Month: August 2019

Fine Line Doctor Who audios are back online

Cover artwork montage

Back in the Nineties, when new Doctor Who had been absent from our televisions screens for a while, a fan mini-industry of fiction, audio and video adventures sprang up. I had become caught up in serious Doctor Who fandom in the mid-Eighties and it was in the pages of Celestial Toyroom that I first discovered adverts for the Audio Visuals, Doctor Who stories made by some of the talents who go on to found BBV and Big Finish Productions. They were extremely polished for the time and inspired me and some friends to create our own stories on cassette, selling them through fanzine advertisements. I decided to called our group Fine Line, after a quote from the marvelous comedy film This Is Spinal Tap. For me, these sonic adventures gave me a chance to write and produce credible adventures without the limitations that VHS films made in the local suburbs had.

In time, cassettes were replaced by CD-R’s, which in turn were supplanted by MP3 files. My old Fine Line website began as a way of advertising and selling my productions, and became the main means of distribution. Eventually I decided to concentrate on original work and gave up paying for the host.

Recently I have been learning up to date skills in website creation via my BSc degree apprenticeship. It’s been fascinating to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript in an organised course. The first time I was learning as I went, using magazine articles and whilst I made working pages, there significant gaps in my knowledge. In order to keep mind in the zone over the summer, I decided to create a website to host my old fan fiction projects. Audios which taught me a lot about writing, directing and seeing a creative project through.

You can find the results at http://18060801.webdevmmu.uk/ You’ll find two seasons of stories, trailers, some behind the scenes articles, and cover images and more. It’s an evolving site and I intend to add more material from time to time. Who knows I might even complete a couple of unfinished shorts we recorded back then. If you download them, I do hope you enjoy them. Love to hear what you think if you do.

BERGcast – The Quatermass podcast we’ve been waiting for

Injured spaceman with helpers

The history of Professor Quatermass in all his many incarnations across television, cinema, books and stage is a particular love of mine, so I would be a cheerleader for this new podcast series, even if I wasn’t one of it many contributors.

It’s the brainchild of cult tv enthusiast, Jon Dear and Howard Ingham, and over the next few months will cover every serial, film, and spin-off, together with a couple of diversions into media which is closely connected to the development of Quatermass.

Episode one is out now, in which Jon is joined by writer, comedian and television historian Toby Hadoke to talk about the origins and significance of BBC’s The Quatermass Experiment, and analyse the first episode “Contact has been established”. The remainder of this now largely lost serial will be covered by them in the next segment.

It’s an excellent debut. Ingham writes a fascinating introduction in which he points out that in many ways, watching Experiment is to witness not so much a show as the ghost of a television programme. The subsequent conversation between Dear and Hadoke is full of fascinating information that I didn’t know about the making of the serial. Hadoke is the ideal guest to start off this series, since he has been corresponding and interviewing as many people behind the scenes of the Quatermass serials as he could since he was teenager. Since few of the cast and crew involved are still with us, this has resulted in a unique archive of memories. He has also spent hours in the BBC archives reviewing the paperwork and uncovering all kinds of incidental gems, such as the cat being recast because the original was “too savage”.

You can listen to it at Jon’s blog Views from a Hill or with the Podbean app.