4.35: Shada

In which things get a bit animated.

Broadcast: Well, funny story… In the unlikely event you’ve clicked on this without knowing this part: Shada is the great lost Doctor Who story, whose production was interrupted by industrial action (a management lockout, and not, as I previously wrote, a strike), and which thus never made it to screen. It would be wrong to call it “incomplete” at this stage, though, because it’s probably been completed more times than any other story: as a video with added narration by Tom Baker in 1992; a Big Finish 8th Doctor audio in 2003; a novelisation and audiobook in 2012; a 2017 DVD combining the original footage with animation and even some new bits; and an updated version of the same from 2021. Oh, there’s also an unofficial entirely animated version put together by Ian Levine, as well as the story’s writer Douglas Adams’ 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which lifts large chunks of both this story and City of Death in the hope that no one will notice. Anyway. The version I watched was the 2017 one. Had it been completed, it would have been broadcast January-February 1980.

Watched: October-November 2020. That’s a much easier question.

Shada, Part One(ish)

Okay, a number of baffling choices here. The half real, half animated thing is a headf*ck. Why is there now a pre-credits sequence, which old Who never had? Why didn’t they break it into episodes? Why do they use the Hartnell theme music? Just... why?

Anyway, this would clearly have been one of the better stories this year if they’d finished it, and might have made the season feel like less of a mess. It’s quite nicely done, and as with City the jokes seem to mesh nicely with the adventure elements rather than just undermining them.

Skagra is very well cast for the sort of smug blond poshos you get a lot of at Cambridge. The bit where Parsons is reading the book and the clock goes haywire is kind of cool.

(There’s a bit 11 minutes in where you can see a staircase I used to live on. It is very striking how the Cambridge of 1979 looks a lot like the one of 1999, and the one of 2019, too.)

The moment where Skagra is watching clips of the Doctor, and they’re reflected in his (animated) eyes, is really nicely done. So is the invisible spaceship, with Skagra walking up into the sky.

Just realised there are cast members from Waiting for God in adjacent stories in season 17. Shame they never got Stephanie Cole. Did a BF though, inevitably.

Shada, Part Two(ish)

Romana is wearing an excellent hat. The actress playing Clare clearly hasn’t done much acting since 1979 as she absolutely sucks in the audio bits.

Parsons’ speech about how brilliant shocking new information is to a scientist is just like one from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

The confrontation between Skagra and the Doctor happens even closer to the room I lived in in 1999-2000. At one point my old window is almost in shot.

The bit where undergrads are singing outside my old college is makes me want to kill myself.

Quite like the Prisoner motif with the sinister balls chasing people.

Anyway, gonna stop there, but I’m actually really enjoying this one.

Shada, Part Three(ish)

Halfway through now and finding I want to keep watching as opposed to finding it a chore to be got through as painlessly as possible. I am forced to conclude: this isn’t a fluke, I’m genuinely enjoying this.

What’s more, what we can see of the 1979 version is well made. Thinking about it now, Destiny is quite well made too – to what extent is the problem with season 17 that they can’t build other planets in studios, so stories without location work look rubbish?

The episodes are of wildly different lengths, by the way. The first was 26 minutes, the next two 20, and last three have to average 24. Maybe this was one reason it wasn’t released episodically.

Other things... We all know that Chronotis is ripped off for Dirk Gently, but it’s only just dawned on me that the invisible spaceship is ripped off for one of the H2G2 books (though I can’t for the life of me remember which).

The bit with the fisherman who gets his brain drained, falls in the water and drowns is weirdly played as comic when it isn’t.

There’s a sort of uncanny valley thing with the animated bits: it comes from everyone being half a lifetime older than in the live action bits, and most of them sounding it. Considering that, it still works quite well.

The bit where the Doctor reads from the book and just makes a bunch of funny noises is basically Rowan Atkinson in the Abu Ben Adhem sketch from Not The Nine O’Clock News. Given the Adams/Lloyd connection I wonder if that’s a coincidence.

Shada, Part Four(ish)

“You’ve got a lot to unlearn.”

I quite liked the cliffhanger of the Doctor persuading the computer he was dead, and so the computer decides he didn’t need oxygen. Very Adams.

The live action stuff is nicely done, and Adams’ scripts are always going to be filled with ideas and jokes, so it shouldn’t be a surprise it works better than Nimon. I think I’d just taken the Who’s Next review of the BF version to be a damning comment on the script, and so was expecting worse.

(Huh, the BF version gives Chris and Clare an 18 year age gap and accidentally makes Clare a cougar. The guy who plays Chris in that one is nowadays a lefty reply guy on Twitter.)

The Doctor turning a random spaceship into a TARDIS is a bit odd.

The bit with all the very old men in the Think Tank is a bit like that Monty Python sketch where Carol Cleveland keeps kidnapping milkmen.

Shada, Part Five(ish)

Having started so well it does slightly degenerate into Williams-era space wibble, doesn’t it? The good bits are the location filming (which is one reason the BF version is shite, I’m guessing) and the witty script. The actual plot is still a load of old nonsense.

I do like Chronotis zapping Clare so she understands space shit though. Also Skagra laughing off the idea of taking over the universe, and turning out to want to be the universe instead. Oh actually the idea of Skagra spreading his mind like a disease (shades of The End of Time?) is quite cool so maybe I was being unfair just because the first part of episode 5 is a lot of running around.

There’s a bit where the Doctor touches Chris’s face in a weirdly homoerotic fashion that I feel has been under appreciated by queer fandom.

Some of the new model shots are quite good. Weird how the old person make up here is remarkably similar to the vampire make up a decade afterwards.

The music definitely builds to a crescendo at the cliffhangers, it’s very odd that it isn’t episodic.

Shada, Part Six(ish)

“Routine inquiry, sir. Report that this room had been stolen.” Wilkins trying to convince a police officer that someone has stolen a room from the college is hilarious.

Okay – this doesn’t entirely descend into space wibble like a lot of Williams stuff but I don’t think it quite delivers on its early promise either. A lot of running around in the last couple. The jokes land, at least.

Does Tom ever get a decent season finale? Season 12 he’s deprived one because they bring season 13 forward; 15 & 16 go off the rails, 17 gets cancelled. Seeds is quite good but inconsequential. Talons is racist. Logopolis I love but I worry it might be a “you had to see it as a kid” one.

Oh, it’s the TARDIS air corridor from Nimon again. Continuity. Cool. Lots of fun bits with the animation here – the Shada prisoners, the TARDIS store room, the Doctor absentmindedly rebuilding a sphere and chucking it away.

Thinking about it, there is something slightly uncomfortable that Chris is already a very clever physicist but Clare has her knowledge implanted in her by a Time Lord. It’s a bit DoctorDonna, but at least it was 1979 not 2008.

Skagra has a certain Evil Robert Webb quality doesn’t he? Love that his punishment is being locked up and told about the Doctor. He’s effectively punished by being trapped with a Doctor Who fan, the very worst fate of all.

The last TARDIS scene, with the 90s Tom Baker and Romana in a cupboard, is extremely weird. 

I HAVE FINISHED THE WILLIAMS ERA. LIGHT HAS RETURNED TO THE WORLD.