THE SLIDE

Another week, and another audiobook gets picked from the shelf and put into the CD player in the car to keep me entertained on my journeys to and from work.

Having decided that continual spending on new stuff is generally a bad idea, I have recently been "revisiting" some of the things which have been gathering dust since the first time I played them and, in certain cases, even longer than that.

Such it was with "The Slide" a seven-part "science-fiction serial for radio" written by Victor Pemberton and first broadcast on BBC Radio in 1965. I'd bought the audio CDs relatively cheaply in a sale a couple of years ago, but never successfully made it past episode two, so this time I was determined to stick with it and see how it all unfolded.

The difficulty of getting past part two was not, incidentally, the serial's fault. When I first got it, I was working full-time from home and, whilst I rarely found the need for audio stimulation, when I did, I quite often found that audiobooks didn't really work for me under such circumstances. I would start to concentrate upon some knotty little problem or other and, perhaps an hour later, I would realise that the CD had stopped and I'd barely heard a word. This doesn't help when it comes to comprehending a plot, so I used to just put music on instead, if the mood of loneliness was overwhelming me that day.

This, incidentally, is why "Test Match Special" was always such a Godsend for me, as it would burble away all day giving me a sense of companionship without me necessarily having to concentrate fully on every word.

Interestingly, audiobooks in the car I seem to be able to follow quite easily, which might explain something of significance about my driving...

Anyway, as a piece of 1960s science-fiction written for the radio, how did "The Slide" hold up nearly fifty years on?

Well, it was all right, I suppose... I mean, it wasn't great, but it wasn't awful either. The seven half-hour segments rattled along at a fair old pace, and it told its story clearly enough in a brisk and entertaining manner, and, to modern ears, gave the tiniest of insights into how attitudes have changed over half a century, as well as how performing styles have moved on. For some of the time it really felt as if I was listening to "The Archers" with added monsters, and yet, with a few changes to the pacing and relatively few tweaks to the script, I actually think that you could remake it today and it would still make a rather gripping radio serial.

The acting style is very much of its era, because everyone talks V-E-R-Y C-L-E-A-R-L-Y and with proper cut glass accents, or with the generic "rough types" accent that presumably used to be taught at RADA…

The stars are the rather marvellous Maurice Denham playing a very complicated role as an MP whose entire world starts to literally crumble around him, and Roger Delgado, the original "Master" from "Doctor Who" playing a more heroic role as a Chilean earthquake "expert" with a rather tragic past, and there's also a small but significant role for a presumably very young Miriam Margolyes... as well as plummy intros courtesy of a young Brian Perkins...

Strangely, this tale of intelligent killer mud was apparently first pitched to the "Doctor Who" production office way back when young Billy Hartnell was holding the keys to the TARDIS, but was deemed "unsuitable" for their needs.

Instead it was reworked as a radio serial with another kind of doctor playing a very key role, and, a couple of years later, the writer would end up working on "Doctor Who" itself, so it must have made one heck of a calling card.

Sadly, some of the "science" being talked about seems pretty "hinky" now. Some of the firmly held opinions about geology seems pretty strange especially because this serial was broadcast at about the time when theories about plate tectonics were first being accepted in the wider scientific community, and the solution to the problem, which I'm not going to explain here, seems to counter-intuitively rely upon the mysteries of the infra-red part of the spectrum which now seems a little implausible.

Still, it passed two or three days of commuting quite adequately, and despite being part of the "aliens in an english domestic setting" subgenre of science-fiction, it wasn't really too silly and did, of course, allow me to experience the various "terrifying" sound effects courtesy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which is always a good thing.

And really, I couldn't have asked any more of it than that.