I remember a time when you set your VCR / DVR and it did exactly what you told it to do, and nothing else. If a show was delayed starting because of an overlong basketball game, you missed part of the program.
Now, DVRs are smart. If something is delayed, it knows. And if something random comes along that’s associated with a series you record, it grabs that, too. Thus, we ended up with a recording of a “lost episode” of Doctor Who that I would have otherwise missed. The episode, titled “Shada,” was written by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) during the Tom Baker / Romana / K-9 era.
As with these things, there’s a story behind the story. Apparently Adams wanted to write a series where the Doctor decided to retire from traveling, but the BBC didn’t want that. Adams decided to procrastinate writing the show (something for which he was famous), thinking that if he waited long enough, the producers would have no choice but to allow him to write what he wanted. That strategy didn’t work, and he was forced to write a new story, which is this one.
They started filming it, but because of a strike by technicians, it was never completed. Last year, someone decided to get it ready for presentation. The actors, of course, have aged a tad in the intervening decades (it was originally supposed to air in 1980), but they were still around, so the missing footage was animated, and the original actors provided the voices. I’d say about a third of the 3-hour (including commercials) show is animated. A lot of it was filmed in Cambridge (scenes of the Doctor punting on the River Cam were used in The Five Doctors when Baker declined to participate in that project). Most of what was animated takes place in various space ships.
It’s an okay story, dealing with a guy who has come to Earth to recover a Gallifreyan book he needs to locate a Time Lord penal colony that all the Time Lords have forgotten about. There’s an old, forgetful university professor with the very obvious name Chronotis, and a student who borrows books, and a floating sphere that can suck a person’s mind dry. The usual Doctor stuff. A few scenes are very Adams-esque, especially one near the end where a don of the college tries to convince a bobby that someone has stolen a room from the university, to which the bobby responds that the number of times a room has been stolen is very low…in fact, it is zero, he concludes. Apparently Adams recycled some of the characters for his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It’s been a long time since I read that book, so I didn’t realize that.
In modern hands, the whole thing would probably have been an hour long. A lot of time is spent twiddling knobs and turning dials, but that was the era, when they weren’t wibbledy-wobbly and talking a hundred miles a second.
The show ends with a funny cameo by 83-year-old Tom Baker, who plays the Doctor again, with a wink and a sly nod to the passage of time. It’s fun to see something new from that era, so if you get a chance, check it out!
