Bloodtide was responsible for scaring me. It really was. Not once but twice. They were different kinds of fear but they went beyond what men in rubber suits generally do to me. Not that I encourage them but you know how it is.

The first (which was actually the second but I want to put it first) was when I was listening to it in bed one night. I managed disc one fine but became drowsy during the ill judged episode three. That is ill judged on my part rather than Mr Morris’s or Mr Russell’s. I’m being polite because I’ve heard that sucking (up) to Mr R can do wonders for your career. So I’m lightly snoring (probably, I was asleep at the time and sadly there is no one around who can verify it) when suddenly I am awoken by the shout of "I AM YOUR GOD!" Well, who wouldn’t be a little rattled by that. Was I having a religious experience? Sadly not. Just Daniel Hogarth being vigorous in his delivery. I am vaguely acquainted with Mr Hogarth, under his online pseudonym, and can vouchsafe that he is not my personal deity. Were I pan-theological instead of merely duo-theological then he might be in with a shot at God of Wine or possibly God of People Called Pamela but I digress. I was woken up sharply and not without a jolt.

The second follows on from that to an extent. I was a lurker at the BBCi message boards for a few weeks before jumping in at the sharks end and laying myself open for all and sundry. All didn’t want me and I didn’t really fancy sundry so nothing came of it. Someone on the Audio board asked the question "Is Bloodtide anti-Christian?" and got the reply "I hope so!!". This began the longest and most fiercely contested debate that those boards ever witnessed. Page after page after page of back and forth pro- and anti- religion, pro- and ambivalent towards religion, pro- and homosexual, pro- and just stepped into calm things down, pro- and… you get the idea. It was, in the words of Yes Minister, forthright bordering on direct. Not that it became a flame war. It was a heated but well conducted debate. The sort of thing that rarely ever happens on message boards because they either degenerate or the boards are too small to foster divergent opinions. It scared me a little because this was a Doctor Who audio play (which I hadn’t heard but which I knew featured the Silurians so it was tantamount to feuding over the subtexts in Warriors of the Deep). Everyone was taking it all waaay to seriously. I’d expected a certain amount of anal discussion (and I was right about that, albeit in a totally different context) but not fierce and impassioned debate about a real issue which happened to crop up in a story. I’ve never been good at debating and questioned whether I really wanted to join a board where my every hastily chosen word would be poured and picked over by people waiting to quote my words back at me with their own dogmatic spin.

But ultimately, all you need to know about Bloodtide is that it manages to undo most of the damage done by Warriors of the Deep. I hope they don’t bring back the Silurians. There are only so many ways they can do the one Silurian story ("This is our planet and we want it back) and they’ve already done it three times. Sorry, four times. Damn. That electro-shock-memory-erasing therapy almost worked.

CD Facts

Part 1 - Tracks 1-8

Part 2 - Tracks 9-15

Part 3 - Tracks 1-7

Part 4 - Tracks 8-15