VISION ON SOUND

WARREN CUMMINGS joins me to talk all about the strange and peculiar history of BBC2, Hullaballoo and Custard.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 12th 2026.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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself talks about his memories of watching TOP OF THE POPSFirst broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 5th 2026.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.

WARREN CUMMINGS joins me to talk about TV spin-offsFirst broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 29th 2026.This week WARREN CUMMINGS is back, and he wanted to talk all about TV spin-offs, which we do sort of manage to do, although I go off on a lot of tangents and spin-offs of my own which somehow all seems rather appropriate.Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, once I’ve fired up those trusty FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL time engines once again and transported you to a sunny new location in which HOLMES AND CUMMINGS INVESTIGATE…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.

MICHAEL HERBERT joins me to talk about TIMESLIPFirst broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 22nd 2026.TIMESLIP was a children’s science fiction series made by ATV for the ITV network back in the early nineteen-seventies. It starred CHERYL BURFIELD as Liz Skinner and SPENCER BANKS as Simon Randall, two teenage actors who manage to hold their own playing against some of the finest television character actors working at that time, including DENNIS QUILLEY, JOHN BARRON, DEREK BENFIELD, IRIS RUSSELL, DAVID GRAHAM and IAIN FAIRBAIRN.Running across twenty-four episodes made in full colour (most of which now only survive in black & white), and consisting of four serials of thought-provoking, philosophical, and time-jumping adventures (THE WRONG END OF TIME, THE TIME OF THE ICE BOX, THE YEAR OF THE BURN UP and THE DAY OF THE CLONE), the series ran from September 1970 through to March 1971, and is fondly remembered by the generation that sat down after school to enjoy it and found that it somehow managed to sear itself into their memories and stimulate their imagination.This week an old friend of the show, MICHAEL HERBERT, got in touch to tell me that he’d been watching TIMESLIP, and wondered if I might want to talk about it. Naturally I’m always happy when someone suggests a topic for VISION ON SOUND, and today’s edition is the result of the conversation we had which, whilst prompted by TIMESLIP did take us off in other directions to discuss other television series that had a similar style. As ever, when your chat involves a certain amount of spontaneity, and you’re working without copious notes, sometimes facts and memories can get a little confused. So I apologise in advance if any of the details got a little fuzzy, but the enthusiasm for what the show was about does, I hope, still shine through, and we’ll put the rest down to interference via the fourth dimension.Incidentally, the TIMESLIP event that I mentioned is on APRIL the 18th at the QUAD in Derby, if you want to find out more just head over to their website derbyquad.co.uk/eventsPLEASE 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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, on TV shows that moved from black & white into colour.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 15th 2026.This week PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back, and he suggested for our archive telly-related topic this week, we might want to discuss TV shows that started off in black and white, but then successfully survived into the colour era, and whether or not something changed about those shows in any significant way due to the introduction of colour.This was prompted by PAUL’s continuing exploration of some of the Australian archive TV shows that we have covered in some of his recent appearances, but also covers shows like the original LOST IN SPACE, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, DARK SHADOWS, THE AVENGERS, BEWITCHED, DOCTOR WHO, PUBLIC EYE, CALLAN, and STEPTOE AND SON, all of which are at least name-checked during our conversation, and managed to a lesser or greater extent to be produced in both formats, and some of which did seem to feel like very different shows once the full spectrum was added. We also wonder whether some Black & White classics like THE TWILIGHT ZONE would have benefitted from being seen in colour, and how significant it was when films and programmes made in glorious colour were experienced on our old black & white TVs.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.

STEVE HATCHER on remakes of classic cop shows.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 8th 2026.There’s been a tendency in recent years for modern television makers to take a long, hard look at the archives and realise that some older television series were actually once quite popular, and think to themselves that they quite fancy a bit of that kind of success and brand recognition, and so they decide to remake, repackage, reimagine, or reboot some of those brilliant old ideas for more modern television audiences, and perhaps one of the more popular genres for drawing this kind of attention had been the crime or police drama series. For example, even as I was writing this intro, ITV announced that a new version of DALZIEL AND PASCOE was in the works, to add to a growing list suggesting that everything old is new again.I suppose this isn’t really all that surprising, considering just how many cop shows have filled the schedules over the long history of television, but sometimes it does start to seem as if there really are very few new ideas out there, or that the viewers these days, like with their supermarket shopping only really trust something that is wearing a familiar brand name. So, whilst new variations on the police drama, often involving quirky detectives living on houseboats, or crossword compilers and little old ladies helping the police with their enquiries, are popping up all the time these days, many of the new shows somehow seem more than a little bit familiar…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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI discovers THE PERSUADERS!First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 1st 2026.This week PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, is back yet again, to discuss a show that rather neatly complements his most recent appearance on VISION ON SOUND where he wanted to talk about the humour of THE AVENGERS. This led him to finally try out an early 1970s TV show which you might be surprised to find he had never actually seen before, which to many of its fans perhaps represents the very pinnacle of the ITC adventure series, the high-budget, high-glamour, glossy series THE PERSUADERS! which starred ROGER MOORE as LORD BRETT SINCLAIR and TONY CURTIS as DANNY WILDE, a pair of rich, womanising international playboys who were recruited by JUDGE FULTON to redirect their wastrel energies into the pursuit of justice and the righting of criminal wrongs across 24 action-packed episodes, first broadcast in autumn 1971 and which, by coming across as being the kind of must-see television that also filtered through into comics and other media managed to make an indelible impact on the children and parents of several nations.And whilst those 24 episodes might not seem all that many, these programmes had all the quality to match the feature films of the time and all looked rather fantastic, meaning that the series, whilst not becoming the huge American hit its producers were hoping for, was still nevertheless, an enormous success across Europe.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.

ADAM HENLEY returns to talk about watching the BLAKE'S 7 Series Two Blu-rayFirst broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 22nd 2026.This week we welcome back ADAM HENLEY, who last year guided us through year one of BLAKE’S SEVEN after its Blu-ray release, and he’s back again now to do the same for the recent release of year two, a season of tragic endings, new beginnings, lucky escapes, some non-escapes, professional disappointments, drama, excitement, high camp, new writers, and Michelin men.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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, wishes you were here to hear him discuss humour in THE AVENGERS.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 15th 2026.This week PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, is back, although this week we’re going to try and get away from the Antipodean content that his recent appearances on VISION ON SOUND have tended to concentrate on, and instead focus on a subject that is almost certainly more familiar to connoisseurs of British archive television: THE AVENGERS, that latterly most quirky of 1960s television drama series.Our idea was to talk about (and hopefully appreciate) the more humorous aspects of this particular show, showing its development and evolution away from its more urban thriller and kitchen sink dramatic roots in the early 1960s, to the urbane, witty, and charming version as seen during its final season in which PATRICK MACNEE’s John Steed was paired with LINDA THORSON as Tara King, and PAUL picked out a particular episode that he considered to be one of the more broadly humorous ones for us both to watch.This was WISH YOU WERE HERE, episode twenty of series six, written by TONY WILLIAMSON, and directed by DON CHAFFEY, and, whilst what follows isn’t exactly an episode guide-style examination of that show, it did provide us with an excellent prompt for a conversation about humour in TV drama series that includes references to other episodes of THE AVENGERS, THE NEW AVENGERS, DOCTOR WHO, and even CORONATION STREET, and I hope that you find the next hour as entertaining as it was for us to record it, even though PAUL wasn’t in the most conducive of places (technically) on the day of recording.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.

WARREN CUMMINGS gets random again, mostly about Black & White TV.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 8th 2026.This week, WARREN CUMMINGS returns to the show for another of our random meanders in and around the crazy world of archive TV, and this week our focus is mostly in black and white, as we were prompted by the kind of nonsense I’ve been picking up second-hand on DVD, which led us via the fascinating series that was THE STRANGE WORLD OF GURNEY SLADE starring ANTHONY NEWLEY, to a chat about the careers of actors such as JOHN LE MESURIER, BRIAN WILDE, and NORMAN WISDOM before we focussed on the 1960s for a while with Z-CARS and THE PROTECTORS, and then went on to address why television audiences always seem drawn towards the characters who are clearly the “right bastards” that in real life we might go out of our way to avoid.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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, on some archive Australian Cop Shows.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 1st 2026.This week PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, is back on his quest to discover and share as many obscure Australian television shows with you as possible, such are the fascinating compulsions of the archive TV fan. PAUL’s motivation is often down to wanting to see other work by some of his favourite actors, and he selects his box sets because of what appeals to him personally, and not through any requirement to experience them in broadcast order.This week, his exploration of the Australian Drama series takes a look at three more shows that he’s been acquiring and investigating, all of which are hour long – or more accurately fifty minute - police dramas dating from the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies; HOMICIDE (not to be confused with the later American series, a show which ran for thirteen years from 1964 and racked up over 500 episodes; DIVISION 4, which began in 1969 and ran for seven years and over 300 episodes; and MATLOCK POLICE which started in 1971, ran for five years, and offered nearly 230 editions.PAUL admits that all of these shows are fairly new to him and, at the time of recording, he had only watched a handful of each, but I’m very grateful to him for taking the time to watch these shows to get a taste of them and share his experiences with the rest of 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.

STEVE HATCHER on the best of 2025's TV Blu-Ray releases.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 25th 2026.This week, STEVE HATCHER suggested that we chat a little about the best archive TV Blu-Rays that came out last year, and, as it was a bumper year for quality releases, we found that we had rather a lot to talk about. So, as well as inevitably discussing the most recent releases of BLAKE’S SEVEN and DOCTOR WHO, we consider the new CHRONICLES OF NARNIA set, and also sink our teeth into some of the new range from HAMMER FILMS (which have at least two television related titles in their collection so far), and the brand new set of THE NEW AVENGERS, as well as a very welcome release for the obscure children’s serial OBJECT Z, and, as they say, much, much more, including some observations on the nature of collecting archive material generally.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.

WARREN CUMMINGS joins me to discuss how TV affects our moods.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 18th 2026.This week, I invited WARREN CUMMINGS back again because I wanted to talk about television and how it can affect our moods. Whilst I was expecting to end up discussing whether or not watching the news channels is a good thing or a bad thing, and whether it’s best avoided, WARREN, as expected, took the topic in a whole other direction, and I think that led to a far more interesting hour, as I hope you’ll agree if you stick around to listen.So, the following hour will take us on a journey from the final QUATERMASS series, via some peculiar observations about THE GOOD LIFE and the heavily armed businesspeople of the 1960s and 70s, THE NEW AVENGERS, the animated version of STAR TREK, MORTIMER & WHITEHOUSE GONE FISHING, SLOW HORSES, EDGE OF DARKNESS, TW3 and Z CARS, and a whole lot of other distractions as we discuss the kind of television that causes our spirits to either wilt, or soar to the heights of, well, not exactly ecstasy, but certainly somewhere at least vaguely enjoyable.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.

TYLER ADAMS joins me to discuss THE CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE MASTER BLACKMAILER.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 11th 2026.This week we welcome back - after far too long an absence - our friend TYLER ADAMS whose popular GOON POD podcast has become the very benchmark for everything that you should ever need to know about that peculiarly British radio comedy phenomenon, THE GOON SHOW, the Goons themselves, just about everything relating to them, and British comedy in general, and is well worth tracking down.For a bit of a change, however, TYLER suggested that we talk about a subject that is not Goon related, nor is it even a comedy topic, which is THE MASTER BLACKMAILER a feature-length offering from GRANADA TELEVISION’s now legendary SHERLOCK HOLMES series featuring JEREMY BRETT as HOLMES and, in this instance EDWARD HARDWICKE as DOCTOR WATSON.This episode, featuring an astonishing guest appearance by ROBERT HARDY, was part of THE CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES selection which followed on from their very popular ADVENTURES OF and RETURN OF series, and comes from 1992, eight years after the series first began, and during a period when the series was experimenting with a longer format for the short stories after previously only extending the episodes for adaptations of the CONAN-DOYLE NOVEL-LENGTH stories, THE SIGN OF FOUR and, inevitably, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI tells me all about some archive Australian dramas - but possibly not the ones you were expecting.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 4th 2026.This week we welcome back our friend PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, and this week he’s going to venture into perhaps territory rather familiar to regular listeners to VISION ON SOUND.Because I expect it will come as absolutely no surprise to any of you that we will be discussing that favourite topic of PAUL’s, the Australian Drama series.But, thanks a particular DVD outlet called Eaton Films making a lot more archive material available – at least as far as Crawford Television productions are concerned - PAUL has been expanding his personal experience of the Antipodean televisual universe, and over the course of the next hour we will be discussing (amongst other shows) two series, one of which is called THE BOX and the other is COP SHOP.Following a 90minute Pilot THE BOX ran from February 1974 through to October 1977 and across those slightly under four years managed to clock up an astonishing 603 episodes, 474 of which were half an hour, and the remaining 128 running to 60 minutes.As with a lot of the shows PAUL likes to encourage us to see, it’s described as a Soap Opera, but it’s unusual in being a drama set in a fictional television station in Melbourne, and, like several shows in which television chooses to turn the dramatic spotlight upon itself, it can occasionally prove to be ground-breaking and perhaps slightly controversial, at least with its forward-looking attitude to the sexuality of its characters, and in featuring occasional glimpses of on-screen nudity when such things were far less likely on television.COP SHOP was – perhaps unsurprisingly - a long running police drama series, and across its seven years of production from 1977 to 1984 produced an incredible 582 fifty-five-minute episodes. In comparison, the seven seasons of HILL STREET BLUES produced 146. They are, of course, very different in style, with COP SHOP perhaps more resembling THE BILL in terms of what it looks like, but it’s still an astonishing rate of production for a police series.And whilst PAUL’S heart will probably always belong to shows like NEIGHBOURS and SONS AND DAUGHTERS, I think you’ll find his enthusiasm for these other shows infectious, and may find your credit cards screaming from whichever purse or wallet you keep yours in.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.

LISA PARKER on some of her recent TV viewing.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 28th 2025.This week, our friend LISA PARKER returns to share some of her recent viewing experiences with us, which, perhaps unusually, is mostly outside what we generally get to talk about whenever LISA shows up.This triggers some rather interesting conversation prompted by programmes as diverse as MISS MARPLE, SERGEANT CORK, DOCTOR WHO, Z CARS, HORRIBLE HISTORIES, and even STAR MAIDENS in another of those sometimes rather more investigative explorations of a viewer’s experiences of viewing archive television that I like to think that VISION ON SOUND sometimes does so well.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.

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, discusses A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 21st 2025.It’s Christmas time and (as any fule no), that’s a time when ghosts and ghoulies tend to crawl out of the wainscoting, and trouble the very worst of us into at least thinking about changing our ways, and perhaps trying to become better people, whatever that may mean.Often, such transformations have already fizzled out before the doors open for the Boxing Day Sales, but at least once a year there’s that one small hope that some of us have at least tried to embrace our fellow inhabitants of planet earth for a few hours of the year as it, too, changes its own directions and heads back towards the sun, or away from it, depending upon where you happen to be loitering upon its surface.This Christmas week we welcome back our friend PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, and he wanted to talk about a peculiar phenomenon known as A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS which ran on the BBC throughout most of the 1970s, and has since been sporadically revived in this century.Over the next hour, as it’s VISION ON SOUND and we tend to have our little archive TV ways, we mostly concentrate on the original 1970s run, but we have already seriously given some thought returning to cover the later films on another occasion, perhaps when the sun is beaming down and those dark and scary corners can’t conceal any horrors that might wish to lurk there.So, amongst other creepy tales, we will be talking in a fairly non-spoilery way about THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER, A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS, LOST HEARTS, THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS, THE ASH TREE, THE SIGNALMAN, STIGMA, and THE --- ICE --- HOUSE…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.

WARREN CUMMINGS explores TV in real time.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 14th 2025.This week, WARREN CUMMINGS is back again for another of our more random telly-related chats, which ultimately leads to us having a lengthy discussion about the structure of how we watch modern television, and involves things like comparing the different storytelling styles of TV mini-series and feature films, via the early 21st century high-concept thriller series “24” and “Big Brother”.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.

NICK GOODMAN discusses three JACK GERSON thrillers.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 7th 2025.This week, NICK GOODMAN was very eager to press his personal Fast Return Switch because he wanted to share his particular enthusiasm for three of the BBC thriller series written by JACK GERSON which were all produced by ROBERT McINTOSH across three consecutive years around the turn of the 1980s.These were RUNNING BLIND in 1979, based on the novel by DESMOND BAGLEY, and starring STUART WILSON, which was followed over the course of the next two years by a pair of not entirely thematically dissimilar three-part thriller serials THE ASSASSINATION RUN and THE TREACHERY GAME which featured MALCOLM STODDARD and MARY TAMM in the lead roles.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.

WARREN CUMMINGS continues his analysis of UKTV comedy by talking about THE GOODIES.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on November 30th 2025.This week, following on from his recent insights into TV comedy, WARREN CUMMINGS is back, this time to dedicate our entire hour to talking about one of his favourites, THE GOODIES which featured BILL ODDIE, GRAEME GARDEN, and the late and much-missed TIM BROOKE-TAYLOR as that wacky trio who somehow managed to reflect and represent between them the Britain of the 1970s in classic comedy form, as we move on into a world of puppet governments, giant kittens, trouser-squeezing disco, sausage-related martial arts, and all manner of other satire disguised as nonsense.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.