The road to the perfect tapezine is paved with good intentions. For Keith Musselwhite it was a quest for the right blend, learning from others as he went. In 1985, he was in the third year at Highbury Secondary School in Salisbury – a fan of Doctor Who, slowly making contact with like-minded others in the locality. His first Who friend was Andrew Candish, who he first met when sent to church by his parents in the early ’80s. Keith casts his mind back to that time: “I didn’t know Andrew was a Who fan at that time, and I can’t really remember how I hooked up with him again at school. He was in the year below me, as was Jo Bunsell, who also became a friend and collaborator. Andrew and I used to hang around with each other at lunchtimes and we were both in Stage 65, the Salisbury Playhouse’s youth theatre company at the time, too. We used to do our own audio adventures on tape, albeit separately. I was the Ninth Doctor and he was the Tenth, long before those incarnations actually existed. We used to chat about story ideas and talked about the continuity of our eras – for example, what if his first companion was actually my last and so on.”

One day, Keith and Andrew volunteered to work in the school library and this led to their Doctor Who social circle being widened. “I first met Nick Goodman at school when I volunteered with Andrew to be a school librarian and Nick was already there. I was in the Third Year and Nick was just a few months away from leaving.”

In the first week of January 1985, Season 22 blazed onto British television screens. Nick Goodman recalls: “It was a big deal – a new Doctor, a return to Saturday nights! After five years at Highbury, only coming across students with little more than a passing interest in the show, my Who network suddenly exploded in my last six months there. I had met die-hard fans Jo Bunsell and Andrew Candish at Junior School and they were now at Highbury. Keith caught a passing comment I made, and we connected. He was very much a fan of the time, both passionate about and critical of the show.”

Something that Nick told Keith really piqued his interest: “I discovered that Nick had quite a collection of Doctor Who episodes on audio. At that time, I only had about a dozen episodes myself, so I was excited when he loaned me a tape containing Meglos. I had a love/hate relationship with that story as it was the only one that gave me nightmares back in 1980. I wondered if, when reliving the story on audio, it would still have that effect on me. I got the tape and played it that same evening. Sadly, the sound quality wasn’t the best and this became a joke between us ever after.”

Nick soon supplied another tape. He had received a cassette in the post – the latest entry in the relatively new craze for Doctor Who tapezines. He immediately lent Sonic Waves Issue 1 to his new friend. It proved to be a revelation to Keith: “Nick introduced me to Sonic Waves, and I became obsessed with it. I totally adored it and listened to it on a loop for more than two weeks. I tried to do a tapezine of my own. We are talking May 1985. The title was Time Rotor initially, but alternated between that and Death Zone. I restarted it several times because I wasn’t happy with it. I had the Geoff Love Space Themes album and used it for backing tracks for different articles. I’d love be able to go back to those tapes and find out what was on them. I had two copies of the 1980 Doctor Who Annual at the time so I ran a competition which was ‘What was this music?’ The prize was a copy of the annual.

“Nick had left school in spring 1985 and whilst I didn’t see him often we remained in contact. He didn’t take part in Time Rotor, but there were other people I was at school with that got involved. There was one guy whose dad wouldn’t let him watch Doctor Who or any TV in the evening. He promised me an article on a Target book he had read but that never happened. Jo Bunsell did a review of Timelash and Revelation of the Daleks but his microphone conked out. Andrew Candish did a Logopolis article that was reused on many occasions, which I think grew out of the Time Rotor / Death Zone project. I tried to do that tapezine several times under different names. I got halfway through Side 2, but then didn’t have the material or impetus to finish it. Time Rotor went through many ideas and recording tests before it was abandoned. By July 1985, it was wiped with recordings of the Live Aid concert. I found it difficult initially to try to get across to people – who liked Doctor Who, but had never heard a tapezine – just what it was that I was trying to do and what I wanted. I was dabbling with recording tapezines, even though they never got as far as the introduction of the first article.” As a consequence, Keith’s 1985 tapezine – whether in its guise as Time Rotor, Death Zone (a title he would return to in 1989 – see Death Zone) or something else – never saw the light of day and certainly never got so far as to connect with a listenership.

During the following year, Keith joined the Salisbury Federation of Whovians (SFOW), a DWAS Local Group co-ordinated by Andrew Wink. In 1986, the group launched its own tapezine, The SFOW Express, though not everybody in the group was on board with the idea, as Keith remembers: “One of my main points of contact in the SFOW mocked the idea of me producing a tapezine as they thought it wouldn’t be any good.” However, Keith was not to be deterred. He felt that tapezines were his destiny.

Although he did not become involved with The SFOW Express, Keith did befriend and prepare another project with a fellow SFOW member (and SFOW Express contributor), Warren Cummings, The Ipcress File. This was to be a tapezine of two halves, with one side recorded by Warren and Andrew Trowbridge and the other by Keith. Although Keith completed work on his side of the tapezine, Warren and Andrew’s side was ultimately not finished, meaning that The Ipcress File was never published.

Undaunted, Keith quickly embarked on a fresh tapezine project of his own – and this became Meglos, the first issue of which was issued in June 1987. In stark contrast to the experimentation and stop-start nature of his initial attempts to produce a tapezine, Meglos ran for five issues over a period of about eighteen months. Issue 1 included Andrew Candish’s review of Logopolis (which dated back to the days of Time Rotor – and would be recycled once again in 1989 in the first issue of Keith’s next tapezine, Death Zone) and another, concerning Vengeance on Varos, by Adrian Clarkson. “I was at school with Adrian,” Keith reveals. “The way he wrote his article made it sound as if he was convinced that actor Maurice Colbourne was in Vengeance on Varos and played a character called Jack Cline, which was his character in Gangsters. I guess he got confused as Philip Martin had written both programmes!”

Nick Goodman also contributed to the debut issue: “I did a review of Season 16. I didn’t have a video recorder at that point, but had just acquired that season – still my favourite – on audio tape, so I gave it a shot. Now that I come to think of it, The Master Tape did the same thing a year later and I remember thinking, ‘We did that first!’ Despite my involvement, I don’t recall ever owning a copy of Meglos 1. Keith and I were friends, but it was to be a year or two before we would become inseparable buddies and worked together more closely on projects.”

Today, Keith regards this issue as the best that he produced under the Meglos banner: “Issue 1 is what I would call the only proper issue – the only one with unique stuff on it.”

For his next issue, Keith took his inspiration from Alan Hayes’ Sonic Waves audiozine, which, in 1986, devoted an issue to convention recordings. For Meglos, Keith was granted access to guest panel recordings that Nick Goodman had made at two Leisure Hive conventions, and Issue 2 became a Leisure Hive III and IV special. “Issue 2 was just me trying to be Sonic Waves 5, which did the same for Leisure Hive II!” confesses Keith, who had attended the events with the Dictaphone-wielding Goodman.

The third issue, released in May 1988, continued with the convention focus. This time it was the turn of The White Hart Convention to take centre stage. The February 1988 event, which was hastily relocated from Salisbury’s The White Hart Hotel to The Rose and Crown due to a double booking, is commonly regarded as the finest hour enjoyed by its organisers – the Salisbury Federation of Whovians. This small convention was headlined by Sophie Aldred (fresh from Dragonfire), Mark Strickson, his then wife Julie Brennon (Fire Escape in Paradise Towers) and ‘UNIT Family’ member Richard Franklin, and proved to be a rich seam for Meglos to mine as both video and audio recordings had been made at the event.

Issue 4 – completed in October 1988 or thereabouts – returned to more of a standard tapezine format, but it was here that Meglos began to lose steam somewhat – and indeed its own unique indentity. Items were recycled from the by-now-defunct Salisbury tapezine, The SFOW Express, such as Andrew Trowbridge’s humourous The Blancmange of Morbius review, and the jokey interview with a fictional BBC Enterprises representative that he and Warren Cummings had concocted. Original content included a piece about the Brigadier and Benton, which Keith put together himself.

The fifth issue of Meglos was sent out in the early months of 1989, and this also drew heavily on The SFOW Express, with Genesis of the Wogans and The Doctor versus the Rani getting fresh airings, along with an article by Karen Bright about the Second Doctor companion Jamie McCrimmon.

Keith looks back on these later issues with some embarrassment: “Meglos should really have finished after Issue 3. It continued because someone called Mark Scott kept sending me tapes, saying, ‘Please send me the next issue!” even though there wasn’t one advertised. I was just sending it to him, really. It was a case of, ‘I need to fill up a tape. Someone has sent me a tape and wants an issue. What shall I do?’ Issues 4 and 5 were just plagiarised from The SFOW Express. I’m not proud of this fact.”

Today, Meglos is one of the small number of Doctor Who tapezines that is believed to be completely lost. The master tapes are certainly gone, something that Keith does not entirely regret, as Meglos represents a chapter in his creative life that he would rather put behind him: “Those tapes were thrown out around the time I last moved house. It’s not really a shame, because they were an embarrassment. If any editions of Meglos do turn up, Issue 3 is the one most likely to surface as it was advertised and I printed up a leaflet for the registration table at the FalCon convention in 1988. I know that several people ended up with copies of that issue.”

Regardless, the ghost of Meglos takes its place in our annals, even if the issues themselves are lost somewhere in the vortex…

The story continues!

Keith Musselwhite would go on to produce further tapezines in the late 1980s, namely 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.

Keith Musselwhite’s Meglos is almost certainly the longest running tapezine that no longer exists at all today. Whatever its derivative traits, it lasted five issues, delivered a variety of different features, devoted whole issues to convention recordings, potentially making their guest panel interviews available to listeners who had been unable to attend the actual events, and was – let us not forget – an early example of on-demand programming in its later issues! It was also an important stepping stone – even though Keith may well disagree – in the journey that led its editor to produce his next, much improved tapezine, Death Zone.

Nick Goodman