Image © Keith Musselwhite, 1989

“Tell me, what’s your favourite tapezine?”
“Death Zone!” intones a Philip Latham-flavoured Lord President Borusa.

After much experimentation with the tapezine format, Keith Musselwhite had produced five issues of Meglos by early 1989. However, its last two issues had been composed almost entirely of material sourced from elsewhere due to the repeated demands from one particular listener for “the next issue”. It was time for Keith to refocus and rebrand. All he needed was an excuse...

Keith and fellow fan Nick Goodman had been friends since early 1985, their love of Doctor Who bringing them together at Highbury Secondary School in Salisbury. By 1989, Keith had entered the world of work and was employed in an estate agency, while Nick was working in a large newsagent’s. The two friends would meet regularly and exchange titbits of news. Early that June, Nick revealed his plans for a Doctor Who project. Keith remembers his reaction: “Death Zone was all Nick’s fault. He said ‘I’m doing a tapezine.’ ‘Well, so am I, then!’ I declared.” And suddenly, not one, but two tapezines were born.

This was typical of Keith and Nick’s friendly rivalry. “Teenage Keith was enthusiastic and competitive, sometimes to the point of abrasiveness – and I didn’t always know how to react to this,” Nick confesses. “But I don’t think his offer to rival what became Rayphase Shift was a case of ‘My one’s bigger than your one’. It was more ‘Let’s get into the sandpit and play’. He liked the idea that I was entering the arena and wanted to have some fun, too.”

Keith sees things a little differently: “I never really thought of myself as a rival, although I can be competitive. There was always the thought in the back of my mind that I could do a better job than I’d done with Meglos. So, when Nick said that he was doing Rayphase Shift, it made me want to try again.”

Re-energised, Keith had the first issue of his new tapezine Death Zone completed and ready to be duplicated by Tuesday 20th June 1989. By contrast, Rayphase Shift was lagging behind. Nick had completed its first side within a 48-hour period, having started on Thursday 8th June, but work was then held up while he waited on further submissions. Death Zone was designed to be Rayphase Shift’s twin, but ended up being its older brother.

Far from being a rushed piece of one-upmanship, Death Zone 1 set Rayphase Shift a high standard to emulate. “Keith was completely in his element creating this new brand,” Nick remembers, “and the choice of Death Zone as a title was interesting as it was one of several that he considered when he first tried to start a tapezine in 1985.”

“It was different to working on Meglos because I had to write articles for it for starters,” Keith observes. “Death Zone was perhaps a more confident version of the earlier tapezine, now that I come to think of it. I’m amazed at how little plagiarising there was and how much stuff I actually did myself. I drew the cassette cover first of all – and since it featured a Sontaran, it was a case of ‘I’d better write something about them to justify it!’ So, there was that feature and three others, I think, though I always preferred doing the linking stuff rather than the articles themselves.”

The issue includes just two recycled elements: Andrew Candish’s Logopolis review – which dated back to the otherwise fruitless Time Rotor sessions of 1985 (and had been included on the first issue of Meglos) – and an interview with Nick, conducted at the Leisure Hive III convention in 1986. “It’s quite sweet that that’s on there,” says Nick, “as it’s probably the earliest recording of the two of us working together. I come across as being rather dazed – it was my first convention and I had a lot to absorb. You then hear our local group joining in and the resulting banter. It’s a wonderful snapshot of the time. It previously featured on Meglos Issue 2.” Currently, that issue of Meglos is regarded as ‘missing, believed wiped,’ so this represents a surviving sliver of it!

A similarly-themed feature was contributed by Mary Milton, who visited the Salisbury group in November 1987 to interview some of its members, focusing on the fans as much as the show itself. The feature had a dual purpose – it would feature on Death Zone but was also submitted as part of Mary’s university coursework. It captures the mood of 1980s fandom and one interviewee even states that, “I go to Doctor Who conventions and things, but I don’t really like the series as it is now and I haven’t really liked it for the last five years or so. Most fans feel this way – or seem to feel this way – so most fans are going to conventions to support a show that they don’t actually like in its current state, which is odd, isn’t it?” Times change and yet, in many ways, they do not.

There was initially no cross-pollination between Death Zone and Rayphase Shift. At the time, Keith was co-organising the Shangri-La convention (which was eventually held on Saturday 21st October 1989 in Reading) with fellow fans Maria James and Heather Allen. “What with that and producing Death Zone, it meant that I was too busy to offer to contribute to Nick’s tapezine. From my perspective, Nick doing RPS was a good thing. It just made me want to make a better tapezine than Meglos.”

Nick, meanwhile, considered that – since the two tapezines were friendly rivals – it would not be appropriate to contribute anything to Death Zone. “Similarly,” says Nick, “that’s the only reason why I didn’t ask Keith to contribute to the first Rayphase Shift.”

While Nick waited for the articles that he needed in order to complete the first Rayphase Shift, the second Death Zone was on the launching pad. By this point in time, the friendly rivalry that existed between Keith and Nick had dispelled somewhat. “I was invited to contribute to Death Zone 2,” reveals Nick. “It was silly not to pool our resources, but then the rivalry was never serious. Mind you, we both had fun scoring points off each other within our respective creations – all in jest. I enjoyed doing my two features for Death Zone 2.”

Keith contributed a review of Season 26 to the second Rayphase Shift, which also carried a commercial for Death Zone. However, Keith had completed two Death Zone issues some two months before Nick managed to get Rayphase Shift’s first issue past the post. Death Zone 2 debuted in August 1989 and copies were marketed at the Honeycomb convention in Swindon.

At the end of Death Zone 2, Keith informed his listeners that the third issue would be a Christmas special, available in December. Several initial pieces for the special were recorded on Monday 18th September, using new microphones that Keith had purchased. However, within the space of a few weeks, he had decided that a Christmas special wasn’t quite special enough for him – and that Death Zone needed a radio-style makeover...

The story continues!

Keith Musselwhite would go on to edit DZFM, which would prove to be the final tapezine that Keith produced independently, though he did act as guest producer for a single issue of Rayphase Shift in 1994. This was a natural progression as Keith was prolific contributor to this tapezine from its second issue onwards, even participating in its unfinished revival issue in 1999. His articles and reviews always exhibited a lively combination of frank and acid comment mixed with zany, often surreal, niche humour. Keith also contributed to Elaine Bull’s Spotlight tapezine, and could be heard in the ’zine’s drama, Sutton Park – Prison in the Sun, which was a serialisation of a film that he had been involved in. After a gap of several years away from the local stage, Keith appeared in several films written and produced by Nick Goodman and fellow Who fans and tapezine contributors Andy Ching, Andrew Trowbridge and Lisa Parker. He later worked with Nick in the transferring of many of these films to DVD, authoring the discs and designing their on-screen menus and printed covers. His creative talents are never far away.

Death Zone reveals an editor who clearly loves his job and the programme and knows which buttons to push. Reinvigorated by the chance to start over and do better, Keith’s first issue swings along merrily and confidently, and exhibits a cheeky friendliness that became the hallmark of his productions. Death Zone 2 blossoms still further, with a faster pace and more contributors. Both were lively and good-natured productions. While his audience no doubt were keen to hear further Death Zone issues, Keith strove for something even better, and arguably the best was still to come in the form of DZFM.

Nick Goodman