First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 8th 2022 "All the regulars will be handling the forces controlling your reception. Traditional heavy-hitters may not be used as they cause strife. The usual suspects are available. Paul, Lisa, Andrew, Ben, Toby, Andy, Warren, Sandy, and Martin. Warren and Martin have been assigned." WARREN CUMMINGS is back and very kindly ventures into his personal nightmares to help me to talk about the television series SAPPHIRE AND STEEL, which starred DAVID McCALLUM and JOANNA LUMLEY across six multi-part stories, serials, adventures or assignments, the thirty-four episodes of which were broadcast between 1979 and 1982. Those six supernatural stories of hauntings and time interventions were filled with the sort of mind-invading early-evening terrors that managed to shape a generation, and created just the kind of unforgettable, haunting imagery that still gets talked about forty years later by those who saw it, and still grips viewers who are still discovering this remarkable series even today. WARREN particularly still has "issues" with the second story (the one set in a railway station, also featuring GERALD JAMES as George Tully), which is, rather naturally, the story both of us chose to watch in preparation for this show, and which gets the bulk of our attention. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 24th 2022 This week’s show started off, appropriately enough, as something of a mystery, as I wasn’t quite sure when we started off what SANDY McGREGOR was going to take as our topic for our latest television-themed prompt, so it was quite pleasant to find out that he really wanted to investigate the tropes, clichés, and golden rules that are used in the course of the average television crime drama, and, whilst I know crime drama is a subject we keep on returning to here on VISION ON SOUND, it’s always a joy to take a look at another point of view on it, especially when so much of the history of TV drama has been spent looking for clues about, and the reasoning behind some of the worst aspects of what humans can do. It made for a jolly hour that, quite frankly, whizzes by quite joyously, so just think of this as the pilot for that hard-hitting, up-to-the-minute, classic, yet modern, atmospheric, thoughtful, action-packed, mindless, cerebral, yet devil-may-care investigative series involving McGREGOR AND HOLMES INVESTIGATIONS as we stumble down into various dark cellars, fail to  switch on any lights, forget to call for backup, and generally remain baffled, hand over our guns and badges, until the penny finally drops and we unmask the villain that was the name at the top of this week’s guest star list, all courtesy of our FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL Time Transporter and its distinctive custom paint job, if you’ll give us just twenty-four hours, or even just the one, captain, and we’ll have this whole thing wrapped up. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 24th 2022 A little over sixty years ago, a television series began that would, in many ways, come to encapsulate a particular view of nineteen sixties Britain that never really went away. It was so popular in certain countries that this particular image of Britain and the British seems to have stuck in their minds and shaped their perception of us ever since. Or perhaps one version of it has, anyway, because THE AVENGERS, the series PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, is joining me to talk about today, went through several incarnations – and lapel carnations – as it progressed through most of the 1960s from its grey, grimy, and gritty origins in 1961, to its colourful, almost pop-art, last hurrah in 1969, and, in many ways, could be said to almost reflect that transformational decade on screen like almost no other television series of its time. Featuring PATRICK MACNEE as John Steed, a charmingly eloquent, and dapper, spy, who wears a bowler hat sometimes cast in stainless steel, and who carries a rolled umbrella which sometimes conceals a sword, who spends his professional career dealing with diabolical master minds intent upon some fiendish, eccentric, and freedom-threatening plot, usually with the assistance of a strong, plucky woman who seems far more adept at handling the rough stuff than he could ever hope to be. CATHY GALE, EMMA PEEL, and TARA KING were those fabulous, ground-breaking, and astonishingly independent women, and were played by three actors destined to become almost as iconic as the series itself: HONOR BLACKMAN, DIANA RIGG, and LINDA THORSEN. Although those other, grittier incarnations, also featured JULIA STEVENS as VENUS SMITH, JON ROLLASON as DR MARTIN KING, and the sublime and ridiculously talented IAN HENDRY who, as DR DAVID KEEL, was there right at the start, might be the person we have to thank for the series even existing at all, but who then chose to leave to pursue other career options, leaving JOHN STEED to step into the breech, and become the calm centre around which the series would carry on though such astonishing changes, not only in the lead actors, but from the technical point of view of switching from live studio videotape, to black and white, and later colour film, and a very successful penetration into the American market. In fact, if any show could be said to demonstrate the evolution of British television in the 1960s, I think THE AVENGERS may be the one that shows it off best, so much so that anyone who watched the 1961 version would barely recognise it as the same show if they tuned in again in 1969, with MOTHER and RHONNDA adding to the cast of eccentric regulars to battle each week with the very cream of 1960s acting talent. This other brainchild of Canadian Television supremo SYDNEY NEWMAN might not be your idea of what the Britain of the 1960s was really like, but it certainly is an image that has persisted since it first aired back in 1961 as a replacement for another series featuring its main star as a police surgeon, right through to its final episode in 1969, and the series was so internationally successful that it even got a fairly successful two year reimagining in the mid-1970s featuring PURDEY and GAMBIT as played by JOANNA LUMLEY and GARETH HUNT. PAUL is unashamedly a fan of the final year featuring TARA KING, so our conversation does inevitably spend a lot of time covering that era, but we do our best to give you a broader overview on our way there. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 17th 2022 The subject of tonight’s conversation. SHARPE, based upon the novels by Bernard Cornwell, set during the Napoleonic Wars, and starring Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, which was one of those long format film series that appeared on ITV for sixteen feature-length stories across about fifteen years from 1993 to 2008 that somehow I was never particularly drawn to, and so I never actually saw one. Luckily, our regular contributor and History Woman LISA PARKER, from the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast, was on hand to guide me towards seeing its greatness, and I hope that you’ll agree with me that her enthusiasm for the show is infectious and truly makes for a fascinating hour as we discuss what turns out to be a rather interesting sounding series of TV films, some of which was filmed in the Crimea, and that now much-troubled country of Ukraine, which just goes to show that, unfortunately, two hundred years later, when it comes to people disputing the ownership of pieces of land in many ways little has really changed. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 10th 2022 Today’s theme is a topic I’ve been wanting to address for a while now on the programme, as I kind of think that it’s something that is quite important to talk about, so we’re going to take television and its relation to mental health, and, to a lesser extent, television as therapy, as our starting point. This not a subject we wish to take lightly, but neither is it something we want to be too heavy-handed about, but I’m hoping you’ll find the next hour as fascinating as I did, and it’s a subject I think I’d like to come back to again, so if anyone else would like to come onto the show to talk about these, or other related issues, well, do feel free to get in touch. Rather bravely, one of our regulars, WARREN CUMMINGS has stepped up to the plate to take a chance on being grilled about his own mental health situation, and how television helps, or hinders him, as he copes with his own personal situation, which I think we’ll let him explain after the time engines have done their thing… PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 3rd 2022 Dennis Potter is considered by many to be one of the all-time great playwrights who was working in British Television during the twentieth century, and for many fans of his work, his masterpiece if you will, standing alongside such memorable productions as PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, BLACKEYES, the NIGEL BARTON PLAYS, CASANOVA, BRIMSTONE AND TREACLE, BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS and so many others, as well as the posthumously produced duet of KARAOKE and COLD LAZARUS, was THE SINGING DETECTIVE, the award-winning six-part serial, controversial in its day, first broadcast by the BBC in 1986, an incredible thirty-six years ago. The serial tells the complex tale of one PHILIP MARLOW (as played by MICHAEL GAMBON), who is a writer of detective fiction stricken by a crippling psoriasis which has isolated him from work, friends and family. He is trapped by his illness into long-term care on an acute hospital ward, where his anger, the daily humiliations his illness brings with it, and bitterness and lack of trust in the motivations of his ex-wife, cause memories of his childhood in the Forest of Dean, hallucinations from his present circumstances, and his attempts to rewrite one of his detective novels, THE SINGING DETECTIVE in his mind, to all combine in a brilliant swirling maelstrom of storytelling which remains as devastatingly original and iconic all these years later. With the memorable use of several of the old remembered “cheap” songs, those songs that “remind us of the tremendous feelings we had when we first heard them”, which are lip-synched in a series of devastating set-pieces, and a multi-layered narrative in which the characters from his past and present, alongside the kind of ciphers who inhabit the typical film noir, start to interact in his fevered imagination, events in both his real life and his childhood start to mingle to create an astonishingly complex series. My regular co-host SANDY McGREGOR, along with his pal TIM BOURNE (who joined us a few weeks ago to talk about THE PRISONER), got together online to talk about THE SINGING DETECTIVE. So… With our elbows at the ready, our pots of grease on the bedside cabinet, and the winds of villainy blowing a well-remembered tune or three on the breeze, we travel back in time and ask “What’s the story? Who’s the dame…?” PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 27th 2022 This week I wanted to try something out for the show that I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time. Such a long time, in fact, that it’s rather become a bit of a redundant idea. You see, a few years ago, I thought it might be fun to try writing a kind of “Collector’s Guide” to what might make up the perfect collection of television for anyone who’s new to having an interest in this Archive Television stuff we talk about each week, and give them a few hints and tips about what might be considered “Essential Viewing” in order to get through all of those awkward “What do you mean you’ve never seen…” type conversations that can happen whenever new blood introduces themselves to someone whose been around the Cathode Ray Tubes a few times. You know the sort of thing – fifty TV shows to see before you die, or the truly outstanding “must see” television shows to watch if you want to have any understanding of what this thing we call Archive Television is truly about. Anyway, in this edition of VISION ON SOUND I set out to begin finding out just what recommendations one or two of the regulars might make if asked to guide someone through putting together their idea of a perfect collection of Examples of Classic TV, and so – as I always seem to turn to him when experimenting with these ideas for new semi-regular editions of the show - I suggested to PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI from THE SHY LIFE PODCAST that he might like to gather together a few thoughts on what he might put together as his idea of the perfect TV COMEDY COLLECTION, and we ended up having this entertaining conversation that encompasses such disparate series as HANCOCK'S HALF HOUR, I LOVE LUCY, BEWITCHED, and GET SMART. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 20th 2022 Evenin’ all! That loveable scamp WARREN CUMMINGS is on the run from his RASPBERRY MIVVI AND A FOOT LONG DOG classic movie podcasting duties again, and has turned up in the FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL TARDIS this week, bringing all of his cinema-related ways with him to infest our cosy telly-themed world here on VISION ON SOUND. But that’s actually quite handy because, for once, this week we were planning to look at a film anyway, as it was the inspiration for a long-running and once much-loved television series which ran from 1955 until 1976, and told the tales of an ordinary copper who’s patrolling his beat around Dock Green. So, join WARREN and I for the next hour, as we discuss THE BLUE LAMP which was filmed in the post-war London of 1949 and saw PC George Dixon as played by Jack Warner fatally wounded in the doorway of a cinema, a scene so iconic that Ted Willis saw fit to resurrect the character five years later for that incredible 21 year run of over 400 episodes of DIXON OF DOCK GREEN, most of which sadly no longer exist, and even our trusty time engines don’t seem to be able to solve that particular problem for us. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 13th 2022 A few months ago, I was joined by PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, for an episode in which we discussed his ideas of what he thought of as COMFORT TELEVISION, and, because I enjoyed that episode so much, and, perhaps, because I think that exploring aspects of good mental well being perhaps ought to be one of the things we occasionally try to do more of with this little show of mine, I asked during that show if anyone else fancied coming on to talk about the same sort of thing, especially as so many of us lonely humans are sitting more and more frequently inside our own individual boxes, turning to our televisions and radios for comfort, and seeking out the familiar and the favourite - those safe, marvellous programmes that we know will transport us, however briefly, to our happy place. Anyway, LISA PARKER, one half of the team behind the rather excellent ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast got in touch and, over the course of the next hour, we take a short tour through some of her fond memories of – amongst other things - a childhood spent mere inches from the TV screen, a New Year’s Eve spent with Basil Brush, people getting Tudor England wrong, tissue-wrangling through CALL THE MIDWIFE, and how you can never find a Mr BRONSON when you need one. So, snuggle up in your various blankets, huddle around your sonic devices, and maybe, as we travel along this path give some thought as to what your own comfort viewing may be, and, should you ever wish to share what your own COMFORT TV choices are with the rest of the VISION ON SOUND community, let me know. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 6th 2022 With a little bit of a shimmy and a shuffle to our schedules, we’ve got PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI back this week in a natter we recorded relatively recently in VISION ON SOUND terms, because, when we arranged one of our regular meet-ups to record a show, we were planning on talking about something completely different, which, hopefully, we’ll be able to return to another time. When we came to record, circumstances in the world of current telly had taken a turn in a dark direction for fans of a certain long-running Australian Soap opera, of which, as regular listeners to VISION ON SOUND will know, PAUL is indeed one of their number, and this was very much on his mind as we settled down for our conversation. So much so, in fact, that we spent pretty much an entire hour with PAUL extolling the virtues of the thirty-seven year old phenomenon that is known as NEIGHBOURS, and what, perhaps, ought to be done to save one of his favourite television programmes from falling into the dustbin of history. His enthusiasm for the show is pretty infectious, as I hope you’ll agree, and it just seemed best to let him carry me along with that perfect wave as we went surfing somewhere off the sunny beaches of Melbourne and its suburb Erinsborough in a show in which we find out about the lives and loves of the people living in and around Ramsay Street, as they have been doing on TV screens five times a week on both sides of the world since the mid-nineteen eighties. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.