VISION ON SOUND

WARREN CUMMINGS joins me to discuss how TV affects our moods.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 18th 2026.

This week, I invited WARREN CUMMINGS back again because I wanted to talk about television and how it can affect our moods. Whilst I was expecting to end up discussing whether or not watching the news channels is a good thing or a bad thing, and whether it’s best avoided, WARREN, as expected, took the topic in a whole other direction, and I think that led to a far more interesting hour, as I hope you’ll agree if you stick around to listen.

So, the following hour will take us on a journey from the final QUATERMASS series, via some peculiar observations about THE GOOD LIFE and the heavily armed businesspeople of the 1960s and 70s, THE NEW AVENGERS, the animated version of STAR TREK, MORTIMER & WHITEHOUSE GONE FISHING, SLOW HORSES, EDGE OF DARKNESS, TW3 and Z CARS, and a whole lot of other distractions as we discuss the kind of television that causes our spirits to either wilt, or soar to the heights of, well, not exactly ecstasy, but certainly somewhere at least vaguely enjoyable.

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.

TYLER ADAMS joins me to discuss THE CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE MASTER BLACKMAILER.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 11th 2026.

This week we welcome back - after far too long an absence - our friend TYLER ADAMS whose popular GOON POD podcast has become the very benchmark for everything that you should ever need to know about that peculiarly British radio comedy phenomenon, THE GOON SHOW, the Goons themselves, just about everything relating to them, and British comedy in general, and is well worth tracking down.

For a bit of a change, however, TYLER suggested that we talk about a subject that is not Goon related, nor is it even a comedy topic, which is THE MASTER BLACKMAILER a feature-length offering from GRANADA TELEVISION’s now legendary SHERLOCK HOLMES series featuring JEREMY BRETT as HOLMES and, in this instance EDWARD HARDWICKE as DOCTOR WATSON.

This episode, featuring an astonishing guest appearance by ROBERT HARDY, was part of THE CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES selection which followed on from their very popular ADVENTURES OF and RETURN OF series, and comes from 1992, eight years after the series first began, and during a period when the series was experimenting with a longer format for the short stories after previously only extending the episodes for adaptations of the CONAN-DOYLE NOVEL-LENGTH stories, THE SIGN OF FOUR and, inevitably, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.

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 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.