Edited version published on Edinburgh Book Review
There are many “lost” Doctor Who stories. Most obviously, there are 106 monochrome episodes — starring the show’s original lead William Hartnell and his 1960s successor Patrick Troughton — missing from the BBC Archive, the legacy of the then-unthinking (and now unthinkable) industry-wide policy of wiping video-tape or burning film copies of old programmes without an inkling of posterity.
Then there are the many Doctor Who stories which didn’t quite make it; a host of storylines, story-breakdowns and full scripts which, for reasons too numerous to list here, were dropped from the show’s often hectic, always unrelenting production schedule.
And then there is Douglas Adams’s Shada, a six part story which the BBC began to make back in 1979, but were forced to cancel part-way through because of industrial action. Perhaps because it was by Douglas Adams, and it existed in such a tantalising quantum state — part made, part unmade — it soon gained the aura of being the “most lost” Doctor Who story of all.
Of course, what is lost can often be found, especially if people care enough. And, when it comes to lost Doctor Who, plenty of people care an awful lot.
Only last year, film copies of two 1960s episodes unexpectedly emerged from a private collection in the UK, a mere 45 years after their original broadcast. Nigh on all the missing episodes were adapted as novels during the 1980s, often by the original script writers — who you could tell were rather surprised to be earning some more cash from work they thought finished decades before. Most of the rest of these “lost” 1960s episodes continue to enjoy a life on BBC Audio, where (of course) the visual effects sound so much better. A few episodes have even been animated for release on DVD.
As for those stories which had previously dropped out of the race, many have now been helped belatedly across the finishing line; most recently, Tom Baker has starred in full-cast audio recordings of “lost stories” produced, under BBC licence, by Big Finish. Suddenly, as their advertising campaign promised: “It’s Saturday teatime in 1977, all over again.”
Despite being the show’s most iconic “lost story”, Shada has (somewhat ironically) had almost as many lives as the proverbial cat. A couple of scenes featured in the show’s 20th anniversary story, The Five Doctors, back in 1983, in order to ensure the fourth Doctor’s involvement. An edited version of the story was released in 1992 with Tom Baker dragged in to explain what happened in the missing segments — meaning, it was almost all him by part six! A full-cast recording starring eighth Doctor Paul McGann was webcast in the early 2000s, and can still be purchased from Big Finish. Never afraid of recycling, Adams lifted much of the plot surrounding the story’s elderly Cambridge don, Professor Chronotis, and dropped it straight into his first non-HitchHiker novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
For many Doctor Who fans, however, none of these were enough. Although it had soon become impossible to complete the story on screen (time and tide waiting for no actor or struck sets), for some at least there was always the hope that it might live again in book form, alongside all the other novelisations published by Target Books between 1970s and the early 1990s. Yet, while he was alive, Douglas Adams had always refused to do the job himself, or allow anyone else to do it for him.
Partly, this was because of the lack of money on offer, given that he was by then the reasonably rich international bestselling author of the HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. Mainly, though, it was because he himself didn’t rate the story that highly — it had been written in under a week which, by Adams’ own standards, was dangerously fast. Some of the cast may have been in tears when the production was cancelled, but (even years later) you could sense that Adams himself was actually rather relieved.
However, given the success of 21st century Doctor Who, plus the clear intention of Adams’s estate to monetise his literary legacy — for example, sanctioning an official sixth HitchHiker novel (Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing) as well as BBC Four’s Dirk Gently series — it’s hardly surprising that the green light would eventually be given to publish an adaptation of Shada.
The only question then was which writer would get the gig. It’s unclear how many writers were considered by BBC Books, but I’d like to think that they knew there was only one serious contender.
Gareth Roberts ticks all the boxes; not only is he a talented writer, who happens to be a fan of the show, but he’s also well-versed in current Doctor Who lore — having written episodes for both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. Then there’s the fact that, early in his career, he wrote a couple of original Doctor Who novels which very successfully recreated on the page the characters, ambiance and sense of humour of the show’s 17th season — the run of stories, script-edited by Douglas Adams, that should have ended with Shada. If anyone could wrestle Adams’s work into a shape recognisable to today’s audience, surely it was Gareth Roberts?
From the result, it would seem it was. This is the successful result of a genuine — albeit somewhat disconnected in time — writing partnership.
Shada comes with many of Adams’s recognisable tropes — the initial focus on a strange, alien book; the somewhat curmudgeonly, forever befuddled young male in the form of postgraduate student Chris Parsons; the emotionally unbalanced computer, to name but three — and there is also, beneath all the jokes, that sense of despondency and loneliness you can find in all Adams’ work.
Yet Roberts is far from absent; he’s ready and willing to reshape the material in order to bring out the best of what an undoubtedly caffeine-rich Adams had furiously typed beneath that ever-looming production deadline. In the process, Roberts puts flesh on the bones of even the briefest of originally one-dimensional supporting characters, while his nuanced, lean prose ensures that this is a brisk, engaging read that wears its intelligence lightly.
To be honest, even in this form, Shada is not the greatest Doctor Who story ever told — thanks to Roberts, it just turns out to be one of good ones. Had he lived to see it, I’d like to think that even Douglas Adams might have reluctantly come to realise that was the case.
© paulfcockburn
