Time after Time: A History of "Shada" from The Essential Doctor Who

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The following article is reproduced by very kind permission of the author and
Doctor Who Magazine.

Time After Time
By Paul Kirkley

“The day after we finished filming Shada,” Tom Baker once claimed, “it was
already mythology to me.”

Baker recorded his final scenes for the ill-fated serial on 5 November 1979.
They weren’t supposed to be his final scenes, of course: with work scheduled
to run into December, there was still plenty to be done. But when the cast
and crew arrived at Television Centre for the next studio session they found
the doors locked. Production had been halted by an industrial dispute which,
depending on who you believe, may have boiled down to a row about whose job
it was to move the hands on the Play School clock.

The doors were finally unlocked later that month, but BBC bosses decided to
prioritise Television Centre for more ‘prestigious’ shows like Fawlty Towers
and The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. So, despite several studio
sessions and a whole week’s worth of location filming in Cambridge having
been completed, Shada was cancelled. And that was seemingly that.

Except this was only the beginning of a long and extraordinary afterlife that
has ironically gifted Shada a much richer legacy than many stories that did
actually make it into viewers’ living rooms. While there may be many Doctor
Who adventures that are better regarded, few can match Shada in terms of its
sheer – thanks Tom – mythology.

Douglas Adams’ story concerned the villainous Skagra’s search for Salyavin, a
notorious Time Lord criminal. Salyavin had been imprisoned by his people on
Shada, their prison planet, but had escaped and was now living in retirement
as Professor Chronotis at St Cedd’s College, Cambridge. Approaching the end
of his regeneration cycle, Chronotis asked for the Doctor’s help in returning
a stolen book called The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey to the Time
Lords. Dating back to the early days of Rassilon, the book – which had
previously been kept in the Panopticon Archives, and over which time ran
backwards – was also the key to the Time Lord prison.

The first attempt to salvage Shada came while the ink was still wet on the Do
Not Resuscitate order: in April 1980, incoming producer John Nathan-Turner
attempted to remount the story as two 50-minute episodes to be broadcast that
Christmas. It was hoped recording could take place at Television Centre in
October, with the only cast change being John Leeson replacing David Brierley
as the voice of K9. In June, however, Nathan-Turner was informed that no
studio space could be made available.

Three years later, relatively generic sequences from Shada’s location filming
were used to cover Tom Baker’s absence from The Five Doctors. If anything,
Shada’s contribution to the twentieth anniversary special only piqued
interest in the missing story. By the mid-1980s illicit VHS copies of the
existing footage were being circulated by fans, some of whom had helpfully
added explanatory subtitles produced on a BBC Micro.

In 1984, former Doctor Who production assistant Snowy Lidiard-White suggested
to John Nathan-Turner that Shada might be a candidate for the BBC’s new range
of Doctor Who home videos. “We’re toying with the idea of getting Colin
[Baker] to fill in the missing bits with commentary,” Nathan-Turner told a
convention audience the following year – possibly in the form of specially
filmed scenes in which the current Doctor would recount the adventure to his
companion Peri (Nicola Bryant). Once again, however, the idea came to
nothing.

Shada’s next reappearance came in an even more unexpected form, when Douglas
Adams cannibalised parts of his script – including Professor Chronotis, no
longer a Time Lord but still a Cambridge academic with a time machine in his
study – for his 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Two
decades later, the book would be adapted for BBC Radio 4, starring Henry
Enfield as Gently and Andrew Sachs as Chronotis.

By late 1991, fans had gone without new Doctor Who for two years. But
Nathan-Turner hadn’t given up on the show – or Shada – just yet. In his new
role administering the BBC’s range of Doctor Who video and audio cassettes,
he concocted another plan to bring the long-lost story to the screen.

“This time I was determined,” he said, as part of the memoirs he wrote for
Doctor Who Magazine in 1997.

“I persuaded Tom to do the linking material. Actually, Tom was quite keen –
he told me he’d always liked this particular story, and he suggested that his
links were done in the first person.”

Baker recorded his on-camera narration – in character, but not in costume –
at London’s Museum of the Moving Image on 4 February 1992.

“We wanted to avoid the sort of dull presentation you see so often on
television these days,” Baker told DWM at the time.

“We wanted something fresher, more dynamic, if you like. They were my
memories, not some unconnected presenter’s. I talked about it on and off for
ages, because everyone who worked on it in 1979 realised it was so valuable.
We always thought it was a terrible sadness. I don’t suppose it could have
been released without some kind of links, and so we’ve sort of made it into a
collector’s item."

“I was extremely pleased with it,” wrote Nathan-Turner, who also commissioned
new visual and sound effects along with a score composed by Keff McCulloch.

“What was originally filmed and recorded amounted to the bulk of Part One,
less of Part Two, even less of Part Three and so on, resulting in very little
for Part Six! I took liberties with what was available from the archives; I
split scenes, I invented backgrounds, I used material unintended for
transmission, so the tape didn’t conclude with little more than a ‘talking
head’ – even if it was Tom Baker’s.”

Someone who was less than pleased was Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy author had written the script in a frantic hurry to fill a hole
at the end of the season, later describing his effort as “a mediocre four-
parter stretched over six weeks."

Adams was equally lukewarm about any efforts to revive Shada. “The story was
a bit of a patchwork quilt to begin with,” he said in 1990, “so making a
patchwork quilt out of the remains of a patchwork quilt would produce
something very peculiar indeed.” In fact, he was so horrified by the idea of
Shada being stitched together for video like some kind of Frankenstein’s
monster (according to some reports, he signed over his permission for the
project by accident) he refused to have his name appear on the cover. He
donated his fee to Comic Relief.

The video was packaged with a miniature copy of the script and released on 6
July that year – finally appearing on viewers’ screens a mere 4,918 days
later than originally planned.

It would be another decade before Shada reared its head again. This time the
initiative was led by James Goss at BBCi, as the BBC’s digital operation was
then known. Goss approached Gary Russell and Jason Haigh-Ellery of Doctor Who
audio producers Big Finish with the idea of recording Shada as a webcast to
mark the series’ fortieth anniversary in 2003.

“We’d already done [Sixth Doctor webcast] Real Time with BBCi,” recalls Gary.
“Jason had had dealings with Douglas’ estate and was on good terms with them,
so he had a relatively easy time getting the agreement to do it. There seem
to have been lots of myths over the years about the estate being evasive or
tricky, but we found them delightful, encouraging and pleasant. They even
suggested finding out if there were earlier drafts of scripts to see if there
was anything exorcised we might want to put back in, even if it was just odd
lines.”

Lalla Ward, who played Romana, declared herself perfectly happy to work with
Tom Baker again, even though she hadn’t seen her ex-husband for more than 20
years. In the end, however, Gary adapted the script for Paul McGann’s Eighth
Doctor.

“I knew I could get Paul McGann’s voice into it rather than just have him say
lines originally written for Tom,” Gary explains. “It didn’t need much
alteration – I mean, it’s Douglas Adams for heaven’s sake, it’s as close to
perfect as it’s ever going to be. But there were subtle nuances in delivery
and flow that I opted to make more McGann-esque.

“Then there was just the task of audio-ising some of the more visual bits,
and I had to create the opening few minutes with Romana and the Eighth
Doctor, to explain why we were doing Shada all over again. That was fun.
After that I handed it over to Nick Pegg, the director, and wished him well!”

McGann, Ward and John Leeson were joined by an impressive cast, including
James Fox as Chronotis, Andrew Sachs (as Skagra in this version), Susannah
Harker, Melvyn Hayes and Hannah Gordon. Flash animation featuring
illustrations by Lee Sullivan completed an impressive package, which was made
available in six instalments through May and June 2003, and later released on
CD.

Did it feel strange for Lalla Ward to be recreating those scenes with a new
Doctor? “Everything about Doctor Who is pretty strange,” she says, laughing.

“This didn’t seem any stranger than other strangenesses. It was lovely to
return to a story I had always liked – largely because of Douglas – and with
not just the good fortune to be working with Paul, but with an amazing cast
altogether. The actual filming of the original Shada wasn’t altogether easy –
filming never is – so in many ways I had a much happier time on this.”

Tom’s are big shoes to fill – does Lalla think Paul McGann succeeded in
putting his own stamp on it? “I don’t think any version of the Doctor is to
do with filling shoes,” she says. “You can only bring your own take to it and
find a new pair of shoes.”

That advice might have proved equally useful to Gareth Roberts when, in late
2010, he was asked to adapt Adams’ Shada scripts into a novel.

Roberts was a natural choice: as well as being one of Doctor Who’s wittiest
scriptwriters, he had penned several well-received novels based on his
personal dream team of the Fourth Doctor and Romana II, and had long been a
cheerleader for that period of the programme. Despite this, by his own
admission, the book proved to be the toughest challenge of his career.

“It was very much harder than I was expecting,” he says. “I thought, ‘The
story’s all there, the dialogue’s all there, it’ll be a doddle.’ But the
story didn’t make much sense. That’s not me going, ‘I’m better than Douglas
Adams!’ – it was just that you could tell it had been written very, very
quickly. So although it’s brilliant, it was hanging out all over the place.”

Honoured and daunted in equal measure, Gareth didn’t attempt to emulate
Adams’ style, (“I gave up on that idea at the very beginning”) and says he
was left to get on with it by the late writer’s estate. “They stood well
back, really. To be frank, because it was a Douglas Adams project, I thought
it might go bigger in the publishing world. But it was really Doctor Who
first, Douglas Adams second, and anything with ‘Doctor Who’ on it is never
going to be a massive bestseller. Which is a shame!”

Despite the labour pains, Gareth was happy with the finished novel. “Looking
back, I think I did it pretty well, really,” he says. Lalla Ward, who
performed the audiobook reading, agrees. “I thought Gareth did a really good
job of it,” she says. “Very clever, very Douglas. I think Douglas would have
been impressed.”

The following year Shada was issued on DVD, packaged with thirtieth
anniversary documentary More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS as a box set
entitled The Legacy Collection. The main feature was a reissue of the VHS
edition, albeit brought up to current technical standards with new transfers
from film negatives.

At one point, the producers of the DVD had entered into discussions with fan
and former continuity adviser Ian Levine about featuring an unofficial
version of Shada he had financed himself. As well as new animation to cover
the missing scenes, Levine had reconvened many of the original cast – though,
crucially, not Tom Baker – to record their lines from the abandoned studio
sessions. It was ultimately decided to stick with the 1992 version.

“We are here to restore, as best as possible, content that’s in existence,”
the DVD’s commissioning editor Dan Hall told DWM at the time. “It’s not our
role to create what was never there. Shada is a great unfinished story, but
it’s just that – unfinished. Creating brand-new Doctor Who editorial content
is the remit of the BBC, not BBC Worldwide.”

One of the bonus features, Taken out of Time, saw several of the cast and
crew returning to Cambridge to discuss the making of the story, and its
aftermath.

“You always look forward to the ones where something went wrong!” says Chris
Chapman, who produced and directed the documentary. “Going into it, we knew
we had some meat – the very fact it was cancelled meant we had a really good
story to tell. We didn’t really have to coax stories out of anyone,” he
continues. “For the people who experienced Shada at the time, it’s a big
memory. For Tom… he doesn’t always have very clear memories of individual
stories, but he remembered Shada very vividly, because of Cambridge and
Douglas, and because of how it turned out.”

In retrospect, one of the most poignant aspects of Shada’s cancellation was
that the serial was supposed to serve as the Doctor Who swansong both for
Douglas Adams and producer Graham Williams – two men who, as Tom Baker
reflects sadly in Taken out of Time, died at a young age. With the
abandonment of Shada it was left to the underwhelming The Horns of Nimon to
bring the curtain down on 1970s Doctor Who, before John Nathan-Turner brought
in sweeping changes for the start of the new decade.

For all its writer’s reservations, Doctor Who’s most tantalising near-miss
has proved exceptionally enduring over the years. It could even be argued
that cancellation did Shada something of a favour. “It has had a strange
afterlife,” says Gareth Roberts, “and one of my main aims [with the novel]
was to finish that off! People were so much more obsessed with it because it
hadn’t been made than they would have been if it had. I thought it was time
to move on. Which was absolutely bonkers – people are never going to move on
from Shada.”

Lalla Ward was good friends with Douglas Adams up until his death in 2001.
She feels he would have been “intrigued by the life of this once-doomed
story… I think it would have had a particular interest to people anyway,
because it was so ‘Douglasy’, but its chequered history has certainly added
to its allure.”

“It’s partly to do with Douglas dying and partly to do with Shada itself
dying a young man’s death,” she says. “It was like a poet dying young, or
Marc Bolan. They take on a sort of mythical quality. And no doubt Shada will
continue making myths for many years to come.”

One man who had reason to be thankful for Shada’s cancellation was Terrance
Dicks. By the start of 1983, the veteran writer had just about managed to
juggle all the characters and elements required for the show’s 20th
Anniversary Special, The Five Doctors, into a workable script. At which
point, Tom Baker decided not to take part. “I discovered that there’s a bit
of Shada where Tom could be picked up, and another where he could be
released,” Terrance told Doctor Who Magazine in 1998. “So I said, ‘I’ll trap
the bugger in a time loop, and that will be him gone from the rest of the
show.’”

And so it was that The Five Doctors saw two location sequences from Shada –
one of the Doctor and Romana punting on the River Cam, and another of them
leaving in the TARDIS – finally making it to air. “It went like clockwork,”
said Terrance. “Actually, I think it improved the story.”

A notable story in the DVD documentary Taken Out Of Time is the revelation
that Daniel Hill, who played student Chris Parsons, married production
assistant Olivia Bazalgette after meeting her in Cambridge during the filming
of Shada. The couple went on to have three children together. If you’re
looking for the ultimate proof of Shada’s afterlife, it’s surely that there
are people in the world who owe their existence to that heady week by the Cam
in the winter of 1979.

“That was such a gift,” says the documentary’s producer/director Chris
Chapman. “We went to Daniel and he said, ‘Are you going to speak to Olivia,
too?’ And I didn’t know why he was talking about Olivia. But that was lovely
– it meant that, despite it all going wrong, there was a sense of something
good that came of it.”

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