Who’s Company, a tapezine hailing from South Oxhey, a suburb of Watford in Hertfordshire, is something of an oddity. Many tapezines had a limited audience through no real fault of their own, but this one was produced in June 1989 for an audience of one, specifically in reply to Paul Chandler’s Who’s Next… which was recorded during the previous month. Some tapezines may have been ordered by just one person, but Who’s Company was actually designed for such a singular audience.

Searching through his collection in 2023 as part of a concerted effort to transfer his old tape recordings to a modern audio file format, Paul Chandler chanced upon an audio cassette labelled simply as ‘Andy’s First Tape’. This proved to contain Who’s Company. “Ironically, out of all the things Nick Goodman and I have digitised recently, it was one of the things I selected to put on an episode of my Shy Life podcast to indicate how friends and I used to send tapes to each other, and I was looking for a range of messages. I just found in the stuff we’d transferred that there was one from Andy. To hear that it was more than just a message… I thought Andy made quite an effort just for me!”

Andy Ching’s memories of it were initially a little vague when interviewed for Who's Listening: “It’s a long, long time ago and mostly forgotten about. I made one bad attempt at a tapezine called Who’s Company – it lasted an hour at the most and Paul is the only person to ever hear it until now. As far as I’m aware, he had the only existing tape copy. It was padded out with clips from The Navy Lark and a few other things, if I remember rightly.”

The tapezine, devised and presented singlehandedly by Andy, was a quickfire affair with the accent very much on humour – with the suggestion that it was a ‘pirate tapezine’ coming from offshore, beyond the five mile limit within which the British government’s legal authority regarding broadcasting applied – hence the short excerpts from The Navy Lark, which consisted of a series of announcements for Leading Seaman Riddle to report to the bridge (sourced from Series 13, episode 1, The TV Documentary, transmitted on 26th March 1972).

There are regular teaser announcements throughout the first side regarding an interview with Jon Pertwee, and this finally appears a short way into the second. It wasn’t, however, quite what the listener might have expected, in that it was compiled from clips of Pertwee in character, mainly as Commander Wetherby of The Navy Lark. This piece reappeared in Paul Chandler’s ALBOE tapezine in 1990.

In terms of how Who’s Company was produced, it seems to have been a fairly modest production from a technical standpoint, as Andy recalls: “I had a little ‘boom box’ twin-tape thing at the time with a built-in microphone. I just had it on my lap and bent over, talking directly into the mic. I can’t really remember how long it took me to finish it.”

With the tape completed and given to his exceptionally select audience, this marked the end of Andy’s foray into tapezine production: “I never thought of doing more.” However, he would go on to contribute to both Rayphase Shift and Spotlight in the 1990s.

After his sole foray into tapezines, Andy Ching took a step back from fan productions, concentrating instead on amateur films with Nick Goodman and the Rayphase Shift crowd, until eventually submitting his own articles at the tail end of RPS’s life. This association culminated in the self-produced documentary Tape to Tape: The Life of a Rayphase Shift in 2003.

Considering that Who’s Company wasn’t designed for a general audience, it’s an entertaining effort. Andy Ching’s approach to tapezine-making was exceptionally light-hearted and everything speeds along at a gallop. Andy gets a quick laugh and then zips on to the next gag, whether that be “the thing everyone’s been waiting for,” which proves to be the end of Side One, or a sped-up Dalek speech from Genesis of the Daleks, which he describes as an “archival discovery, a young Dalek learning its lines”. There are occasional ‘breathers’ breaking up Andy’s fast-paced delivery in the form of vintage TV themes, though the versions played are the variable but kitsch Geoff Love cover versions. Who’s Company’s quickfire nature is its true strength – it never stands still for long enough to become boring or dull and its hit rate isn’t too be sneezed at either. The highlight is the Jon Pertwee ‘interview’, which is quite well thought out despite the primitive and audible nature of the editing.

Alan Hayes