Shada (Webcast version)

Chapter the 333rd, Flash animation - ah-ah! And the Doctor saves the universe...

Plot:

The Eighth Doctor visits Romana and K9 on Gallifrey (she's now the president, it was a Big Finish thing, don't ask). He's wondering about a time when he was in his fourth body and she and he visited Cambridge. They were taken out of time (by the black triangle in The Five Doctors, continuity fans!) and so never got to answer the summons of the Doctor's old friend Professor Chronotis. They visit this retired Time Lord and old friend of the Doctor in his rooms in St. Cedd's College. He asks them to take a book he borrowed from Gallifrey back for him, as it has special powers and could be dangerous. But Chris Parsons, a young science postgrad, has already borrowed the book, and is examining it with his colleague Clare Keightley. Also, Skagra - a villainous clever-clogs, armed with a mind-stealing sphere and backed up by an army of Krarg creatures and an invisible ship with a sultry-voiced computer - wants to steal the book too. When he gets his hands on it, Skagra kidnaps Romana and steals the TARDIS, using the book as the key to take him to the Time Lord prison planet Shada. Skagra needs to steal the mind of an old Time Lord villain imprisoned there, Salyavin, to help him turn everyone in the universe into one connected mind, controlled by him.The Doctor stops him and saves the day, everyone has tea and biscuits, then gets arrested by a policeman.

Context:

This definitely has to be cheating, right? Well, let's see by answering my standard canon questionnaire for any spin-off or oddity I want to watch in between Ncuti episodes to try to keep up the random nature of the blog. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)?  Yes - it did end up as an extra on a DVD eventually, but when it first came out, it was the main attraction. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? Hmm... I have covered the story Shada before in a post from 2017, and I did briefly mention the 2003 webcast then, but I didn't go into any detail. The 2003 version has an almost completely different cast, including a different lead actor playing the Doctor, and little bits of new material. That's variance enough, at least in my mind, to warrant a separate blogging. Anyway, to watch it at all required a lot of effort, so I felt I should write it up to make that effort worthwhile: I had to dig out the 2013 Shada DVD from storage, and download an open-source Flash emulator (Flash hasn't been supported in web browsers since 2021) to get the thing to play at all. I watched on my laptop an episode a night over six nights in July 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: aside from sideways trips into spin-offs like this, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 15 now remain to be blogged.

First Time Round:

This was the third of four webcasts made available on the BBC's Doctor Who website in the early 2000s; stretching the rules of the blog for this one has allowed me to post about the full set. The BBC staff who worked on the website in those days, many of them fans, saw an opportunity to create something new. This started with the salvaging of a rejected radio pilot. For the follow-up, they turned to Big Finish who had been creating audio Doctor Who stories for a few years by that point. The images that accompanied the audio were animated in a rudimentary style, but they grew in sophistication with each attempt. Big Finish also produced Shada, and the fourth of four that followed later in 2003 was a fully animated story by Cosgrove Hall Studios. The technology of the time could not keep up with the ambition, so the technicalities of viewing each webcast were challenging. Shada was the first one I watched in full online; a story by Douglas Adams was rewarding enough to persevere with the lagging and stop-start nature of such an activity in those pre-broadband days.

Reaction:

The majority of what shapes this version of the story, for good or ill, comes from the original script. A Douglas Adams Doctor Who script is a hell of a gift, containing as it will so many original ideas, surprising plot reversals and witty dialogue. It doesn't come without flaws, though. There's a lot of to and fro between space stations and spaceships in the second half of the story, for example. This 2003 version uses backgrounds that help orient the viewer to where exactly in space each scene is taking place. This works better than does the 2017 version, which was hidebound by the need to be faithful to the original designs. There, the animation had to sit alongside the original footage; with no such restriction here, and no worries about budget, artist Lee Sullivan is able to go wild and create some striking new designs for the Think Tank, Skagra's ship, Shada, and - best of all - the Krargs. Despite the limited nature of the animation, Sullivan's Krargs are more dynamic and scary than the ones from 1979. Where the 2003 version is perhaps too faithful is in the words rather than the pictures. The one clever addition to the original is the prelude scene explaining why Paul McGann's Doctor is appearing instead of Tom Baker. This is classic Gary Russell (the writer who adapted the scripts for audio); often in his original work he creates imaginative connections from one piece of Doctor Who continuity to another: in the 2003 Shada, he takes the reuse of Shada footage in 1983 anniversary romp The Five Doctors and weaves it into the canon tapestry, twenty years on. When the fourth Doctor and Romana were taken out of time in the Peter Davison era story, it aborted the Shada adventure, and now McGann's Doctor wants to return and finish it. The fictional world mirrors the real world, with Shada incomplete in both, and being revisited and finally finished after many years. It's low-key genius.

The prelude's idea is so good that one almost wants to explore it through the rest of the story, but that can't be done: if the remainder deviates too much from the original script, then the viewer isn't getting Shada as conceived, but instead someone else's take on it. That would defeat the point. Unfortunately, in places the original script can't be made quite to fit: the porter at St Cedd's having recognised the McGann Doctor from various visits over the years doesn't work - it needs to be Tom Baker, as that is who originally intended to visit, and who was already a friend of the professor at that stage in his lives; as president of the Time Lords, Romana has much more authority, responsibility and power to recover the book than the Doctor, so shouldn't be letting him take the lead; indeed, she could call in any number of Time Lords to sort out the situation rather than go with the Doctor's more home-spun approach. One just has to let these go, and accept that the original dialogue had to be sacrosanct. There are but a few cursory mentions of Romana's status and the Doctor being pleased at being reunited with K9 to remind us that we're watching a slightly new take on the old tale. Other changes are because the story needs to act as both webcast and audio only. People whose bandwidth couldn't cope with the flash animations, or those who bought the story as a CD from Big Finish afterwards, need to have some things vocalised. This means some action is simplified with explanatory dialogue of the 'Look out for that sphere just behind you!' variety. It's mostly unobtrusive, but it does lead to an in-joke being smothered to death for webcast viewers. When Skagra gets a lift, the drawing shows the car is a Ford Prefect (a reference to a character from Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The drawing was only picking up on a gag in the audio, though, so the driver character then bangs on about how much he loves his Ford Prefect car, which belabours the point a bit.

The artist gets a couple of other visual Hitch Hiker in-jokes in later though: a drinks machine is labelled Nutrimat, and - this one a real freeze-frame job - a Shada background shows two convicts trapped inside their prison pods; one has two heads (Zaphod Beeblebrox) and the other is wearing a dressing gown (Arthur Dent). There are a few other minor changes: Think Tank scientist Caldera is a purple alien rather than an old bloke, and there's a minor subplot added where Claire worries about the bike that she lent the Doctor. There are a couple of Tom Baker ad-libs removed - calling Chris 'Bristol' and "What's it powered by K9?"/"Insufficient data"/"Aren't we all?!" - probably because they were too characteristic of the fourth Doctor's style. Mostly, though, change comes from the different performances by the new actors. Andrew Sachs is a good baddie, a more clipped and sneering version of Skagra than the TV version's more suave and aloof take by Christopher Neame; James Fox does a slightly different calibration of absent-minded professor in the role of Chronotis - he's not quite as doddery as Denis Carey in the original, which maybe takes a little away from later revelations of the plot; Melyvn Hayes and Hannah Gordon do very well in small comic roles - it was a coup to get such a strong cast together to give voice to this story. Sean Biggerstaff and Susannah Harker as the two students tagging along are both perhaps giving under-powered performances compared to the actors in 1979, but both of them feel more like postgrad students than did Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne. They look more like students too (the animations are modelled throughout on the new actors' looks). McGann, Ward and Leeson are great, as usual. It all adds up a nice tribute to Adams (whose tragic premature death happened only two years before this webcast) and to 40 years of Doctor Who.

Connectivity:

Both Shada and Lucky Day have sequences set in contemporary UK places that are not London, Sheffield nor anywhere in Wales, which is fairly uncommon. They both contain an appearance from at least one other Time Lord besides the Doctor, and both feature an organisation called Think Tank.

Deeper Thoughts:

"You've looked into alternative time." It's less rare than you'd think that a Doctor Who story exists in more than one alternate version. For a start, every one of the classic series stories, and a growing number of the new series ones too, exist in prose form as Target novelisations. Often these were very close to transcripts of the TV episodes with added descriptions, but a great many diverged, often in significant ways. The first ever novelisation in the 1960s was Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, an adaptation of second ever Doctor Who story The Daleks from 1963/64. The book was published in 1964, whereas the very first story An Unearthly Child was not novelised for decades afterwards (as it only has cavemen and no Daleks). David Whittaker, the script editor of the first ever season that included both stories and the author of the Dalek book, created a brand new introduction for the main characters on the page. The aim was to make the book self-contained and get to the Dalek action as soon as possible, and Whittaker took quite a few liberties: Ian is a scientist rather than a science teacher, Barbara is Susan's private tutor rather than her school history teacher, Ian and Barbara don't know each other before the story's start, and they see the mysterious police box on Barnes Common rather than in Totter's Lane. For similar reasons, Jo Grant is given a completely new introduction in the 1974 book Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (an adaptation of TV story Colony in Space, Jo's fourth story). It's pretty much impossible to reconcile these different televisual and prose versions; of course, someone might have said the same about the 1979 and 2003 versions of Shada. I'm sure Gary Russell could give it a good go; parallel universes might well be involved.

Many Target book authors, particularly in the very early and in the much later years, either side of a lean middle period, fleshed out their TV work with new characters, subplots, motivations, dialogue. It wasn't one way travel, either. By the early 1990s when stories to novelise were running out, original stories started to be made as novels (as well as in comics, short stories and audios). When the new series started in 2005, there were therefore quite a few ready-made candidates to turn into television stories. 2005's Dalek is based on Robert Shearman's audio adventure Jubilee, and the following year's Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel is loosely based on Marc Platt's audio story Spare Parts. They were perhaps changed enough that the two different versions could co-exist without too much canonical musing; the same, though, cannot be said of Human Nature / The Family of Blood, which was a much more faithful - though still different - take on Paul Cornell's 1995 novel Human Nature: it's hard to reconcile why the Doctor would choose to hide out pretending to be a human in a boy's school just before the First World War twice, in both his seventh and tenth regenerations. Creating similar difficulty, he had to indulge in an odd couple flat share comedy twice (in the TV and comic strip version of The Lodger) and interacted with unlikely messages across time with someone called Sally Sparrow as both his ninth and tenth self (in Blink and the short story it was based upon, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow).

Contemporaneous with the explosion of original stories that would one day act as the blueprints for TV episodes, VHS was becoming the showcase for new versions of classic stories, such as the extended editions of The Curse of Fenric or The Five Doctors. This was just the start, with many new versions of stories following on DVD and Blu-ray to this day, recut with new effects and extra scenes. The Five Doctors had another special edition made in the 21st century, meaning there are now three variants. Which of the available versions of any story is the definitive one? Is there any such thing? Shada is a narrative multiverse all on its own. It existed in at least three versions beyond any officially licensed product, with two fan edits of which I'm aware, as well as an unofficial novelisation written by Paul Scoones. Officially, there was the narrated version of the story with to-camera inserts of Tom Baker released on VHS in 1992, and the script book of the story that was sold in the same package. There was an official novelisation published in 2012 (don't imagine any of these versions were consistent, by the way), There was the 2003 animated webcast as described in this blog post; as mentioned, this was also available as an audio only version from Big Finish, and that was expanded with additional material, so was different again. There was a 2017 hybrid of live action and animation, formed as an omnibus version; then, when that was released on Blu-ray in 2021, it had minor changes, and episode starts and ends inserted. Added up, that's ten different versions, seven official, three unofficial. If one counts Dirk Gently's Detective Agency (an original novel by Adams that reused a lot of the Shada material), it's eleven. Shada, like Doctor Who, like life, is definitively infinite, and I can't help but feel that that's exactly as Douglas Adams would have wanted it.

In Summary:

Douglas Adams worked on so few Doctor Who stories that you can't blame anyone - including your humble blog author (who begs your indulgence) - from covering Shada over and over again.