Ortved - Simpsons confidential: the uncensored, totally unauthorised history of the worlds greatest TV show by the people that made it

Here it is, two decades later. I never thought that as I aged I would develop Groundskeeper Willie Eyebrow Syndrome (GWES), and yet nature has cruelly slotted me with it. And here it is, two decades later, and I still can't go near cafeteria food without thinking of Bart Simpson's corrupt lunch lady and her massive cartons of beef hearts on the rear loading dock. And finally, here it is, two decades later, and despite my urbane demeanor and general support for worthy causes, I can't help but wonder how cozy Mr. Burns's pair of loafers made of former gophers would feel.

I remember back at the start of the kraziness, back when Fox was a plucky young network with a gleam in its eye, with the amusing-but-doomed Tracey Ullman Show operating at the tent pole of its aspiring avant-garde sitcom regime. I remember in that show seeing an amusing animation clip in which a very badly drawn and animated Matt Groening character barfed into a dish of mints in a doctor's waiting room. (I think that's what it was; my brain cells may well now have the neuro equivalent of GWES.) I remember thinking to myself, Man, I can't believe they showed barfing on TVthat was so transgressive. Thank you, Fox, for opening new doors through which satire may enter.

And so the Simpsons have been barfing into dishes of mints for more than two decades. Actually, to be technically correct, it's the Family Guy characters who do the avant-garde barfing these days. But the Simpsons did open that door, and in so doing have created a self-sustaining mythology of archetypes and stories that unite mankind far better than NATO, Esperanto, or metric. During book tours I used to hand out cards and ask people to write down the name of their favorite Simpsons character and then hand it in at the end of the reading. Surprisingly, it wasn't Bart or Homer or the big kahunas that were the favoritesit was the peripheral characters that were beloved: Duff Man with his Ooh yeah! and his tendency to refer to himself in the third person; Selma, the beloved chain-smoking lesbian hag; or (possibly the most obscure character of all) alcoholic marketing cipher Lindsay Nagle.

The larger goal of asking people to write down the names of their favorite character was simply to create a nice mood in the room, and it always worked. You can find people in just about any mood, and after a bit of Simpsons banter, a more cheerful psychic homeostasis emerges. I remember in a Quebec hardware store, a teenage girl at the end of an aisle holding up a blue feather duster and saying to her friend, "C'est Marge Simpson." Now that's world peace in action.

I suppose having GWES is simply a subset of a larger condition called growing old. I look in the mirror and am daily insulted by myself, and yet the Simpsons remain as young and fresh as alwaysexcept for the earlier episodes, which aren't as well drawn as in later episodes, the ones in which Homer sounds funny, and which are too weird to watch repeatedly. (Fans know what I mean.) I like the fact that we don't know where Springfield is. I like the fact that you still never really know where an episode is going to take youto Capitol City, to Epcot, to Winnipeg, or to a dash of mints filled with barf.

You may be entering this book with ambivalencemaybe it's not a good thing to see how the show comes into being; maybe it's best not to see the beef hearts being turned into lunch. But maybe you'll come away from the book fortified and more eager than ever to turn the TiVo to Fox on Sunday nights. Forget Disneyland. Sunday night at eight is the happiest place on earth. Ooh yeah!