VISION ON SOUND

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 27th 2023 Like a lot of other archive TV fans, over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of Telly-related ephemera, much of which seems destined to sit around undisturbed in dark corners of the house waiting for me to notice that it’s there. Anyway, in a recent rare moment of churning, I randomly picked up a copy of the RADIO TIMES that was...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 20th 2023 Often it was the exciting thumping nature of the theme music that became most identified with so many TV series, and was remembered long after the various shenanigans of that week’s episode was forgotten, and so, for one week only, VISION ON SOUND presents an hour of what might be the most exciting TV theme tunes ever...! In a...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 13th 2023 Fans of archive television didn’t used to talk about CROSSROADS much, despite it having an iconic theme tune written by TONY HATCH, an amazing array of guest performers, a whole host of top behind-the-scenes talent often cutting their teeth on this show, and being a series that ran for twenty-four years across several golden a...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 6th 2023 “DOCTOR WHO IS THE MISS MARPLE OF SCI-FI!” This week, once again, that regular contributor to VISION ON SOUND, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, is our returning guest, and is sitting in the hot seat as I fling another of our random chat topics in his general direction, and, when we set out on our journey, neither of us have a clue...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 30th 2023 ANDY TATE who we’re welcoming today is a fan of the show, and got in touch with me with a whole list of exciting suggestions of subjects for shows we might want to do on VISION ON SOUND, so it only seemed fair to invite him along and talk to him about some of them. And what a fun guest he turned out to be, as I think you’ll disc...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 23rd 2023 A couple of years ago, back in our forty-eighth edition of VISION ON SOUND in September 2021, I welcomed ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON onto the show for the first time, and we spent a happy hour discussing his artistic life, creating his witty television-themed illustrations and graphic images, and about how his love of archive televisio...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 16th 2023 It’s been rather too long since we last heard from our Canadian Correspondent RICK LAWLOR on the show, so when I did finally manage to remind myself of this and get in touch, it was a joy to find out that he was still keen to contribute to the show, despite those pesky time differences that can sometimes make finding suitable mo...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 9th 2023 I’ve wanted to cover the iconic TV series THE TWILIGHT ZONE on the show since almost the very first episode of VISION ON SOUND, but for some reason, things seemed to keep getting in the way of me getting around to it, so I was very pleased when ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON joined me for a bit of a chat about the series in all of its many...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 2nd 2023 This week I really wanted to talk about some TV CHEESE, by which I mean the sort of television that can become anybody’s guilty pleasure, even if they might never want to fess up to watching it, or the sort of television that’s so bad it’s actually quite good, or, at the very least, enjoyable. Old curmudgeons like myself, of cour...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 25th 2023 Way back in October 2021, in the fifty-fifth edition of the show if you want to seek it out, LISA and ANDREW joined me to chat about the then relatively brand new release of the BBC’s 1960s version of MAIGRET on Blu-Ray and DVD, so, with eighteen months having passed since, it doesn’t seem too soon to return to talking about the...

BONUS EPISODE! Available from 6:00pm, FRIDAY JUNE 23rd, 2023 ADDITIONAL CONTENT featuring LISA PARKER, ANDREW TROWBRIDGE, PAUL CHANDLER, and WARREN CUMMINGS. For our recent edition which paid tribute to the late, lamented NETWORK DISTRIBUTING, the UK video imprint company that had an eclectic and eccentric range of archive TV releases, STEVE HATCHER and ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON suggested that I might...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 18th 2023 In a change to our schedule, with the sudden unexpected demise of NETWORK DISTRIBUTING, the UK video imprint company that had, with its eclectic and eccentric range of releases, served fans of Archive TV very well for the last 25 years, STEVE HATCHER and ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON got in touch and said they wanted to talk how they fel...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 11th 2023 My regular co-collaborator on the show, WARREN CUMMINGS, has been hosting his CINEMATIC SAUSAGE podcast all about classic movies for the past couple of years, and the thought struck me recently that an enormous amount of the kind of films that he and I both find we enjoy aren’t from the sort of time when we would have been able...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 4th 2023 This week, our regular visitor is my occasional co-presenter on VISION ON SOUND, SANDY McGREGOR, that connoisseur of the cleverer end of classic telly who I am always keen to welcome back to the show in order to elevate my usual choice of topics to chat about above the usual television fayre that I tend to squander my days watchi...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 28th 2023 Despite the slick operation we try to give you the impression that we are running here as we take our weekly deep dives into the world of archive television here on VISION ON SOUND, sometimes my regular co-host, WARREN CUMMINGS, and I agree to meet up and record our latest show with not much actually planned for what we’re going...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 21st 2023 Long time listeners to VISION ON SOUND will already be aware that PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, our returning guest on this week’s edition, is a very avid fan of the TV detective series BERGERAC, and, whilst he has mentioned this from time-to-time on his appearances, we realised that we’d never had a sit down to just talk about th...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 14th 2023 It’s long been known, at least in archive television circles anyway, that the charismatic Canadian television pioneering producer SYDNEY CECIL NEWMAN was enticed into working for ABC television in Britain in the late 1950s, and was responsible for such high profile dramas such as ARMCHAIR THRILLER, as well as creating the sixties...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 7th 2023 One of the things that bothers me about modern television is the way I feel it is often directed, written, and designed to deliberately manipulate the viewer into feeling a particular almost designated set of emotions, as if we can no longer be trusted to respond in the right way, and so our sympathies and reactions are manipulate...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 30th 2023 A few weeks ago, I talked to PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, about his memories of the Children’s TV he grew up with, and afterwards, STEVE HATCHER got in touch because he quite fancied talking about his own memories of such things which, as is the nature of these things, date from at least a decade earlier. And so, not being one...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 23rd 2023 This week, WARREN CUMMINGS returns for a lightning journey through one of his favourite TV shows, BLAKE’S SEVEN, TERRY NATION’S classic space drama from the late 1970s and early 1980s, which featured a small and possibly foolhardy band of freedom-fighting heroic outcasts (or, if you prefer, terrorist maniacs) battling against t...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 16th 2023 This week, I thought I’d try to make a more musical edition of the show and take a look at  - or a listen to - one or two of the many favourite TV theme tunes that we’ve discovered during all of those years of watching TV.  I’ve been thinking about doing a more music-based show for quite some time, but it always comes down to m...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 9th 2023 I often feel very lucky that, with such a lot of telly out there in the world to be viewed, VISION ON SOUND has several regular guests who are prepared to watch certain up-to-the-minute programmes so that I don’t have to, and I can concentrate on the older stuff, which is where we usually like to lurk in this show. This also mea...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 2nd 2023 I’m delighted to say that this week our returning guest is the writer MICHAEL SEELY who got in touch to ask if he could return to the show and have a little chat about his favourite comedy series which is (or are) YES, MINISTER and its continuation as YES, PRIME MINISTER, a pair of linked series written by Anthony Jay and Jonath...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 26th 2023 For various reasons, I’ve been watching quite a lot of television set in and around Scotland over the past couple of months, and, as it rather luckily turns out, for many similar reasons, so has one of our regular visitors to the programme, and, even more luckily, that visitor is SANDY McGREGOR, which means that we can safely t...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 19th 2023 Now that the dust has settled, and the year is rapidly hurtling towards the Easter holidays, it seems like there is no better time for us to calmly sit down and have a bit of a chat about the most recent festive season. We’re nothing if not topical here on VISION ON SOUND. No, really… Bear with me on this… Because, sometimes, r...