Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 547: Shada, Episode One
Dear diary,
SHHHAAAADDDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Sorry, it’s a force of habit, that. A bit like shouting back when someone fondly recalls Crackerjack. Oh, but everyone knows about Shada. The jewel in the crown of ‘lost’ Doctor Who stories. The tale that got a fair way into production - filming, even! - before being hit by strike action and never managing to be completed (despite numerous attempts by John Nathan-Turner once he’d taken over the producer’s chair for the following season). All along, I’ve planned to simply skip this story. It never made it to broadcast, so why should I include it as a part of the 50 Year Diary? But then I went and did Farewell, Great Macedon, which didn’t make it even this far through the production process, and the closer I’ve gotten to reaching this point of the programme’s history, the more I’ve been thinking that I probably should cover it in some way.
The question: how? Ironically, for the only story in Doctor Who history which made it part way through filming and never got completed, there are more completed versions of this tale out there than many other stories! The first, as for many ‘definitive’ version of the story comes from the BBC Video tape, realised in the early 1990s. About seven or eight years ago, copies of this tape used to go for silly money on eBay, but I was lucky enough to get one for a fairly reasonable price. I recall watching it and enjoying it on the whole, even if I can’t remember a great deal about it. Then it was remade by Big Finish, but this time starring the Eighth Doctor alongside Romana and K9! This version made it out as an animated webcast, and also as an extended CD version, which I listened to with Nick Mellish when we wrote a book about all of the Eighth Doctor’s adventures on audio. Again, I seem to recall enjoying it.
Back in the day, Shada was one of the very few Doctor Who stories which didn’t get novelised for Target books. Again, somewhat ironically, there are now multiple versions of the novelisation in existence! There’s one produced by the Doctor Who Appreciation Society by Jonathan V Way, another by the New Zealand Fan Club written by Paul Scoones, and more recently a version officially published by BBC Books written by Gareth Roberts, which was then released as an audiobook read by Lalla Ward.
Ward must be sick to death of Shada by now, because she’s recorded it four times over! In addition to the original recording, the Big Finish version and the BBC audiobook, she also returned to voice Romana in a fan-made animated version of the story made a few years ago. It’s this version that I’ll be watching for the next six days, since someone kindly sent me a copy when enquiring if I’d actually be doing Shada in some form for the marathon. I did briefly consider doing a different format for the story each day, but that seemed to be a little bit too much!
The first few episodes of the story (this one in particular) don’t suffer massively from the loss of recording, and so there’s only a few brief clips of animation at this stage. I’ll hold back discussing any of that for a day or two, until I’ve had a better chance to see what it’s like when there’s a lot more of it. As for the story itself… well, it’s just as much fun as I remember it being. It’s very much in the same humorous style that’s pervaded a few of the stories this season, and it’s great seeing the Doctor and Romana interacting with Professor Chronotis. With the way I’ve been enjoying our regulars’ relationship this season, this simply feels like they’ve brought in a doddery uncle to meet the newlyweds!
The thing that struck me the most about this episode is how oddly it’s structured. We don’t have any dialogue for the first two-and-a-half minutes, and even then it’s simply a recorded computer message being played out over loudspeaker. The first actual, proper, line of the story is ‘excuse me’, coming four-and-a-half minutes in. The episode doesn’t suffer because if it - if anything it works all the better as a result, because it makes that early scene with Skagra and the Sphere all the more unusual and un-nerving.
After that, the Doctor and Romana don’t actually appear until almost nine minutes in, but their involvement isn’t missed all that much, because frankly I’m loving the Professor enough to simply watch his antics! When the pair do appear, the feel of their lolling about Cambridge on the punt is reminiscent of the early parts of City of Death, with them simply enjoying each other’s company together in beautiful surroundings. Even once they get caught up in the story proper, visiting Chronotis and searching for the book there’s plenty of humour to be found between them, and it’s just fun to watch them together!
