"Hello viewers!"

"Hello viewers!"

We've always regarded 'Round The Archives' as a team effort and one of our oldest friends actually seeded the idea that we could do a podcast when we were invited onto his own show. In July 2016, we popped up to Winchester for a trip to the pub with Paul Chandler to record an interview for Episode 13 of his 'Shy Life Podcast'. It proved to be an enjoyable experience, nattering about old telly and it wasn't long before we started doing it for ouselves (ooer!)...

Paul is a prolific poet, author, actor and podcaster and we've been doing silly things with him for many years now. The annoying thing known as Real Life means that we don't get to meet face-to-face as often as we once did, but the audio medium has allowed us to work on various projects even if we're not in the same county at the time.

The 1990s saw us doing an awful lot of filming. Or possibly a lot of awful filming, depending on your point of view! 'Sutton Park' was Paul's camcorder fantasy spoof soap opera. It ran for over 3000 episodes and is almost impossible to describe without sounding like a loony. There is some material currently available online and just looking at Episodes 1150 and 1151 brings back fond memories of some very strange goings-on. I'd utterly forgotten using my Emu as a set of improvised bagpipes, but the bit using Smarties (who, of course have the answer!) to do some divination did ring a bell.

The cast was split between Paul's circle of friends and a variety of hand puppets, with the odd talking clock and inflatable Santa Claus... Golden-haired Little Jay was one of my favourites, and I remember some spooky footage with a plastic witch-on-a-stick that we taped at Knowlton Church, which also features in 'Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World: The Riddle Of The Stones'. The ruined church, that is, not the plastic witch-on-a-stick...

Currently Paul and Nick Goodman are working their way through the 'Sutton Park' archives and I look forward to rewatching some more of a very creative period in our lives.

In recent months, Paul has been kind enough to allow us to indulge in some more silliness on his podcast, and the recent plotline of alien Ikk being a trifle unwell owes more than a little to 'Sutton Park'.

Paul's own blog may be found here and he will be returning to 'Round The Archives' very shortly...

(By Andrew Trowbridge)