First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 17th 2022

This week, STEVE HATCHER returns for another in our short series of chats about the cinema films based upon popular television series. This week, STEVE wanted to talk a little about the movies based on TV comedies, and chose DAD’S ARMY, AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, THE LIKELY LADS, WHOOPS APOCALYPSE, and IN THE LOOP as five of his personal favourites to take down from the shelves and share with you, so let's head down to the local fleapit at the end of the pier on another soggy summer afternoon in the early nineteen-seventies…

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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 10th 2022

A few weeks ago, you may remember, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself from THE SHY LIFE PODCAST who is one of our regular visitors to us all here at VISION ON SOUND was trying to persuade me of the delights of one of his favourite shows, SEX AND THE CITY and, because I’m always open to fresh new ideas about some of the TV shows that I’ve never personally got around to watching, he thought he might like to try again with a couple of other shows that I’m mostly unfamiliar with, and so the next hour, recorded, incidentally, on a terrible connection for which I can only apologise, we take a short - but hopefully fascinating - diversion into the dark world of DEXTER, the American series with a serial killer in the central role which ran for eight seasons between 2006 and 2013, and which has recently been resurrected for a final bow.

And staying amongst the darker shadows of television, we then take a detour INSIDE NUMBER NINE, another show that I’m fairly unfamiliar with, but which, because of being written by STEVE PEMBERTON and REECE SHEARSMITH, shares a lot of DNA with an old favourite of mine from the turn of the century THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, and which seems to be the inevitable spawn of both that series and its offspring PSYCHOVILLE.

There’s also a little DOCTOR WHO chat in this context, and we might also briefly touch upon what it actually is that draws us into watching a TV show, or, indeed, choosing not to, and the whole notion of revisiting TV series a few years later 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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 3rd 2022

This week we welcome back WARREN CUMMINGS once again for another of our loosely television-themed chats where we pick a few topics out of our random grab bags of recent thoughts and musings and see just where they take us.

So this week, prompted by THE PROFESSIONALS we chat a little about cars and Mr Hudson, look back at the career of JUNE BROWN, lurk in the wings of vaudeville, mull over the dark side of certain characters who were once considered to be National Treasures, think about the VOX POP in modern news, and finally ponder over the effectiveness or otherwise of those creatures known as SEA DEVILS.

All-in-all, a thrill-packed hour, and I hope you will enjoy the ride.

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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 26th 2022

This week we welcome back one of our regular contributors, the encyclopaedic and telly fact-filled mind that belongs to STEVE HATCHER, who has suggested that we might want to talk about the movie spin-offs and adaptations of television series that used to feature prominently in the cinemas in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, several of which proved to be very successful, and some of which were decidedly less so.

Some of these films have gone on to become the more familiar versions of series that no longer seem to get much airtime simply through their regular appearances on television over the years and decades since they were made, and for many viewers, they might even have become the definitive versions of a whole host of television favourites.

Often these films were adaptations of much-loved sitcoms, but also several drama series were deemed worthy of being transferred to the big screen, in colour, sometimes featuring the original television cast, and sometimes bearing little relationship whatsoever with the source material.

STEVE has picked out five dramas (as well as five sitcoms which we’re going to talk about some other time), for us to talk about as specifically British examples that demonstrate the various ways in which these adaptations were achieved by the film-makers of those eras, and, whilst our conversation might touch upon a few others that spring to mind, it’s those five films that we are going to mostly focus our attention on.

So sit back as we mull over the most exciting colourful eccentricities of DR WHO AND THE DALEKS, the colourfully dark and compelling re-imagining of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT in the London Underground Station at Hobb’s End, the strangely detached environmental disaster that prompts the DOOMWATCH team to not exactly leap into action themselves but instead nominate a proxy, the government assassin CALLAN somehow managing to revisit his own past, and the bizarre, much-truncated, late 1990s re-invention of John Steed and Mrs Emma Peel in THE AVENGERS.

We might not get the time to cover all them in any great depth, so there’ll be little in the way of my usual VISION ON SOUND nonsenses of the kind that point out details like the future Roj Blake turning up working at Hobb’s End that I might usually start to weave the interconnectedness of all things around to intrigue you with, especially as one of those five films does actually obliquely name-check this very show, but I hope you’ll enjoy this quick time-trip through some great TV shows dressed up in their best clothes for their various trips to the ROXY and the REGAL.

And once we’ve got back to base, STEVE will return in a few weeks time for a follow-up in which we chat in much the same way about those sitcoms.

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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 19th 2022

This week we welcome back SANDY McGREGOR and TIM BOURNE for another in our occasional peeks at series that maybe fall under the banner of perhaps the more surreal end of the television drama spectrum.

After our previous examinations of both THE PRISONER and THE SINGING DETECTIVE, a couple of months ago, SANDY announced that he was planning to revisit both of the 1990s series of TWIN PEAKS and he just happened to mention that his old pal TIM was also a huge fan, so, of course, it went without saying that I had to schedule both of them in for another of our online chats.

TWIN PEAKS, the dark twisted brainchild of Mark Frost and renowned movie director David Lynch, was something of a cultural phenomenon in the early nineteen-nineties, as many television viewers were as eager as AGENT DALE COOPER to find out just who killed LAURA PALMER, the bright seemingly golden girl of the quiet-seeming rural logging town of TWIN PEAKS.

Both the town and Laura seemed to have been living, at the very least, a dual existence, and, once you scratched beneath the surface of this ordinary-seeming community, or looked into the background of the sad victim of a mysterious killer, nothing about either of them seemed to be exactly what you might have expected, and the impact this one brutal event has upon this whole town populated with eccentrics, monsters, and crammed full of secrets, led to two seasons, and around thirty episodes of one of the most compelling, challenging, memorable, and downright peculiar series ever made on American TV, a series which placed some indelible images inside the minds of viewers, and which remains a cult favourite even today.

Some people believe that the show tended to fall away a little once the initial mystery had been resolved, but others maintain that the further layers of mystery, taking place across at least two interlinked worlds and which presented some utterly bizarre and terrifying imagery, were where the fascinations of TWIN PEAKS truly begin.

Either way, there was enough interest for the feature film FIRE WALK WITH ME to be made a couple of years after the series itself was wrapped in plastic, and twenty-five years later, as promised by the original narrative, TWIN PEAKS did return for a short, but very welcome, limited event series, with both DAVID LYNCH and MARK FROST in charge to add even more confusion to all of the mysteries, if you had been hoping for some kind of closure.

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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 12th 2022

This week we welcome back LISA and ANDREW from the ROUND THE ARCHIVES PODCAST who have agreed to be subjected to our FAB RADIO RANDOMISER and be guided on a long journey through the universe of television via a series of random topics to see just where the conversation takes us.

This week, with the simple prompt of the words TERRY NATION, we will flit via THE AVENGERS, skirting around the world of ITC, and television Science-Fiction, take a couple of orbits of CHARLIE BARLOW, pause to think a little bit about modern day viewing options, before heading off into the deepest recesses of THE SKY AT NIGHT.

I always feel that VISION ON SOUND is often at its best when it’s just a couple of people just having a natter about the subject of the old telly which we all love, and taking these trips just lets us have a quietly informed chat about all sorts of telly-related nonsense, and I hope that you enjoy taking the journey along with 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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 29th 2022

One of the many series that PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI is an enthusiastic fan of is the HOME BOX OFFICE series SEX AND THE CITY, which ran for six seasons, which started in the last couple of years of the last century, and continued through into the first few years of the twenty first, and has since been revived for two feature films, and has now resurfaced in the spin-off series AND JUST LIKE THAT which, he assures me, does not involve any magic tricks or fez wearing that he’s aware of.

SEX AND THE CITY told the stories of the friendship between four smart and dynamic women living in New York City around the time of the millennium, who seem to have no secrets from each other, and share frank details of every matter in their personal lives, whilst living at the more successful, fashionable, and privileged end of life in the city that never sleeps.

The series was based upon the newspaper column in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER and subsequent book written by CANDACE BUSHNELL, and consisted of ninety-four episodes broadcast over six seasons from June 1998 through to February 2004.

It features SARAH JESSICA PARKER as CARRIE BRADSHAW, whose newspaper column gives the series its title and much of its subject matter. Her three friends, who have varying degrees of success in their personal lives, are CHARLOTTE YORK (played by KRISTIN DAVIS), who works in an Art Gallery, SAMANTHA JONES (played by KIM CATTRALL), an independent business woman who had a career in PR, and MIRANDA HOBBES (played by CYNTHIA NIXON), who is a very successful lawyer.

SEX AND THE CITY is a series that is hugely popular with its fans all around the world, but, despite having a few vague memories of dipping in and having a peek at a couple of episodes when it first appeared on terrestrial television in the UK, it was never a series that I was particularly drawn towards, so PAUL is here to persuade me, as my guests often are these days, how wrong I was to ignore it, and to tell me why it’s one of his favourites and why I ought to perhaps give it another try.

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

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 22nd 2022

Ground floor: street level, front door and parking lots, stairs and keyboard accessing, mailboxes and tat. Going up.

First floor: studio, magic happening. Songs, chat, ads, plugs, microphones and chairs. Going up.

Second floor: this week, Lisa and Andrew back, for fun-filled chattering about Are You Being Served? Going down

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

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 15th 2022

Vision On Sound is currently, like many, a House of Disease, so several of our planned programmes have had to be postponed as our guests recuperate, and we hope that they will get well soon. Luckily for me, and the show, and hopefully all of you out there, I can usually rely on one or two of our regular visitors to step up at short notice and find something television-related for us to talk about, so that we don’t have to vanish into any dark dimensions ourselves for a couple of weeks.

So, I am more than pleased this week to welcome back PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, who is a big fan of the anthology mystery and terror television series, of which there have been several over the years, including ORSON WELLES’ GREAT MYSTERIES, THRILLER, CHILLER, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, TWILIGHT ZONE, and many more.

PAUL joined me for a very off-the-cuff chat about two of his favourites as we grabbed hold of a giant iron knocker, and rapped timorously on the imposing, and frankly terrifying, doors of two of the great HAMMER HOUSES of television.

THE HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR presented ITV viewers with thirteen fifty-minute tales of terror in late 1980, and, about four years later, THE HAMMER HOUSE OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE was released, and gave us another thirteen disturbing and edgy tales to ponder upon, this time lasting seventy minutes a week.

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.