Keith Musselwhite had been working on tapezine ideas since 1985. His projects had always been experimental in nature and, as Keith felt that none of them had hit upon the magic formula, none of them had been completed or released. However, Keith remained determined to produce a tapezine, and in 1987 befriended Warren Cummings, a fellow member of the Salisbury Federation of Whovians (SFOW), and begin to plot a new tapezine project with him, The Ipcress File.

This was to be a tapezine of two halves, with one side recorded by Warren and Andrew Trowbridge, who had been a regular contributor to the SFOW tapezine, The SFOW Express, and the other by Keith. “The Ipcress File was a name that Warren came up with – to this day, I have absolutely no idea why,” admits Keith. “I have a feeling that my work on it was completed sometime during the spring of 1987. As far as I remember, it was all Who-related. In tapezine terms, it was probably the first time that I had completed something I’d started! There was a guy on GWR Radio called Chris Kelly (not the Chris Kelly who presented Clapperboard), who used to call himself ‘The Wally on the Wireless’, so I decided to call myself ‘The Twerp on the Tape’. My main memory of the contents of my side is that it included a review of The Highlanders by Andrew Candish, which included some very poor sound clips from the story. He was at the time appearing in a play at the Salisbury Playhouse, and I also recorded an interview with him. This Ipcress File feature was called ‘An Interview with a Doctor Who Fan’, and it was terrible – basically, just talking about school.

“Warren was supposedly going to do Side 2 of The Ipcress File, complete with specially composed incidental music by a band that he said he knew. I said to him that I would also need that music as we were both doing the same tapezine. He said, ‘No, no. That’s just for my side. You do your own thing – they composed it specially for me.’ I spoke to Trowby [Andrew Trowbridge] about it many years later and he told me that the ‘specially composed incidental music’ was just a record that Warren had won at a fair! I finished my side and gave it to Warren to do his bit. I have no idea what contents he had lined up and, as far as I know, he never completed the thing.”

Remarkably for an uncompleted project, a wealth of preparatory recordings by Warren and Andrew do survive, though nothing exists of Keith’s side of The Ipcress File. However, it remains a mystery why a Doctor Who tapezine should share its name with a 1962 Len Deighton spy novel...

Keith Musselwhite would go on to produce tapezines of a more successful nature in the late 1980s, namely Meglos, Death Zone and DZFM. The latter 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.

Warren Cummings moved away to London and from Doctor Who fandom in 1990. Since his return to the fold in 2009, he has featured as P.C. Warren, a character in Andrew Trowbridge’s book Toby and Lucie, has become a semi-regular contributor to Andrew and Lisa Parker’s Round the Archives and In Conversation podcasts, and has written many well-received obituaries for the podcast’s blog. Since 2020, Warren has been a regular voice on FAB Radio International’s show about modern and archive television, Vision On Sound, created and presented by Martin Holmes, and occasionally pops up in Paul Chandler’s The Shy Life Podcast as ‘Uncle Warren’. In late 2021, Warren created his first podcast, based around the world of old films. Initially entitled A Raspberry Mivvi & A Foot Long Dog, the podcast was reimagined as The Cinematic Sausage and is still going strong. Warren lives in Dorset with a lot of ideas but lacks the bravery to put them into the written word, as he is afflicted with a ridiculous sense of humour.