In reply to UKC Articles:
Thanks for the comments on this (and a massive thanks to Dave for taking the time to share the story).
This was probably the most difficult episode to put together for a number of reasons, the main one was a sense of responsibility to Dave to make sure that it was saying what he meant. There's also a lot of material which doesn't get included, or details which get left out to try to keep a clean thread and keep the pace of the story.
Dave is slightly mortified by my hyperbole in the description, and he might be right. To me it is completely astonishing that someone would venture onto this first ascent with so little preparation. Anyone who has done Moonraker or Dreadnought and glanced across would surely feel the same. Dave points the respect at Mick Fowler and Andy Meyers for the first ascent of Caveman - he made the second ascent before doing Terra Cotta. In Dave's eyes Terra Cotta is just a minor variation, which I suppose it is, but when I was looking through similarly hard ascents made during the 1980s I felt that Dave's really held its own against them. We saw Jerry in the first episode taking on a similar minimal-inspection-balls-out ascent. We were starting to get into the realms of lots of practice and sport standards shooting up by the time of Dave's ascent, but it still ranked up there in my mind.