VISION ON SOUND

PAUL CHANDLER on THE INVADERS, THE WILD WILD WEST, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, and BEWITCHED.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 24th 2023

This week, all the way from THE SHY LIFE PODCAST, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself is back here on VISION ON SOUND because, well, he had an idea that he thought that I might like to talk about for the show, and knowing - as he does - that I’m always eager to grab at any such demonstration of enthusiasm from the team, he suggested that I might like to try it out.

So, basically, PAUL asked himself the question about what sort of Archive TV he might be able to see if he was up and about and away from home and didn’t have his extensive collection of television with him. What kind of programmes, essentially, could he watch on a website like THE TUBE THAT IS YOU that might just scratch that itch when he was far, far away from the shelves of YETI TOWERS...?

Over the course of several evenings he picked out a few random choices of single stories from four American television series that were popular in the 1960s, and whilst narrowing this down to choices from a single decade might not be quite as completely random as he initially planned, it does give us the opportunity to return to this theme on another occasion by selecting shows from another decade.

Anyway, future planning aside, the four very popular and successful series PAUL chose were THE INVADERS, a QUINN MARTIN PRODUCTION from 1967 which featured ROY THINNES as ARCHITECT DAVID VINCENT in an era of deep paranoia when you had to have a responsible profession in order not to be a complete “ALIENS ARE HERE” spouting crackpot, apparently.

After that he ventured into THE WILD, WILD WEST featuring ROBERT CONRAD and ROSS MARTIN, before taking a VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA with RICHARD BASEHART and DAVID HEDISON, and ended up being BEWITCHED by SAMANTHA the urban witch as played by ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY.

For THE INVADERS PAUL picked out THE TRIAL from the second season, from THE WILD, WILD WEST, he chose THE NIGHT OF THE SIMIAN TERROR from late in the third season, and from VOYAGE he picked TERROR ON DINOSAUR ISLAND from the second year. Finally, it’s a pair of fifth season offerings from BEWITCHED, that he chose, in order to keep the running times consistent, the two-part story COUSIN SERENA STRIKES AGAIN.

So if you want to watch the specific shows we’re talking about after the programme, at time of recording PAUL found all of these episodes on YOUTUBE, and it’s always a joy when I can present a show where my guest has done all of the homework.

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.

GRAHAM WARD ON RICHARD CARPENTER

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on November 12th 2023

This week, we welcome GRAHAM WARD, yet another new voice to the ever expanding list of contributors to the VISION ON SOUND pool of talent, and, whilst we do start off today with my usual introductory interrogation about his own fascinating earliest television memories and so forth, we very swiftly move onto the topic that he primarily wanted to talk very fondly about, which is the television screenwriting career of RICHARD CARPENTER, who, after a brief career as a jobbing actor in the 1960s, is possibly best known to the general public these days for his work on HTVs stunning ROBIN OF SHERWOOD.

That particularly high profile 1980s hit still appears regularly on the daytime ITV channels, but, of course, fans of his work will also remember such delights as CATWEAZLE, THE GHOSTS OF MOTLEY HALL, THE ADVENTURES OF DICK TURPIN, a large contribution to THE ADVENTURES OF BLACK BEAUTY, and THE FAMOUS FIVE, and the swashbuckling adventures of SMUGGLER and ADVENTURER, and he could very much stake a claim for having reimagined the children’s historical adventure series, most often on the ITV channels, for more than one generation.

RICHARD CARPENTER sadly passed away in 2012, but leaves behind him a huge legacy of television work which, whilst remaining much loved by generations of Archive TV fans like the people who listen to this show, is still being discovered by new generations of fans even today.

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.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on July 9th 2023

I’ve wanted to cover the iconic TV series THE TWILIGHT ZONE on the show since almost the very first episode of VISION ON SOUND, but for some reason, things seemed to keep getting in the way of me getting around to it, so I was very pleased when ANDREW-MARK THOMPSON joined me for a bit of a chat about the series in all of its many manifestations.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE, created by the legendary television writer ROD SERLING was first transmitted on American TV on the CBS network in October 1959.

Despite being often thought of as a Science-Fiction series, THE TWILIGHT ZONE was something far more insightful, and far stranger than that. Because whilst the overall notion of slipping into THE TWILIGHT ZONE is a fundamentally S-F concept, the stories that it featured were often more about life, and fate, and the whims of chance, or choice, than being about starships and aliens.

Of course, such tales did feature, some so memorable that they have inspired some of the finest moments on THE SIMPSONS decades later, as well as presenting half hour versions of stories that later went on to inspire the minds behind several blockbuster movies.

Taking as its source stories featuring people from all walks of life, themes as diverse as jazz music, boxing, military life, and aircraft pilots would feature alongside the astronauts exploring the final frontier at the start of the space race, as well as the melancholic angst of life in post-war atomic-age America.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE aired for five seasons, but sadly was not as much loved in its day as it would later become, and had only moderate ratings meaning that it was twice cancelled and revived, ultimately running for five years and 156 Episodes, 92 of which were written by ROD SERLING himself.

It has since been revived several times, with varying degrees of both success, and, in the case of the feature film version, tragedy, but these versions have rarely proved to be as lasting, or as iconic as that original series born in the 1950s.

Of course, with a topic as huge as THE TWILIGHT ZONE, we may feel the need to return to it at some point, so do feel free to share your own thoughts on the series with us.

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.

A QUARTET OF USTV SEVENTIES COP SHOWS

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on October 15th 2023

This week, PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, is back with another quartet of TV shows that he’s been watching in his quest to discover what sort of television he might be able to find when he’s off on his travels and far, far away from his own personal archive of DVDs, blu-rays, and other television that he might have about the house to entertain himself with.

This week he’s reached the early 1970s and has been watching four American series that, coincidentally, all happened to be popular crime dramas from that era, which, perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising to us really, as, with the popularity of the Western fading fast in the television output of the time, it was the crime drama towards which the Networks and Production Companies turned in order to find their next sure fire hit in a turbulent and often gritty, grimy, and crime-ridden decade in which fear and anxiety often stalked the urban streets on both sides of that vast continent, and TV crime was fought mostly by the Cops, the Lawyers, or the Private Eyes.

So, during the next hour, PAUL will be talking about BARNABY JONES in which BUDDY EBSEN moved from spending many years as a comic oil millionaire into the more murky world of Private Detective work in L.A., KOJAK, in which TELLY SAVALAS was a streetwise cop fighting crime in the bankrupt city of NEW YORK, PETROCELLI, in which BARRY NEWMAN took on cases in Californian Courtrooms, and POLICE WOMAN featuring ANGIE DICKENSON as PEPPER ANDERSON in a ground-breaking yet hard-hitting police drama.

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.