Doctor Who - Audio Details

The Doctor has a spot of unfinished business.  Reunited with his old friends Romana and K9, he answers a summons from Professor Chronitis, a retired Time Lord now living the academic life in a Cambridge college.

But the Doctor isn't the only visitor to Cambridge.  Somewhere in the city is the sinister alien Skagra, who is intent on stealing an ancient and mysterious book brought to Earth by the Professor many years before.

What is Skagra's diabolical masterplan?  And who or what is the mysterious Shada?  To discover the truth, the Doctor and his friends must embark on a perilous journey that will take them from the cloisters of Cambridge to the farthest reaches of deep space, risking deadly encounters with a sentient spaceship, the monstrous Krargs, and an ancient Time Lord criminal called Salyavin.  As the Doctor soon discovers, the fate of the universe hangs in the balance...

The original 1979 TV production of Shada was halted by industrial action, and for many years the story remained unmade - until now.  Originally broadcast over the internet on BBCi's Cult website, this extended CD version, featuring an all-star cast headed by Paul McGann, and boasting an unforgettable script by the great Douglas Adams, means that the legendary Doctor Who adventure is lost no more!

"I WAS DOWN TO WRITE the six-parter at the end of that season," Douglas Adams once explained of his year as script editor of Doctor Who.  "I had in mind a story that I wanted to do, and the producer said, 'No, that's over the top, I don't want to do that story.  Come up with something else.'  So I wrote Shada."  The rejected idea, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, would instead form the basis of Douglas's third Hitch-Hiker novel, Life, The Universe, and Everything.  Meanwhile, elements of the canceled Shada, notable St Cedd's College and the character of Professor Chronotis, would later find their way into the 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.  "There were good bits in it, and I didn't want them to go to waste," Douglas later remarked.

"In a wat I preferred writing the Doctor Who scripts to Hitch-Hiker's, because I would be made to get the plot straight first.  In the things I wrote for Doctor Who, there were absurd things that happened in it, and funny things.  But I feel that Doctor Who is essentially a drama show, and only secondarily amusing.  My aim was to create apparently bizarre situations and then pursue the logic so much that it became real.  So on the one hand, someone behaves in an interesting and apparently outrageous way, and you think at first that it's funny.  Then you realise that they mean it, and that, at least to my mind, begins to make it more gripping and terrifying...  I can understand people saying 'They weren't taking it seriously', but in writing it I was taking it terribly seriously."

"The whole point of Doctor Who is that, if you take the second letter of each of the 59th words of all the episodes over the last twenty years of broadcast and run them together backwards, the original location of the lost city of Atlantis is revealed."

Douglas Adams, Variously over the years