STEVE HATCHER reveals more of his eclectic television playlist.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 19th 2025.

This week we welcome back STEVE HATCHER once again to continue our series of conversations about some of his eclectic television viewing choices.

Steve has a life long love of television and – like many archive TV fans - is always adding to the mix that makes up his own personal TV schedule based around some of the archive channels, things he finds on the Tube that is You, and his own extensive DVD and Blu-Ray collection which means that he is constantly exploring the fascinating and more obscure corners of the television archives and finding new and often forgotten series to talk to us about.

This week he will mostly be introducing us to several sitcoms, some of which you will have heard of, a couple of which you may actually remember watching, but nevertheless all of them are largely forgotten by the viewing public at large.

So over the course of this week’s show we have a natter that includes the GEOFFREY PALMER-led Channel Four series FAIRLY SECRET ARMY, a kind of not really spinoff from THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN written by David Nobbs; we’ll blow the dust of the once hugely popular ITV hit that was THE ARTHUR HAYNES SHOW, and we’ll also take a peek at the BBC 2 delight that was HOW DO YOU WANT ME? which featured DYLAN MORAN alongside FRANK FINLAY and two actors who left us far too soon, CHARLOTTE COLEMAN and EMMA CHAMBERS.

And just to keep things balanced towards the broader and perhaps more dramatic regions of the television spectrum, we will also touch upon the 1960s BBC drama anthology series DETECTIVE which ran for three series across five years in the latter part of the 1960s and, across its 45 episodes, introduced a whole range of detectives to the viewing audience, many of which were neither SHERLOCK HOLMES nor MAIGRET, despite the programmes often being introduced on screen by RUPERT DAVIES himself.

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 talks about DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 12th 2025.

This week we welcome back MICHAEL HERBERT whose popular recent biography of the television writer MALCOLM HULKE “THINGS ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM” has been released into the world for about six months now, but it is still available via Lulu Books.

MICHAEL hasn’t lost interest in the life and work of MALCOLM HULKE yet, however, and earlier in the year he suggested that we might talk specifically about one of his DOCTOR WHO stories for today’s episode, in a conversation which we recorded on the 22nd of JULY 2025.

So, over the course of the next hour, we will mostly be talking about a seven-part story from the very first colour series which had the title DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS and which was first broadcast in 1970, and starred JON PERTWEE, CAROLINE JOHN, and NICHOLAS COURTNEY.

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 revisits the television year of 1975.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 5th 2025.

This week we’re welcoming a new voice to VISION ON SOUND, NICK GOODMAN, and he’s here to talk about the television of 1975, and the effect it had on making him the archive television fan he is today.

So I hope you enjoy what you hear as we end up chatting about THE GOODIES, THE CHANGES, THE TOMORROW PEOPLE, DOCTOR WHO, SPACE: 1999, although, let’s be honest, I DIDN’T KNOW YOU CARED…

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 shares some of his eclectic viewing.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 28th 2025.

Such is the wibbly-wobbly nature of how I put the schedule for VISION ON SOUND together that this week’s show features a conversation I had with STEVE HATCHER way back in July after he’d not been on the show for a while, in which we discussed his then recent viewing choices.

Obviously since then there has been our appearance at WHOOVERVILLE 16 which went out a couple of weeks back, so you will have heard him more recently, even if, when we recorded it, you hadn’t.

Or something like that anyway.

Anyway, all will either become clear, or perhaps it will hardly matter at all, as we have a TV viewing related chat that covers a wide range of TV series including FAMILIES LIKE OURS, BOB SERVANT, THE DETECTIVES, PATIENCE, THE GOLD ROBBERS, VILLAINS and THE PROFESSIONALS…

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 SEELY talks to me about CALLAN.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 21st 2025.

This week’s show features the return to VISION ON SOUND of one of our guests MICHAEL SEELY, the prolific archive TV author, researcher, and publisher of several books which forensically explore topics as diverse as THE NIGHTMARE MAN, DOOMWATCH, and the almost totally forgotten R3, through his SATURDAY MORNING PRESS imprint.

MICHAEL got in touch with me because, earlier in the summer I’d been giving the TV series CALLAN a long-overdue re-watch, because it felt as if it had been far too long since I’d seen any of the surviving episodes from the black and white series which began on ABC television in 1967 after a successful pilot as part of the ARMCHAIR THEATRE strand, and was popular enough to be picked up by THAMES TELEVISION and continue into the colour era, eventually having four series of containing 44 episodes of which 34 survive.

It was also remade as a feature film in 1974, and was resurrected for a one-off television play in the early 1980s.

CALLAN is one of those somewhat legendary series from the 1960s and 1970s which gets talked about a lot – often in hushed, awe-filled whispers – in archive television circles, so I make no apologies for returning to the subject today.

I’d been extolling its virtues online and claiming it as a classy example of how writing, direction, and performance can build suspense and tension in a multi-camera studio situation, push the boundaries, and create something terrific, occasionally shocking, and utterly intense within those limitations.

MICHAEL popped up to remind me how brilliant EDWARD WOODWARD’s intensity was, and how it sells the whole thing and, after an exchange of messages, we both agreed that his return to the show was long overdue, and the following conversation, recorded on JUNE the 18th 2025, is the result, and I do 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 at WHOOVERVILLE 16.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 14th 2025.

This year, for the fourth consecutive year, VISION ON SOUND was invited to once again take part in the annual event organised by the DERBYSHIRE WHOOVERS known as WHOOVERVILLE.

This year was the sixteenth WHOOVERVILLE, or WHOOVERVILLE 16 as it was known on the day, and it took place on AUGUST THE 30th 2025 at THE QUAD creative centre in the very heart of the city of Derby.

I’d been invited along by two of the main organisers for the event, STEVE HATCHER and ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON who are both old friends of VISION ON SOUND and have racked up several appearances on the show between them, and I’m always terribly grateful to both of them for their continuing support and enthusiasm for this show.

STEVE managed to persuade the lovely M.C. PAUL GRIGGS to join us on the stage to chat about old TV for half an hour or so, and there was a promise of the sound engineering legend that is BRIAN HODGSON joining us later on in the session.

I’m presenting the interviews featuring in this edition of the show unedited and as raw as on the day we recorded them, and so we find me in the middle of setting up some recording equipment as we attempt to get STEVE HATCHER, PAUL GRIGGS and myself on stage to try and have a natter that at least partly involves a few thoughts about the archive TV that all of us here at VISION ON SOUND know and love.

Later we are indeed briefly joined by the legendary BRIAN HODGSON, and the show finishes with a catch up I had with STEVE a couple of days after the event.

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 THE STONE TAPE.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 7th 2025.

I suppose it’s something of a welcome back, of course, after the show took a few weeks off for personal reasons.

Well, to be perfectly honest with you, after two hundred and fifty episodes on the bounce, I was basically knackered, and running on fumes, and decided that the world was unlikely to stop turning if I skipped a few weeks.

Now I am rather sorry that we dropped off the air unannounced, which did confuse some of our loyal listeners for a while, but it was all rather unplanned, and the show had already been uploaded for transmission and such is the wibbly-wobbly way I put this show together, I didn’t get the opportunity to add a tag scene with Tara to explain what was going on whilst I poured gallons of ginger pop masquerading as the expensive stuff.

It also meant that I allowed an entire summer to pass without addressing that faux pas that featured in our last show about American sitcoms, with the small matter of one of them not being American at all, but a Canadian show. Some might say that I could play the “North America” card, or wait for the day when a particular Orange turnip finally gets his own way on that matter, but all I can say as an excuse is that most of our chats on VISION ON SOUND are fairly spontaneous, and until I can persuade someone to sit in on our recording sessions, poised at their laptops and ready to pounce on any slight errors we make, then they are occasionally going to slip through, even though we try our very best to at least give the vague impression that we know what we’re talking aboot.

Happily for me, those fabulous people at FAB RADIO were quite willing to be very forgiving, and keep the show’s slot available to welcome me back when I was good and ready, and, whilst some life stuff that I’m not going to bother you with is currently still making production of the show more of a slog than it might otherwise be, we’re back and ready to head into the autumn with a whole stack of as yet unheard interview recordings made before the production pause until we get into the giddy process of making a whole new batch of shows.

So today we’ll start off with WARREN CUMMINGS returning (yes, him again!) to talk about – in our usual roundabout sort of a way - a personal favourite of his, THE STONE TAPE, as written by NIGEL KNEALE and broadcast on Christmas Day 1972. We recorded this on the 17th of June, so it’s somewhat appropriate that it found itself preserved in silicon to be released into the world a few months later, but could still come back and haunt you forever, should you wish to listen again one day.

Anyway, I hope 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.

PAUL CHANDLER presents THE SHY YETI's Top Ten USTV Sitcoms.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 20th 2025.

This week our friend PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, returns to present another of his Top Ten choices, which this time is a follow up to him recently presenting his choice of his all time favourite British Sitcoms, as this week he crosses the Atlantic to give us his personal selection of his favourite American sitcoms.

As with his other choices, I think that you might be a little bit surprised by several of PAUL’s selections, and, of course, the vast archive of quality options that have to be left out when you’re making a list like this. I’m sure that, if I’d spoken to him on another day, perhaps they might have been completely different. Two of them, after all, even change their places during the course of this conversation.

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 talks TV fashions.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 13th 2025.

This week WARREN CUMMINGS is back again, and this time we decided to take a slightly irreverent look at the notion that our enjoyment of archive television might be reduced simply because of the fashions being worn or the appearance of the people that turn up in it. Does a great contemporary drama, or a classic comedy series now look just a little bit silly because the characters are wearing terrible fashions, have ridiculous haircuts, or sport quite ludicrous facial hair? And will the cutting edge series currently being made and shown look just as ridiculous in a few years time.

All of this was prompted by a mention of some terrible underpants in an episode of a classic TV drama series that we mentioned in passing a few episodes ago, so we really do have to be very careful of what we are talking about and where it might take our explorations of the archives next time…

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 talks about those 1960s puppet series.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 6th 2025.

This week I welcome back WARREN CUMMINGS once again, and this week he wanted to talk all about the Gerry Anderson puppet series of the 1960s, and, although his take on them might be somewhat different to the version you might normally expect when we talk about archive television, I do think we had an entertaining, if highly animated discussion, all about FOUR FEATHER FALLS, FIREBALL XL5, STINGRAY, THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET.

And whilst we did also manage to take in THE ADVENTURES OF TWIZZLE and TORCHY THE BATTERY BOY in passing, we somehow managed to almost completely forget about SUPERCAR, which is the kind of thing that happens when you get carried away with the things that you are actually talking about.

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.