VISION ON SOUND

PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI tells me all about some archive Australian dramas - but possibly not the ones you were expecting.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 4th 2026.This week we welcome back our friend PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, and this week he’s going to venture into perhaps territory rather familiar to regular listeners to VISION ON SOUND.Because I expect it will come as absolutely no surprise to any of you that we will be discussing that favourite topic of PAUL’s, the Australian Drama series.But, thanks a particular DVD outlet called Eaton Films making a lot more archive material available – at least as far as Crawford Television productions are concerned - PAUL has been expanding his personal experience of the Antipodean televisual universe, and over the course of the next hour we will be discussing (amongst other shows) two series, one of which is called THE BOX and the other is COP SHOP.Following a 90minute Pilot THE BOX ran from February 1974 through to October 1977 and across those slightly under four years managed to clock up an astonishing 603 episodes, 474 of which were half an hour, and the remaining 128 running to 60 minutes.As with a lot of the shows PAUL likes to encourage us to see, it’s described as a Soap Opera, but it’s unusual in being a drama set in a fictional television station in Melbourne, and, like several shows in which television chooses to turn the dramatic spotlight upon itself, it can occasionally prove to be ground-breaking and perhaps slightly controversial, at least with its forward-looking attitude to the sexuality of its characters, and in featuring occasional glimpses of on-screen nudity when such things were far less likely on television.COP SHOP was – perhaps unsurprisingly - a long running police drama series, and across its seven years of production from 1977 to 1984 produced an incredible 582 fifty-five-minute episodes. In comparison, the seven seasons of HILL STREET BLUES produced 146. They are, of course, very different in style, with COP SHOP perhaps more resembling THE BILL in terms of what it looks like, but it’s still an astonishing rate of production for a police series.And whilst PAUL’S heart will probably always belong to shows like NEIGHBOURS and SONS AND DAUGHTERS, I think you’ll find his enthusiasm for these other shows infectious, and may find your credit cards screaming from whichever purse or wallet you keep yours 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.

LISA PARKER on some of her recent TV viewing.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 28th 2025.This week, our friend LISA PARKER returns to share some of her recent viewing experiences with us, which, perhaps unusually, is mostly outside what we generally get to talk about whenever LISA shows up.This triggers some rather interesting conversation prompted by programmes as diverse as MISS MARPLE, SERGEANT CORK, DOCTOR WHO, Z CARS, HORRIBLE HISTORIES, and even STAR MAIDENS in another of those sometimes rather more investigative explorations of a viewer’s experiences of viewing archive television that I like to think that VISION ON SOUND sometimes does so well.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, discusses A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 21st 2025.It’s Christmas time and (as any fule no), that’s a time when ghosts and ghoulies tend to crawl out of the wainscoting, and trouble the very worst of us into at least thinking about changing our ways, and perhaps trying to become better people, whatever that may mean.Often, such transformations have already fizzled out before the doors open for the Boxing Day Sales, but at least once a year there’s that one small hope that some of us have at least tried to embrace our fellow inhabitants of planet earth for a few hours of the year as it, too, changes its own directions and heads back towards the sun, or away from it, depending upon where you happen to be loitering upon its surface.This Christmas week we welcome back our friend PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, and he wanted to talk about a peculiar phenomenon known as A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS which ran on the BBC throughout most of the 1970s, and has since been sporadically revived in this century.Over the next hour, as it’s VISION ON SOUND and we tend to have our little archive TV ways, we mostly concentrate on the original 1970s run, but we have already seriously given some thought returning to cover the later films on another occasion, perhaps when the sun is beaming down and those dark and scary corners can’t conceal any horrors that might wish to lurk there.So, amongst other creepy tales, we will be talking in a fairly non-spoilery way about THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER, A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS, LOST HEARTS, THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS, THE ASH TREE, THE SIGNALMAN, STIGMA, and THE --- ICE --- HOUSE…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 explores TV in real time.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 14th 2025.This week, WARREN CUMMINGS is back again for another of our more random telly-related chats, which ultimately leads to us having a lengthy discussion about the structure of how we watch modern television, and involves things like comparing the different storytelling styles of TV mini-series and feature films, via the early 21st century high-concept thriller series “24” and “Big Brother”.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 discusses three JACK GERSON thrillers.First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on December 7th 2025.This week, NICK GOODMAN was very eager to press his personal Fast Return Switch because he wanted to share his particular enthusiasm for three of the BBC thriller series written by JACK GERSON which were all produced by ROBERT McINTOSH across three consecutive years around the turn of the 1980s.These were RUNNING BLIND in 1979, based on the novel by DESMOND BAGLEY, and starring STUART WILSON, which was followed over the course of the next two years by a pair of not entirely thematically dissimilar three-part thriller serials THE ASSASSINATION RUN and THE TREACHERY GAME which featured MALCOLM STODDARD and MARY TAMM in the lead roles.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.