VISION ON SOUND Martin Holmes

LISA PARKER on DIXON OF DOCK GREEN and more!



This week’s returning guest from our panel of returning regulars is LISA PARKER from the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast who volunteered to take part in another of our more random chats which sometimes happen when there’s not much going on in the wider world of ever decreasing telly appreciation circles, at least nothing much that I’m paying all that much attention to.



But things have been getting rather exciting lately with regards to the rediscovery of missing television, and whilst we can’t quite get the flags and bunting out because the entire missing ABC archive hasn’t turned up, there are still those occasional golden nuggets that are found that give some of us jaded old hands just a little bit of hope that there are indeed still many archive TV gems to be found out there.



And so, knowing that LISA is a big fan of crime dramas, and has been something of a champion when it comes to advocating just how good DIXON OF DOCK GREEN is in the face of much suggestion of its perceived air of cosiness (often from many who’ve never bothered to watch it), it was something of a joy when TPTV announced the discovery of DUFFY CALLS THE TUNE from its fifth series in 1959, one of those finds from the missing episodes of 1950s telly that are just about as rare as hen’s teeth, and unfortunately, mess with the previously neat mathematics of missing DIXONS.



Perhaps more amazing too is the fact that TPTV were allowed to actually broadcast the episode very quickly after its discovery, and make it available to all of exactly the sort of viewers who are most eager to see such newly rediscovered gems.



So anyway, with LISA (and, you may notice, a sleeping cat) in place, it didn’t take long before we got talking about this find, DIXON OF DOCK GREEN in general, and several other topics across a free-flowing hour of exactly the kind of telly-related chat that VISION ON SOUND is here to provide.



First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 26th 2024



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.

SANDY McGREGOR considers those ROCK FOLLIES.



First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 19th 2024



This week SANDY McGREGOR returns and, wearing his incisive musical expertise hat, he’s going to talk us through the various madnesses that are the ROCK FOLLIES, a BAFTA award-winning drama series about the experiences of women in the music business which starred CHARLOTTE CORNWELL as ANNA, JULIE COVINGTON as DEE, and RULA LENSKA as Q, a series which was made by THAMES TELEVISION, first broadcast in 1976, with a sequel ROCK FOLLIES OF 77 the following year.



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 looks at some of the more obscure 1960s sitcoms.



First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 12th 2024



This week, STEVE HATCHER returns and we’re going to start a short occasional series in which STEVE talks about some of the more obscure or forgotten sitcoms of the 1960s.



Whilst we’re all probably rather over familiar with the more famous sitcoms of that era, the likes of HANCOCK”S HALF HOUR, STEPTOE AND SON, and DAD”S ARMY were all on TV during that decade, and rightly went on to become mainstays of the conversations we as a nation often have about the comedy of that era, we do sometimes neglect many of the lesser known TV comedies that were on during that rather innovative decade.



Several have, of course, been quite rightly forgotten because they were awful, and many suffer from the problem that is the bane in the lives of many archive TV enthusiasts, in that they were largely wiped, but, as STEVE explains, amongst the ones that do at least partially survive, there’s rather a lot of largely forgotten TV gold to be found.



Well, I say forgotten, but this week’s selection include several very familiar and even rather iconic TV sitcom titles, but I do sometimes suspect that even these are largely forgotten in the wider world as they are all from the nineteen sixties, were mostly shot in black and white, and haven’t enjoyed quite as much exposure over the years as some of the more well-known comedies of the 1970s have enjoyed as their repeats endlessly cycle around.



So today we’ll be talking about the demob happy BOOTSIE AND SNUDGE, the workplace trials of THE RAG TRADE, the domestic travails of MARRIAGE LINES, and the age old battles of GEORGE AND THE DRAGON, along with a few other shows that happen to get mentioned along the way.



STEVE’s drawn up a list of around fourteen of these kinds of shows for us to talk about, and, given that this first hour only covered around four of them, I suspect that we will be returning to the topic at least a couple more times as the year rolls along, so you’ve all got that to look forward to over the coming weeks.



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, returns with some telly set in the middle of nowhere.



First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 5th 2024



This week, because he felt like getting away from it all, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back, and, in coming on this show, he’s obviously picked exactly the right place to do it.



Well, perhaps not, but PAUL has been watching several shows that he realised were basically set in the middle of nowhere, and, as such, thought that they might make for a pleasant edition of VISION ON SOUND, so here we find ourselves chattering about a rather eclectic mixture of shows both old and new including SURVIVOR, A MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD, DEATH AND OTHER DETAILS, and TREASURE HUNT, as well as a whole life-raft of other stuff that gets bunged into the mix whenever we get going.



Anyway, it makes for a fun hour of telly related chat, and I really hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.



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 considers some TELEVISION MONSTERS (but maybe not the ones you were expecting)



First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 28th 2024



Today on VISION ON SOUND, “HERE BE MONSTERS!” as the saying goes, but not necessarily the kind of monsters that you might be expecting.



Well, they certainly weren’t the ones that I was expecting when our regular contributor STEVE HATCHER got in touch and told me that he wanted to do a show on the theme of monsters.



After all, amongst other things, STEVE is very much one of the movers and shakers of DOCTOR WHO fandom, and so I kind of assumed that those sort of monsters were the ones that he most probably had in mind, although, as I was reaching out to grab my copy of the monster book, he explained that he had the more human kind of monster in mind, the kind of testosterone-fuelled monsters that used to inhabit the offices, boardrooms and bedrooms of those high-profile dramas of the sixties and seventies which used to clog up our TV screens with ambitious pant-dropping capitalist anti-heroes involving themselves in dodgy deals and shady shenanigans that somehow came to define the notion of what the world of big business resembled for generations of viewers.



And so, in today’s show we involve ourselves in a whistle-stop tour of the melodramatic corporate power games of THE POWER GAME, MOGUL, THE TROUBLESHOOTERS, THE MAIN CHANCE, MAN AT THE TOP, and HINE, and a couple of others that get mentioned along the way.



So, let’s take a trip into a toxic world of back-stabbing, ladder-climbing power-grabs, where everyone is out to get to the very top by any means necessary…



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 talks about THE TRAITORS



First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 21st 2024



This week, VISION ON SOUND moves into uncharted territory… Or does it?



Certainly our main topic this week is not the kind of thing that we usually talk about on the show, as it’s a programme that’s shiny and new, and pretty much up to the minute, and is something that you might even regard as “trendy” if you were of a mind to do so.



And whilst the realms of the kind of television that is grabbing the headlines right now, and leading to the sort of public conversations that usually set my eyes a-rolling are really not our normal subject matter hereabouts, do bear with me, because not everything is as it might seem.



Unless it is, of course.



This week, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself really, really wanted to talk about latest blockbuster TV game show that “everyone” (in inverted commas) has been talking about: THE TRAITORS, because he’s been watching a lot of it, in several variant forms, over the past few weeks, and might possibly be said to have got somewhat addicted, and maybe even a little evangelical about it.



Anyway, if someone is happy to come onto the show and talk about anything that can quite reasonably be said to be at least vaguely related to television, I’m not going to stop them, even if they want to talk about a television series that I’ve not seen any episodes of.



To be quite honest with you, sometimes those shows where I’m having a programme described and explained to me by someone who is a fan make for the most fun and exciting editions of VISION ON SOUND anyway.



Luckily for me, our conversation also manages to take in such joys as older game shows like TREASURE HUNT, THE INTERCEPTOR, BIG BROTHER and SURVIVOR, and we do also try (in a small way) to examine the psychology of what makes such shows quite so appealing to people who do happen to like such things, whilst wondering just what tricks ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE may one day have in store for the unwary gameshow contestant.



Now, normally, the telly that we are talking about on this show is often so old that spoilers are not something that are likely to be an issue, however, despite me hanging on to this recording for several weeks since we recorded it, I still ought to warn you that there might be one or two things talked about during this hour that you might not yet want to hear if you are still planning to give one or more versions of THE TRAITORS a try, so you have been warned!



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.