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JOHN ISLES discusses THE X-FILES. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 18th 2026. This week we welcome aboard JOHN ISLES who is a writer, film-maker, and one third of the podcast hosts on I Don't Do Sci-Fi, and Tripodscast, and he’s joining us here on VISION ON SOUND for the first time because he found out that I’d been watching THE X-FILES a lot recently, and he’s a bit of a fan. Whilst he mostly wanted to talk about the recent Directors cut of the second X-FILES feature film I WANT TO BELIEVE: VRACH FRANKENSHTEYN, I also managed to discuss the X-FILES in more general terms with him, alongside some of TEN THIRTEEN PRODUCTIONS’ other output, and a few other TV shows along the way. 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 goes WITHIN THESE WALLS. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 11th 2026. This week, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back, and he’s been following up on a topic we’ve chatted about a few times on VISION ON SOUND over the years, the TV prison drama. Or, more specifically, the women’s prison drama. PAUL has watched several of these over the years, from PRISONER (or, if you prefer PRISONER CELL BLOCK H) to WENTWORTH and BAD GIRLS, amongst others, and it’s a genre that he returns to and which he finds altogether fascinating, and not for the reasons some of you might suspect. Anyway, this time he’s been watching WITHIN THESE WALLS, created by DAVID BUTLER, which was a highly successful ITV drama series made by LONDON WEEKEND TELEVISION in the mid-to-late-1970s, which ran for 72 episodes across five seasons from January 1974 to April 1978. Set in the fictional HMP STONE PARK, it’s a series that I have always associated with the name GOOGIE WITHERS who played FAYE BOSWELL, the first prison governor on the series, for its first three years, with her replacements being played by KATHERINE BLAKE and SARAH LAWSON in the last two years of its stretch. Known for its hard-hitting, bleak storylines, WITHIN THESE WALLS featured a whole host of familiar faces in its guest cast, and, as you’ll hear from PAUL himself, it’s definitely proved intriguing enough to make him keep on watching. 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 discusses the second version of TV's SPECIAL BRANCH. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 4th 2026. This week, WARREN CUMMINGS is back and, perhaps rather surprisingly for when we appear together on VISION ON SOUND these days, he decided that he’d quite like to talk about one TV show. Or perhaps more accurately, one iteration of a TV show that appeared in two wildly different formats in the course of a four year run. SPECIAL BRANCH, a police series that (not unsurprisingly) told stories about the activities of that particular section of the police force first appeared as a THAMES TELEVISION studio-based drama in 1969. It starred DERREN NESBITT as DCI ELLIOT JORDAN alongside WENSLEY PITHEY and later FULTON MACKAY and ran for 27 episodes spread across two series before vanishing seemingly forever in November 1970. In 1973, when the newly-formed EUSTON FILMS production company created by THAMES were looking for a series to launch their new production style, they took the concept down from the shelf, blew off the fingerprint dust, and set about retooling the series as an action-packed film series intended for the international market, starring the craggy-faced GEORGE SEWELL as DCI ALAN CRAVEN. That they didn’t quite succeed straight off the bat, and the show only ran for two seasons of 13 episodes each, doesn’t seem to matter all that much, because, whilst the series was popular enough domestically (especially once the producers added the popular face of PATRICK MOWER into the mix) it is a very good example of a production company learning on the job to make the sort of high-octane television that they were hoping to, and, when production ceased, the team almost immediately geared up to create THE SWEENEY and, in terms of EUSTON FILMS anyway, the rest is TV history. 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.

THE SHY YETI looks out for LOOK-IN! First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 27th 2026. This week, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back and he’s been on a bit of a spending spree, tracking down for his collection some early copies of a comic / magazine that was something of a cornerstone of our TV appreciation for kids like me in the 1970s. LOOK-IN, the self-styled “JUNIOR TV TIMES” that, with its articles on popular TV, pop stars, football and the like, cast its popularity net far and wide amongst the pop culture seekers of that particular decade and, to a far lesser extent, into the eighties and beyond. Glossy in finish, and featuring great photos and articles, as well as some gorgeous cover art, how could we not be tempted by this fine example of a magazine specifically (and very successfully) aimed so precisely at our age group, no matter what our interests might have been? Despite the articles on the popular chart bands of the time, and the bigger movies of the era including JAMES BOND and STAR WARS, perhaps inevitably it was the telly stuff that drew kids like me in, especially with the beautifully rendered comic strip art that extended the adventures of our favourite TV adventure series, and really were a big part of the draw for those of us who bought LOOK-IN each and every week. THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, THE BIONIC WOMAN, THE TOMORROW PEOPLE and SPACE: 1999 might have been some of my favourite comic strip adventures of that era, and occasionally might have been more exciting than the shows that spawned them, but other shows such as FOLLYFOOT, TIMESLIP, DICK TURPIN, and HOW THE WEST WAS WON were also featured, as well as comic greats such as… BENNY HILL. PAUL has been tracking down some of the rarer early issues, and that was the starting point for this week’s conversation, so I hope you’ll enjoy thi rather nostalgic hour as we talk about all things LOOK-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.

WARREN CUMMINGS gets increasingly random. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 20th 2026. This week’s show is basically a bit of a random, archive TV related conversation that WARREN CUMMINGS and I had back in June, before VISION ON SOUND took its summer break. Over the course of this hour we cover a lot of ground, from BLUE PETER, via GRANGE HILL and THE TOMORROW PEOPLE to discuss the various merits of CYRIL SHAPS, HARRY SULLIVAN, the future of DOCTOR WHO, which lost TV shows WARREN would most like to see more episodes of, and quite a lot more, at least some of which is really quite interesting, and a lot of which remains quite relevant as we arrive into the autumn, ready to cool down a little, and get back to work. Anyway, I’ve dug this out of the dusty archives for you to listen to, and I hope that you enjoy it. 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.

VISION ON SOUND takes part in WHOOVERVILLE 17. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 13th 2026. VoS 295 is a slightly shorter episode than is usual (which hopefully partially explains my extended intro blurb) of which a large part was recorded on stage in the METRO CINEMA at QUAD, DERBY ob SEPTEMBER 5th 2026. STEVE HATCHER joins me on stage to chat with JASON HAIGH-ELLERY about BIG FINISH PRODUCTIONS and (amongst other topics) their adaptations of classic TV shows for audio. It is a DOCTOR WHO event, so there's a fair amount of chat about that show, obviously, but I hope we entertained our audience on the day with some interesting insights into the wider world of archive TV, and I hope that listeners to VISION ON SOUND will enjoy the results too. 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 looks at DANGER MAN. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 6th 2026. "Every radio station has its specialised talk show presenters: America, Howard Stern; France, Philippe Bouvard; England, James O’Brien. FAB Radio International also has its own. A messy job? Well, that's when they usually call on me, or someone like me. Oh yes -- my name is Holmes. Martin Holmes." 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 YOU RANG, M'LORD? First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 28th 2026. This week, LISA PARKER, one of the regular contributors to VISION ON SOUND who hasn’t been on the show for far too long returns to tell me all about one of her favourite sitcoms, YOU RANG, M’LORD? Created and written by the legendary television writing duo JIMMY PERRY and DAVID CROFT with twenty-six fifty minute episodes being broadcast across four series between 1988 and 1993, this popular series took three of the lead actors from another of their hit series HI-DE-HI, PAUL SHANE, SU POLLARD and JEFFREY HOLLAND, alongside many other actors who had appeared their other series, and placed them in a similar situation to that of the hit drama UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS almost two decades earlier. PAUL SHANE plays ALF STOKES, the scheming butler to the MELDRUM family, SU POLLARD plays his daughter, the maid IVY TEASDALE, with JEFFREY HOLLAND playing the pompous footman JAMES TWELVETREES. They are all in the service of LORD MELDRUM and his younger brother TEDDY as played by the familiar duo from IT AIN”T HALF HOT MUM, DONALD HEWLETT and MICHAEL KNOWLES. Other familiar faces included BILL PERTWEE, FRANK WILLIAMS, BARBARA NEW, MAVIS PUGH, and JOHN HORSLEY, and there’s a memorable theme song featuring none other than BOB MONKHOUSE. Despite its high production values, and a longer running time that meant it slotted very nicely into the traditional Sunday evening viewing schedule, it wasn’t exactly seen as a roaring success at the time it was made, and was seldom repeated on the main BBC channels. It remains, therefore, one of PERRY and CROFT’S lesser-known works, although, rather surprisingly, it has recently been revived as a radio series more than thirty years after it ended its TV run, which probably shows that it may have been more enduring than people might have thought. 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 on JUMPING THE SHARK. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 21st 2026. This week, if it hasn’t done so already, VISION ON SOUND finally gets to jump the shark, that strange phenomenon where a TV show does something so outrageous, so ridiculous, or something simply so awful that its viewers can never really look at it in quite the same way again. The phrase itself refers back to 1977, and an episode in the fifth season of the popular American wholesome family sitcom HAPPY DAYS in which the much loved Arthur Fonzarelli (“THE FONZ”) straps on his water-skis and, well, jumps over a shark, although the phrase itself, referring to television absurdities generally, wasn’t coined until 1985, nearly a decade later, by JOHN HEIN and SEAN CONNOLLY. Whilst the phrase is often used to point out the particular moment that a television series knows that it is doomed, that particular episode of HAPPY DAYS was actually very successful, and the series itself continued for another six seasons across the next seven years, and prompted seven different spin-off series during its run, including LAVERNE & SHIRLEY, and MORK & MINDY. PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, suggested that we might want to talk about this whole notion of Jumping The Shark, and, at the risk of strapping on our own water-skis, over the next hour we chat about several of our favourite TV series and whether or not they ever jumped the shark, and I hope you’ll enjoy at least some of that we come up with. 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 on A VERY BRITISH COUP. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 14th 2026. This week a very ADAM HENLEY wanted to come back and talk about a very TV mini-series that is very important to him, A VERY BRITISH COUP. This was a three-part political drama about the attacks upon a very left-wing socialist government by the establishment, a film very much directed by MICK JACKSON, very much written by ALAN PLATER, based very loosely upon a book by CHRIS MULLEN, and which was very first broadcast on Channel Four in 1988. Starring RAY McANALLY in one of his very finest later roles as HARRY PERKINS a radical socialist Prime Minister who gets nobbled by the left, the right, and just about everyone in between as he tries to implement an agenda that almost nobody in the corridors of power seems to think very highly of. A very powerful political drama that takes a very no-holds-barred stance on the very devious machinations and abuses of power that serve to keep the United Kingdom such a very docile place politically, and what can happen when those very powerful people get to do very much what they want to do in order to keep their own version of the world the very same as they have always had it. It’s one of ADAM’s very favourite television programmes, so do join us as we head back into the very alternative future, somewhere in the very early 1990s. 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 on THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 7th 2026. I didn’t get where I am today without recognising when someone has an enthusiasm for a TV show that I’d better invite them on the show to talk about it, so when NICK GOODMAN wanted to come back and talk about his all-time favourite sitcom, THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN, I wasn’t going to say no. Written by David Nobbs and running across three BBC TV series of seven episodes each in the late 1970s, with a belated sequel THE LEGACY OF REGINAL PERRIN following in 1996, the series starred LEONARD ROSSITER in perhaps his other most memorable TV role (alongside RIGSBY in RISING DAMP and those Cinzano adverts), and cemented his reputation for television comedy in place for all time. It’s a darkly comic tale of one man’s reaction to executive and domestic stress which is also populated with a memorable cast of absurd characters whose antics and catchphrases still resonate fifty years on, although, amongst the corporate nonsense, and farting chairs, perhaps I should warn you, the series does also feature references to suicide in its narrative that might not seem quite so amusing to some listeners today. A new version starring MARTIN CLUNES followed in 2009, and this also prompted us to talk a little about our likes and dislikes when it comes to television remakes, which rounds off the hour rather nicely. Meanwhile, despite a bit of a c**k-up on the technical front, I think NICK’s enthusiasm for the show makes for an entertaining hour that I hope you will find both smashing and super. 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 on archive television found and lost. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 31st 2026. I realised recently that, whilst everyone else in the Archive television community has been talking a lot about such things, here on VISION ON SOUND, we haven’t really addressed the hot topic of this year so far, namely the discovery of some exciting missing episodes of television series that had been thought lost forever. So I contacted WARREN CUMMINGS and we decided to spend this week’s edition trying, in our usual unique VISION ON SOUND way, to try and rectify this. Naturally, whilst we will, of course, mention the resurrection of two exciting episodes of THE DALEKS’ MASTER PLAN in the course of the next hour, this isn’t really an episode about that. Instead, whilst we do talk about some found television, and some lost television, we also talk a little about the type of television that was more likely to become lost television, and whether the different types of attempts to fill the gaps in the archive - via recreation, or animation, or other means - have been successful or not, and, in the end, if it’s the original programmes themselves that are the most important versions to have, and whether they can ever live up - or down - to their reputations if and when we do finally manage to actually see them. 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 on A VERY PECULIAR PRACTICE. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 24th 2026. This week ADAM HENLEY returns to the show because he has recently been watching a BBC drama series that has been one of my personal favourites for a very long time, and he wanted to talk to me about it. The show in question is called A VERY PECULIAR PRACTICE, featuring darkly bizarre tales of the various machinations, goings on, double-dealings, dustcarts, and nun-related antics occuring on campus at the UNIVERSITY OF LOWLANDS in the mid-to-late 1980s. Written under intriguing circumstances (and with a very deft post-modern touch), by ANDREW DAVIES, and directed in its entirety by DAVID TUCKER, it was a somewhat surreal (and sometimes very black) comedy drama that appeared for one seven-part series of fifty-minute episodes in 1986, followed by another in 1988, and was then resurrected for a one-off Screen One television movie called A VERY POLISH PRACTICE four years later in 1992. The series starred PETER DAVISON as DR STEPHEN DAKER, an idealistic young GP who is looking for a fresh start as he joins a university medical practice at a time of great change in the higher education sector. The health centre is staffed, alongside LINDY WHITEFORD’s long-suffering nurse MAUREEN and GILLIAN RAINE’s terrifying receptionist MRS KRAMER, by a mis-matched trio of Doctors who include the bisexual ultra-feminist DR ROSE MARIE (played by BARBARA FLYNN), the hyper-ambitious and empathy-free DR ROBERT (BOB) BUZZARD (played by DAVID TROUGHTON), and the decrepit and often sozzled DR JOCK McCANNAN (played by GRAHAM CROWDEN). In the first series DR DAKER becomes romantically involved with a post-graduate police officer, LYN TURTLE (played by AMANDA HILLWOOD – later pathologist GRAYLING RUSSELL alongside INSPECTOR MORSE), and in the second he becomes more deeply involved with the Polish arts lecturer GRETE GROTOWSKA (as played by JOANNA KANSKA). Across the series, the campus is overseen by a pair of scheming VICE CHANCELLORS, ERNEST HEMINGWAY “THE POISON DWARF” of the first run is played by the impeccable JOHN BIRD, and his JFK-channelling replacement JACK DANIELS in the second run is played by MICHAEL J SHANNON. A host of well-known character actors like TIMOTHY WEST, JAMES GROUT, JOE MELIA, FRANCES WHITE, JEAN HEYWOOD, ROBERT LANG, PETER BLAKE, and CLIVE SWIFT feature in guest roles, and the series also contains early performances by soon to be well-known faces such as HUGH GRANT, KATHY BURKE, SIMON RUSSELL BEALE and MARK ADDY. The series also features an excellent (and very earworm-ish) theme song written by DAVE GREENSLADE and performed by ELKIE BROOKS that somehow, despite us having to have a somewhat appropriate two attempts at recording this particular show, ADAM and I almost unforgivably fail to mention. For me, A VERY PECULIAR PRACTICE is truly one of the great drama series of the 1980s and is well worth seeking out if you are a fan of well-written and clever television drama, and I do hope you’ll be tempted to track it down once you’ve listen to what I hope is an entertaining hour that might help to persuade you. 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 presents a right load of Sherlocks. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 17th 2026. SHERLOCK HOLMES on television is a topic that we tend to return to time and again on VISION ON SOUND, and for very good reasons. Not only is the character a television staple that runs through pretty much the whole of television history, and in several countries, across the decades of television production, but it is often used as a mark of distinction and generally brings out the very best that television is capable of being. Earlier on this year TYLER ADAMS came on to talk about THE MASTER BLACKMAILER in Granada Television’s prestigious series THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, but this week WARREN CUMMINGS is back, and he promised me a right load of Sherlocks, so how could I resist? So do join us as we meander around various iterations of SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’s most famous creation, and transport us back to, well, several different multiverses offering up many alternative interpretations of crime-fighting, Victorian style… 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 and ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON discuss THE RIGHT END OF TIME, a TIMESLIP event that took place recently at QUAD in Derby, featuring STEVE's interviews with CHERYL BURFIELD, SPENCER BANKS, and event co-organiser STEVE HARDY. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 10th 2026. On April the 18th QUAD in Derby hosted THE RIGHT END OF TIME, an event all about the early 70s classic TV series TIMESLIP. For various reasons, I couldn’t go myself, but STEVE HATCHER gamely offered to record some chats with STEVE HARDY who organised the event alongside ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON, and special guests, actors SPENCER BANKS and CHERYL BURFIELD, which open this week’s VISION ON SOUND. STEVE HATCHER and ANDREW also joined me the following week to reflect upon the day’s events, and try to crack through the time barrier, 56 years on. 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.