VISION ON SOUND

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 cock-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.