In between his two tapezine pilot issues, Who’s Next… and ALBOE, Paul Chandler produced a taped report entitled Lost in Longleat. This was recorded in the week between the first transmissions of Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric in October 1989, first and foremost for Paul’s friend Lee Freeman, but the tape was distributed, like the tapezine pilots, to Paul’s many penfriends. It was not advertised for sale more generally.

“If I was doing it now, I’d call it a podcast, but it was a long time before podcasts,” Paul commented when he included a recording of Lost in Longleat in episode 106 of his popular The Shy Life Podcast.

The premise of Lost in Longleat is that Paul receives a phone call, challenging him to accept a mission of “deadly danger”, to visit Longleat and its famous Doctor Who exhibition and “to natter on audio tape for almost 60 minutes”. The recording was made during a family visit to the Wiltshire tourist attraction, with Paul commentating into his cassette recorder microphone as an on-the-spot reporter. After an introduction, the listener then meets Paul at the breakfast table with the family – his mother, father, Aunt Jessie and eight year-old brother Graham – and then, after some greetings to individual listeners, it’s off to Longleat.

Once there, Paul comments on the attraction and eventually goes into the Doctor Who exhibition, describing the sights and sounds as he takes in the displays. This part of the recording is topped off with a visit to the exhibition shop, complete with descriptions of what was on offer and vox-pop recordings with others in the shop, including comments on the then most recent Doctor Who story, Ghost Light, and about how frightening the forthcoming The Curse of Fenric was expected to be.

The second side of the cassette is mostly taken up with Paul getting, quite literally, lost in Longleat as he reports from the maze. “I love mazes,” he comments as he enters, a phrase he repeats often during the report as he gets more and more lost, almost as if to convince himself that he really does love mazes despite his predicament. Paul eventually finds his way out and the family return home, with Paul recording their reactions in the car – twice, as the first time the recording failed!

A heavily truncated edit of Lost in Longleat was included in the second issue of Nick Goodman’s Rayphase Shift tapezine.

Since Paul Chandler’s early attempts at tapezines, he has moved on to other creative pursuits – writing many unpublished scripts and stories whilst still at school. Once at University, he moved into improvised video projects such as the spoof soap opera, Sutton Park, which ran for eight years from 1992 to 2000 and more than 3,200 episodes. Around this time, he was also an actor for hire, appearing in many of Nick Goodman’s video projects. In the first decade of the new millennium, Paul focused on verse, self-publishing his poetry collections, and also writing novels and short stories about The Mouse of Commons. By the early 2010s, Paul was a regular performer at Covent Garden’s renowned Poetry Café, making over one hundred recordings of his performances. He has posted these, along with videos of his worldwide travels, on his MrShyYeti YouTube channel. He also published three series as scripted novels: The Beast of Friends, Hot Stuff and Kensington Gore (see www.lulu.com/spotlight/shyyeti). Since 2016, he has been an avid podcast producer, releasing to date over 650 episodes of The Shy Life Podcast, a show that covers all manner of topics, features many returning guests, and an intriguing ongoing fictional subplot! He also regularly contributes to a number of other podcasts such as Round the Archives, The Smellcast, Vision on Sound and Big Fatty Online. In 2020, Paul contributed to Nick Goodman’s Life After Magnet Memories book and in 2022 published a script novel, A Woman for All Reasons, also with Nick Goodman.

From a 21st century perspective, the recording of the aural atmosphere of the exhibition, and Paul’s commentary, are quite fascinating, preserving in a small way this fondly-remembered but long gone exhibition.

Alan Hayes