Great Climb On iPlayer

Watch on line or download the full3.5GB...

Virtually the entire route overhangs - one plus is that it kept the rain off.

Just a quick heads up for anyone who missed the weekend's BBC Scotland 'Great Climb' outside broadcast featuring Dave MacLeod and Tim Emmett tackling a desperate new route on the Isle of Harris.

The original broadcast went out on BBC 2 Scotland and, for two hours, the BBC HD channel and was both very long and very impressive – amazing camerawork - though for most of us south of the border, a bit hard to find.

The good news is that the entire broadcast, all five hours and 40 minutes of it, is available on the BBC iPlayer service, so you can watch it on line or, if you have a ballistically rapid broadband connection, you could download the entire thing, but be warned, that's 3.5GB of flailing digital climbers.

Of course, the advantage of watching a 'live' broadcast after the fact is that you can skip to the end and find out whether the guys succeeded or not and 'fast forward' through extended rests.

We haven't watched it all ourselves – Saturday's are hill days after all – but what we have seen is gripping stuff. Check out the cameramen hanging out in space while you're there as well and the gory footage of MacLeod's gashed ankle which was taken out by a falling flake days before the climb and stitched back together for the route – ouch.

Incidentally, the massively overhanging crux is on the second pitch, so not too far in. You can also entertain yourself by spotting the cameramen - coordinated by Brian Hall - dangling haplessly in space for the best angles. Unfortunately for them, that meant that while the climbers stayed largely dry and protected from rain by the overhanging face, which was chosen by MacLeod for just that reason, the film crew were far exposed to the weather.

You can find the full monty at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ts470/The_Great_Climb/