Undoubtedly one of the more idiosyncratic entries that you will find at Who’s Listening, The Making of a Myth grew out of the fan group the Devon Seaside Devils, which had been formed after Miles Northcott met fellow fans Jon Kolchak Pertwee and Russell Buer.

“Our stuff was quite different to the norm and generally focused on one of our founder members, Russell Buer,” Miles comments. “He was quite a character back in the day and was always saying crazy, odd and inexplicable things, which were often very funny, although not intentionally so. The Making of a Myth was initially a series of taped messages between Russell and his longtime friend Jon Kolchak Pertwee. Jon sent me these tapes to listen to and they were so funny that I felt the world at large deserved to hear them, too.”

Before long, the group began setting a cassette recorder running whenever Russell was with them – and these became The Making of a Myth series, which in turn spawned a series of musical tapes which consisted of regular, familiar songs with clips of Russell inserted for comic effect.

There was a further branching out by the Devon Seaside Devils when The Talentless Winkle Chunk was recorded. This title may at first sound like the strangest ever title for a Doctor Who cassette (though The Ipcress File gives it a run for its money!), but when you’ve got the joke it all makes sense. Miles explains: “The Talentless Winkle Chunk was us as a group performing The Talons of Weng Chiang from the scriptbook, adding in our own ad-libs and doing silly voices. I played Jago and missed one meeting, so someone else took over for that episode. When we did the next episode, I had them do the lines with me – and, by the last episode, we had about six of us, all reading Jago’s lines at the same time!” The third issue of The Talentless Winkle Chunk took in a reperformance of another Doctor Who classic, The Tomb of the Cybermen (reimagined as Toom of the Cydermen).

“This led to the production of two videos in which we played a story – Ghost Light and Silver Nemesis respectively – and dubbed our own soundtrack over the top. For these, we didn’t use scripts and just improvised everything. It proved to be the inspiration for my current podcast, Doctor Who’s Line Is It? ...Anyway!!!, for which a group of us have done the same thing – but on audio – with a number of stories. I add sound effects and music, timing everything so that the podcasts can be played at the same time as the original episodes – to create entirely new versions of the stories that we based our performances on!”

The Devon Seaside Devils, in addition to their exploits on audio cassette, dared also to explore the possibilities of print, unleashing their own fanzine, The Russell Buer Show. “That was closer to a regular ’zine, but still imbued with our own quirkiness. As time went by, we occasionally changed the title to include the names of various other group members – and we named one issue after Martin Wiggins, in recognition of the fact that he actually took out a subscription, bless him!” The Seaside Devils also made several videos, the subjects of which included a day out with Russell Buer, a mini-convention, one of their group meetings, a trip to Longleat. Included within a couple of these were interviews with actors Deborah Watling, John Leeson, Pamela Salem and Paul Darrow.

Those who were tempted by The Making of a Myth and the various reperformed Doctor Who soundtracks had a variety of opportunities to buy copies of the tapes. They were on sale at group meetings, at the Exo-Space 2 convention in Exeter in 1991, through The Whonatics (of which the Devon Seaside Devils were a sector group), and through adverts in the fanzine. Miles reveals: “We didn’t sell very many, although I did sell a copy of Buer! The Movie – at Exo-Space – which was subsequently shown to various other people by the purchaser and added to the Great Man’s legend quite a bit!”