’s most guarded societies.

Pre-orders for the Cambodia memoir Put It in the Chicken are available at Amazon https://bit.ly/TV-Guy-1
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