It was later released on cassette and CD, most recently by BBC Audio and free with the 27 April 2010 edition of The Daily Telegraph newspaper via WHSmith.

The Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on a mysterious space liner, where intergalactic policemen are investigating art thefts, a computer is suffering from a split personality and the Captain's disease threatens every living thing on the ship… Slipback was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, four months after the final episode of Doctor Who's twenty-second season, during the programme's enforced hiatus, the next season not airing for another a year and a half.

It was the first Doctor Who serial produced as a radio play (an earlier audio production, The Pescatons, was released as a story record).

Saward's novelisation expands on the radio play greatly, with an extensive prologue running about a third of the book before the Doctor appears and the adaptation of the radio play storyline begins.

Slipback was released on 7 November 1988 on a double audio cassette along with the 1978 LP version of Genesis of the Daleks.