VISION ON SOUND

MICHAEL HERBERT on DOOMWATCH. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 16th 2024. This week’s returning guest from our ever growing group of returning regulars is MICHAEL HERBERT who, you might remember from some earlier editions of VISION ON SOUND, has spent a lot of the last few years researching the life of MALCOLM HULKE, which, of course, because everything in the world of television is all interconnected somehow, means that he comes across other things that interest him, and he got in touch to see if I fancied having a natter about DOOMWATCH. Now, despite rumours to the contrary, I absolutely adore DOOMWATCH. Perhaps it’s because it simply appeals to my own inflated sense of pessimism, but there’s just something very entertaining about a television series built around the potential disasters that humanity is capable of causing through its own hubris if we allow ourselves to go ahead with our experimentations unchecked and without a certain amount of accountability, and there is an enduring appeal to the stories it told more than half a century ago, many of which still feel very relevant today, when some of the actions of governments and individuals really do feel as if they still need reining in. Created by DR KIT PEDLER and GERRY DAVIS following their successful collaborations on DOCTOR WHO, and broadcast on the BBC across three series between 1970 and 1972, DOOMWATCH explored new and unusual threats to humanity which were appearing in many ways, as the human race was busily developing the white heat of technology in the post-nuclear age, in a series of stories involving subjects as diverse as plastic-eating viruses, artificial hearts, toxic waste, and rats with a genetically enhanced taste for human flesh. The series involved the dramatic experiences of the fictional DEPARTMENT FOR THE OBSERVATION AND MEASUREMENT OF SCIENTIFIC WORK – You can see why they preferred to use DOOMWATCH as a title – as they attempted to protect the world from the dangers of unprincipled scientific research, as they were set up “to investigate any scientific research, public or private, that could possibly be harmful to man” which basically meant that DOCTOR SPENCER QUIST and his team were often irritants to those who were heavily invested in the steady march of progress. No change there then. Starring JOHN PAUL, JOBY BLANCHARD and SIMON OATES, amongst others, the series made a star of ROBERT POWELL, whose character TOBY WREN’s untimely demise at the end of the first series sent shockwaves through the pages of the RADIO TIMES in a way that the serious concerns being talked about in the storylines seldom did. It may surprise you just how many of the stories told in this series seem to be about things humanity has only recently begun to have concerns about, when the writers involved were trying to warn us about it decades ago, but, well, that’s human beings for you, isn’t it? 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 the TV life of HADLEIGH. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 9th 2024. A few weeks ago on VISION ON SOUND, STEVE HATCHER took us on a brief tour through the television lives of several characters who were the kind of testosterone-fuelled monsters that used to inhabit the boardrooms and bedrooms of those high-profile dramas of the sixties and seventies whose dodgy dealings and shady shenanigans somehow came to define the notion of what the world of big business resembled for generations of viewers. It was in VISION ON SOUND 186, if you are the kind of listener who might want to look that sort of thing up. One character who was initially on that list ultimately didn’t manage to make the cut as he turned out - unexpectedly - to be rather too nice to be included on such a list, and that was JAMES HADLEIGH, as played by former ADAM ADAMANT GERALD HARPER, across four incredibly popular series of a show which was created by ROBERT BARR and ultimately consisted of 52 hour-long episodes (unsurprisingly titled HADLEIGH), which was produced by Yorkshire Television that ran across the ITV network between 1969 and 1976. HADLEIGH told of the various ups and downs in the life of the local squire – something I’m sure we can all relate to - as he protects the welfare of his tenants in the role of a kind of knight in shining armour, correcting social injustices from behind the wheel of his Aston Martin as one description would have it, although it’s probably more about HADLEIGH’s financial trials and tribulations, and the ups and downs of a complicated personal life, all of which seemed to become compulsive viewing for anything up to 17 million viewers during the years that it was being broadcast. Also, as STEVE will explain, the HADLEIGH series was itself a sequel to a very different hour-long drama series that was also created by ROBERT BARR and produced by YTV in 1968, GAZETTE, which was an altogether much harder-hitting and more working class drama based around the activities of a local newspaper based in the north. Anyway, as STEVE’s now finished watching all of HADLEIGH’s televised adventures, he thought it might be fun to come back onto the show and discuss what he made of a series that he actually found quite compelling viewing despite it sounding like it really would not exactly be his cup of Earl Grey in a bone china teacup at all. 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 considers his TV happiness. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on June 2nd 2024 This week PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back once again for another of our cosy chats that might take the subject of television as its starting point, but then plays fast and loose with the self-imposed restrictions VISION ON SOUND has set itself. I was in something of a downbeat, sombre mood when I arranged to talk to PAUL, and so I thought that I might try something slightly more philosophical than our usual run through his most recent archive TV discoveries, or something fresh, new, and exciting that he was going to try and persuade me of the virtues of, and, instead, I thought that I might try and get PAUL to help me pin down what it is about the kind of television he watches, or his interest in the subject of television itself, that brings joy and happiness into his world, in another of our experimental formats that are usually for one week only. As ever, by the end of the hour, I’m not sure that we come to any real conclusions really, but PAUL takes us on a very personal journey through the friendships that he has made by sharing his love of certain television shows with other people, and tells us a little bit about some of the creative elements in his life that have come about from simply having an interest in the process of making television. Anyway, I hope that you enjoy what he has to say in this week’s edition, and, should our conversation inspire you to want to take part in a similar discussion, feel free to get in touch with me via @visiononsound1 in the social media service formerly known as TwitWorld. 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 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.

LISA PARKER considers the series SHADOW OF THE NOOSE First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 14th 2024 This week, LISA PARKER, one half of the team behind the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast returns to VISION ON SOUND to talk about a series that combines her love of television dramas about Law and Order with her love of period dramas. The series is SHADOW OF THE NOOSE, an eight part series which was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1989 which does that tricky thing of building a drama series set around the background of true life events, but which also presents fictionalised versions of some of the real people once involved. In this series we are presented with JONATHAN HYDE playing the celebrated defence lawyer SIR EDWARD MARSHALL HALL, who had a formidable reputation as an orator, and who successfully defended many people accused of murder in many high profile cases that occurred in the late VICTORIAN and EDWARDIAN eras, some of which remain notorious even to this day, and, because of the harsh penalties that were in place during those times, most of such cases did often have, as the series suggests, the shadow of the noose looming over them, at least as far as the defendants were concerned. Despite being well-regarded at the time, a second series was never commissioned, so, unfortunately, some of the more notorious cases that SIR EDWARD defended were not covered by this ground-breaking legal drama series, but that does not reduce the legacy of the programme, especially in more recent times, as almost any well-known murder case from history seems to still be a source of endless fascination to modern viewers. It’s always a joy to welcome back LISA, whose research into these shows is always pretty comprehensive, by the way – which always pleases me. Here she presents the case for the defence whilst representing this, perhaps often overlooked, and fascinating case study of a life lived in the legal spotlight in what could possibly nowadays be considered to be a somewhat obscure archive TV drama series. 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 pays tribute to LAURIE JOHNSON First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 7th 2024 Last time we had him on the show, WARREN CUMMINGS turned up with a whole load of notes on the career of a great film & tv music composer that we ended up not using, so it only seemed fair to use them this week instead as VISION ON SOUND pays tribute to the late, great LAURIE JOHNSON. 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 on the multiple TV adaptations of DRACULA First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 31st 2024 This week, STEVE HATCHER wanted to talk about, amongst other things, four distinct television adaptations of Bram Stoker’s book DRACULA, so that’s exactly what we did. So let’s set those FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL Time Engines to “GOTHIC” and take a trip to the dark side… 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 discusses some of the grim reaper's recent work... First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 24th 2024 We don’t often acknowledge the work of the Grim Reaper on VISION ON SOUND, but with Arabella Weir spooking me with talk of SNIPER’S ALLEY on the Christmas GONE FISHING, and the scythe striking down so many TV icons in the past few months, I thought I’d get together with WARREN CUMMINGS to chat about the TV lives of a few of them. So why not sit back as we remember such great names as DAVID SOUL, DAVID McCALLUM, MICHAEL GAMBON, BRIDGET FORSYTH, ANDRE BRAUGHER, and LANCE REDDICK over the next hour which I promise you isn’t half as maudlin as you might fear, although sadly, our FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL time machine can’t bring any of them back… 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 guilt-free TV. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 17th 2024 This week we welcome back one of our more regular contributors to the show, PAUL CHANDLER, the SHY YETI himself, hotfooting it over from his endless production routine of making THE SHY LIFE podcast. For this show, I decided to give PAUL a prompt to give us something to talk about, and this was due to the fact that one of the streaming services that I use at home offered me an option of watching some GUILT-FREE TV and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that I was particularly sure what it even meant by that. Did it mean that I could just watch a whole chunk of it without feeling guilty at quite how much time I was wasting? Or was it offering me permission to watch a whole selection of the type of television that I might never feel comfortable in admitting to watching? Or was it referring to some other, more sinister possibilities in the line of popular entertainment…? Whichever it was getting at, I swiftly mistranslated its purpose as being all about those guilty televisual pleasures that might not be popular choices if you happened to mention them in polite company, and then realised just how little time I actually spent in polite company anyway. So, the upshot of all that pointless introspection is that I decided that PAUL was exactly the person I should choose to talk about this stuff, and that became the prompt for our programme this evening, and, even if I suspect we very swiftly moved away from that as the main thrust of what we ended up talking about, I think that the conversation we actually did have did, ultimately, still make for a fairly fascinating hour of telly-related chat, which is, of course, what we always try to bring you here on VISION ON SOUND. 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 explores the roots of his GOONPOD podcast. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 10th 2024 This week we welcome another new voice to VISION ON SOUND in the form of TYLER ADAMS, although his won’t be an unfamiliar voice to you at all, if you happen to be a listener to his phenomenally successful GOON POD podcast, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, takes as its starting point the 1950s BBC radio comedy series THE GOON SHOW, and has attracted many brilliant people to expand and expound upon the show’s impact into all sorts of worlds beyond. But I found myself asking what what what what what was it that led a young lad who grew up on the other side of the world in New Zealand, far away from the hallowed halls of the BBC, to form such an enthusiastic connection to this British show which was made long before he was even a twinkle in a farmer’s eye, and I think you’ll find his story, steeped as it is in a whole host of British sitcom classics, a fascinating one… 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 revisits the video age. First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on March 3rd 2024 This week one of my more regular guests on VISION ON SOUND, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back, and we’re going to take a nostalgic meander that starts off with a few reflections on what it was like growing up in the video age, or rather, growing up in an era when we consumed our films and, perhaps to a lesser extent, television – at least as far as the video rental shops were concerned – via the medium of videotape. But, of course, because it’s PAUL and I, we also meander off into topics like how we consume such media in more recent times, too, the whole world of collecting physical media, PAUL’S own dalliances with television production, and we even give a mention to his pet cat Deeley, and his efforts to sabotage PAUL’S viewing and editing routines… So, why not join us as we head back to an age of chunky buttons, programming, top-loading, and VHS… 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 The Rivals of Hercule Poirot First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 25th 2024 This week STEVE HATCHER returns and wants to talk to me about what he calls THE RIVALS OF HERCULE POIROT, and, I think we’ll just let him explain what that might be as we go along… But, as it includes two television versions of LORD PETER WIMSEY, CAMPION, and THE MRS BRADLEY MYSTERIES, I think you’re all in for a very interesting evening of classic sleuthing… 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 looks at the various variants of LAW & ORDER... First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 18th 2024 This week we welcome back LISA PARKER from the ROUND THE ARCHIVES PODCAST and we’re going to have a bit of a natter about one of my favourite USTV shows, the phenomenally successful LAW AND ORDER, the recently revived crime series that launched a franchise consisting of a whole raft of spin-offs, and we’ll also be talking about its UK counterpart unsurprisingly called LAW AND ORDER UK 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 and I have a grumpy old hour... First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 11th 2024 It’s been suggested to me recently that AGEISM has become the last prejudice that television seems happy to tolerate. In an era when inclusivity and tolerance of all kinds of people has quite rightly finally become the norm on TV, it still appears to be apparently quite okay to mock the elderly in advertising, dramas, comedies, and everyday life. Now it’s sometimes been said that when WARREN CUMMINGS and I get together on the show, it’s like we become the grumpiest of grumpy old men, so who better, I thought, to consider this topic with me? But, of course, because we’re both very old, and likely to drift off topic, the following hour drifts into all sorts of the sort of other television-related grumbles, which may prove that they do have a point. 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.

ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON on THUNDERBIRDS First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on February 4th 2024 This week ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON wanted to talk about the exciting and colourful GERRY & SYLVIA ANDERSON produced series from the mid-1960s "THUNDERBIRDS," so… well, that's exactly what we did, and, without a fast-cutting montage of highlights of this week's episode, I think you'll enjoy it. 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.