VISION ON SOUND

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 22nd 2023 This week we welcome back our regular contributor PAUL CHANDLER, the SHY YETI himself, who’s found a few spare moments to once again venture into his imaginarium of televisual treats and share his choices for the section of the museum set aside specifically for the strange and quirky subset of television drama – and occasiona...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 15th 2023 Now the sort of people who like dinner parties, or enjoy partaking in small talk, will always tell you that you should never discuss religion or politics in polite company, and they probably make a good point, especially if you don’t ever want your social event to end in a bit of a punch-up. Equally, and perhaps to our nation...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 8th 2023 I like to think that some of the very best editions of VISION ON SOUND have come about when I just have a chat with fans of television about what it is that they like about the television programmes that they love. At the same time, some of our more regular listeners might recognise just how much I enjoy talking to writers, or...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 1st 2023 VISION ON SOUND’s old friend SANDY McGREGOR is back again this week to take a look at another of the serious television dramas that he enjoys so much and likes to talk to me about. This time it’s PETER FLANNERY’S epic nine-part drama OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH that he has been watching. It’s a story based upon the original scrip...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 25th 2022 It’s Christmas Day here at VISION ON SOUND H.Q. and everybody else on my usual guest list has slipped away to spend their day catching up with their nearest and dearest, or hiding under their own particular choice of rock, or just generally stuffing their faces, unwrapping their gifts, or simply vegging out in front of what...

This is a bit of a bonus episode, really, as WARREN and I were recording something completely different a couple of weeks ago and ended up having this chat that started with us diving into the Cortina from LIFE ON MARS, taking a diversion through the whole idea of television and toys, overtaking Stanley Unwin’s jalopy from THE SECRET SERVICE, and paying a brief visit to our partial namesake VISION...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 4th 2022 Our old friend SANDY McGREGOR got in touch recently to point out that, amidst all of the ballyhoo and hullaballoo surrounding the centenary of one particular British broadcasting institution, it was easy for shows that talk about television like this one to forget that another television Channel had passed a significant miles...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 11th 2022 A few weeks ago, around about HALLOWEEN, WARREN CUMMINGS and I gathered for one of our little chats about our recent television highs and lows, and, as is often the case with us, we started out with little in the way of a plan, but just thought it might be nice to see where the conversation took us. With thoughts of GHOSTIES...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 4th 2022 This week we welcome back the ever popular and ever erudite LISA PARKER, one half of the team behind the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast, for one of our regular catch ups on what’s been happening in her telly world over the past few weeks. It’s one of those wide-ranging meandering wanders through various television topics that we’...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on November 27th 2022 In the early 1980s, GRANADA TELEVISION produced what is widely considered to be one of the all-time masterpieces of British Television Drama series, much of it filmed on location in India, and which went on to be sold all around the world as an example of the very finest of the kind of television series that British televisi...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on November 20th 2022 This week’s show is simply WARREN and I nattering about all sorts of our usual nonsense as we talk about the telly he watched on his holidays, and so we chat about all sorts of things, from GAVIN & STACEY to BREAD, from TRIANGLE to RETURN OF THE SAINT, from… Ah, you get the idea... PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, mu...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on November 13th 2022 This week we welcome back the ever popular SHY YETI, PAUL CHANDLER, chief wrangler of THE SHY LIFE PODCAST for another of our meandering rambles around the highways and byways and forgotten short cuts of this complicated matrix we think of as the universe of archive, and not quite so archive television. The idea behind this...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on November 6th 2022 Over the past couple of years, the BBC has been taking several of its landmark television plays off the shelf, blowing the dust off them, and treating viewers to BBC4 who are so inclined to a chance to see some of the highlights of its often influential and sometimes controversial flagship drama series from the 1970s and earl...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 30th 2022 The last few weeks do seem to have brought a lot of endings along with them, some of which have felt life-changing on a grand scale, others of which have been sad on a personal level for perhaps fewer people, and some of which simply involved something as inconsequential as a TV show which, whilst perhaps seeming insignifican...

I don’t normally do this, but here’s an unedited chat WARREN CUMMINGS and I had last night (24 OCTOBER 2022) about Sunday’s DOCTOR WHO finale episode THE POWER OF THE DOCTOR, which I thought might make a nice (well, maybe not that nice) grumpy old bonus. NB This does contain strong language.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 23rd 2022 For my latest catch-up with WARREN CUMMINGS, this month I decided to focus on a set of film DVDs that had been lent to me by VISION ON SOUND regular SANDY McGREGOR that featured the films of MICHAEL POWELL and EMERIC PRESSBURGER, and the reason I thought they might be of interest was because of the number of actors who turned...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 16th 2022 On this week’s show we welcome back that perennial pair of regular contributors LISA PARKER and ANDREW TROWBRIDGE from the headquarters of their ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast, lurking, as they often do, somewhere on the south coast of England. This week ANDREW suggested the topic of REACTIONS might be something he’d like to talk...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 9th 2022 On this week’s VISION ON SOUND we welcome MICHAEL SEELY who is well known in Archive Television circles for the books he has written about certain television series, and for his biographies of some well recognised names from television production from the sixties and seventies. PROPHETS OF DOOM, his unauthorised history of the...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 2nd 2022 This week we welcome back STEVE HATCHER who, for several years now, has been regularly sharing his thoughts and reviews on television, both ancient and modern, to his friends, followers, and anyone else who might care to read them online, and his insights are often so very perceptive that they’ve tended to cost me an arm and a...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 25th 2022 As most of you will be aware, the second Elizabethan era recently came to an end in the early part of September, and, for a lot of the time over the subsequent couple of weeks, television went into a kind of not exactly “limbo”, but very much shifted its attention to the life of the late Queen, and the public paraphernalia...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 18th 2022 It’s perhaps a bit of a weird one this week, or possibly not, as I invited PAUL CHANDLER, the SHY YETI back to attempt a bit of a chat about the philosophy of television, and to look into why it is that the likes of us latched on to television as a thing we enjoyed at an early age, and turned it into an interest, a fascinat...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 11th 2022 Two former guests on VISION ON SOUND happen to be the chief movers and shakers behind WHOOVERVILLE, an annual DOCTOR WHO convention held in DERBY in September, and this year they were kind and supportive enough to ask VISION ON SOUND to join them and take part. So, we packed up our trusty FAB GEAR and took VISION ON SOUND o...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 4th 2022 I didn’t want to make a big deal of this being the one hundredth edition of VISION ON SOUND but, given that another broadcasting institution is also celebrating its own version of a century, I invited WARREN CUMMINGS back to pick through the list of BBC TV favourites as chosen by the viewers of THE ONE SHOW, so we got to cra...

VISION ON SOUND - A radio show in which my rotating roster of guests and I have occasionally thoughtful, often insightful, and sometimes downright wacky conversations all about all sorts of things prompted by our love of old television and much, much more. Broadcast on SUNDAY EVENINGS at 7:00pm on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL - Internet radio broadcasting from the heart of Manchesterford - and availabl...

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 28th 2022 This is a show that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, ever since our guest and regular contributor, STEVE HATCHER appeared on the ITV quiz show THE CHASE – and, to be honest, I possibly thought about it even earlier than that, when he first let us know that he was GOING to be on that show. That his appearance was such a...