Product Description

'Listen! Quiet! Everybody stand still for a minute. There's something. Can't you hear it?' During an abnormal heatwave in March, the air becomes thick and dull. Nothing moves - you can almost hear the silence. Something was bound to happen...Redlow, a new town in Kent, was the dream of self-made man, Hugh Deverill, MP. At a crowded and restless town meeting, Janet Marshall faints due to the stifling atmosphere. She is helped by her friend Dr Ken Richards - just as a sudden earthquake tears the room apart. A long, deep crack in a road is discovered nearby, and powerful tremors are felt along the South Coast.When torrents of seething mud start emerging from the fissure, scientist Josef Gomez is called in: the mud contains a special organism that can control people's minds. And it can kill. Declared a disaster area, Redlow becomes a state of emergency. Then other fissures appear...Long absent from the BBC archives, this digitally remastered recording of "The Slide, from Doctor Who" writer Victor Pemberton, features Roger Delgado, who went on to play The Master in "Doctor Who". This atmospheric BBC full-cast drama also stars Maurice Denham, David Spenser and Miriam Margolyes. This CD release also includes a detailed sleeve note recounting the making of the radio serialisation, written by Andrew Pixley.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104157 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-06
• Released on: 2007-08-06
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Audio CD

Customer Reviews

Attack Of A Living Mutant Mud
The Slide was a radio sci fi serial that was transmitted on the BBC Light Programme on successive Sunday evenings between 7.00 and 7.30pm for seven weeks commencing on 13 February and ending 27 March 1966.

It is notable for have many links to Doctor Who mainly the fact that the major starring part is Roger Delgado cast as Professor Josef Gomez. Roger Delgado is of course the first and finest incarnation of the Doctor's arch enemy, the Master. Professor Gomez is somewhat similar to the Master both being charming, sophisticated and suave and there is even some of the Master's danger lurking beneath the surface without the evil of course.

The other main link to Doctor Who is the author, Victor Pemberton who wrote The Slide was one of Doctor Who's script editors during Patrick Troughton's era and he contributed a story for the show's fifth season entiled 'Fury from the Deep' which was derived from The Slide.

The Slide has been missing from the BBC radio archives for years and is still not resident in that repository, this release is due to the generosity of the author who had the presence of mind to record the entire serial on transmission, however there have been copies of selected episodes floating around sci fi fans for years, if you know where to look and I have had poor copies of two of the seven episodes for a long time and it is these two episodes that form the basis of this review, as I have not heard the other five episodes I can't really review them.

Episode 2 is entiled 'Down Came A Blackbird' and begins with a green mud bubbling to the surface and solidifying, local farmers then find various wildlife dead in the Hollymill area. earth tremours begin to hit Scotland and the Lake District. In Redlow Hospital a woman called Janet, whom I imagine appeared in the first episode is muttering something about "Light". Gomez is pressured into finding a solution by Deverill, an MP who then leaves for London. The RAF are unable to stem the flow of the mud and a couple of potholers are trapped underground in an area overflowing with the living mud.

Episode 6 is entitled 'Time Limit' and begins with Redlow now a major disaster area and is being evacuated. Two men go into the sewers that has been identified as the mud's central base and find several missing people. Gomez realises that there is an hypnotic link of some kind between the mud and the people it controls, the mud destroys human life by inducing suicides, by making people throw themselves into it. The mud uses agents to trap people that it considers a threat.

I apologise for not being able to review the other five episodes as stated above but on the evidence of the two that are in my possession I think that the whole serial is going to be first rate and is the reason for the five stars.

Radio SciFi is an area that has lost out frequently to it's television counterparts but with material such as The Quatermass Memoirs, The War of the Worlds, The Day of the Triffids etc it can be just as compelling and wonderful and I am happy to say that The Slide almost certainly belongs to that category. I really am looking forward to finally hearing the entire serial after all these years and in remastered sound too. You can't do much better than that.

Back to the old school
This 3CD set exemplifies everything that used to be right with British science fiction. As much as I appreciate the current crop of BBCTV Sci-fi I do find that, these days, the stories all seem a bit rushed.
"The Slide", in a manner reminiscent of serials like "Quatermass And The Pit", takes its time to build the story. Characters have ample opportunity to develop and the air of menace grows palpably as all the plot elements are drawn together.
This is also a superb example of how to create a story where your own piecing together of the evidence runs just ahead of the discoveries made by the characters. True, there are similarities with "X: The Unknown"(see other reviews) but that certainly doesn't devalue this story in any way at all.

The acting is nearly always above par, the sound effects are as pioneering as you would expect from the BBC Radiophonic workshop at this time (not to mention the nostalgia element of old style telephones, police sirens and fire engines) and the plot progression whilst being slightly formulaic is still a joy. I particularly enjoyed all the classic "B-movie" elements of the story; the farmer looking for his missing dog, the strange death of local wildlife, the missing hospital patients, the old couple who won't leave their home in the face of imminent destruction, people developing a strange dislike of daylight, the slightly disgruntled soldiers on guard duty at night who unwisely investigate strange noises and the scientists racing to find a solution against all the odds before it's too late......and there's so much more.

Thank goodness this wasn't lost along with so many other gems during the BBC's horrendously ill-advised purge of its own back-catalogue.

Absolutely smashing.

very slow
Seven part series that could have been done in four. Midwich cuckoos crossed with day of the triffids. VERY slow passed series that quickly wraps up in the final episode almost as if the writer quickly realized he had to finish it. You can spot the ending from about episode two, the acting is ok but the characters do tend to sound the same, and the scene changes are very quick cuts adding a bit of confusion. Disc two has a high pitches noise through out (poorly remasted?). Its ok, worth a listen but not worth the asking price. I would give it two and a half stars