With a dangerous look in those same eyes, Smith turned on the remaining company. They all had fixed bland smiles as if nothing impossible had just happened. The porter, however, was peering at the indentation left by the box on the carpet. He shook his head in admiration, muttering, ‘So that’s how he does it…’
The old man walked over to Smith, still all smiles. ‘Are you sure you won’t have that cup of tea, officer?’
Smith was not to be distracted. ‘Where,’ he said with dangerous intensity, ‘has that police box gone?’
The old man spread his arms wide and shook his head as if in bewilderment. ‘And what police box would that be, officer?’ he said
That was the last straw for Smith. He tucked his pad and pen away, and pointed at the door. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right! Coats on, the lot of you. You’re all taking a little walk with me down to the station.’
Chris and Clare, hand-in-hand and giggling uncontrollably, followed the Professor, a mortified Wilkin and Constable Smith across the quad of St Cedd’s College, and towards the main gate.
As they stepped out onto the streets of the city, the sun burst from behind the clouds, bathing the ancient buildings of the university quarter in a golden light. Some early-risers tinged by on their bikes and the massed bells of Cambridge began to ring out, calling the faithful to prayer and making sleeping students pull their pillows tighter over their heads.
‘Well, we’ve seen the universe,’ said Clare, nuzzling closer to Chris. ‘But I think I prefer home.’
Chris leaned in to kiss her.
‘Oi, lovebirds,’ Smith shouted back to them. ‘You can cut that out for a start, unless you want lewd behaviour added to the charge sheet!’
Chris stifled another giggle and Clare playfully slapped his hand.
‘I really feel I should be taking my arrest a bit more seriously,’ Chris said.
Professor Chronotis looked back over his shoulder at the couple, grinning widely. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I can’t wait to discover what the charges are going to be. Can’t be worse than last time at least.’
Clare suddenly quickened her pace, dragging Chris along with her.
‘What’s the rush?’ Chris asked.
Clare smiled a secret smile. ‘Oh, I’ve just got a feeling that something rather nice might happen when we get to that police station.’
‘Before or after the arrest?’ Chris sighed.
‘Not sure,’ said Clare.
Chris leaned in closer, frowning. ‘Then how do you know it’s going to happen?’
Clare prodded the end of his nose with her finger and smiled. ‘I read it in a book,’ she said.
Chapter 75
FAR AWAY FROM Cambridge, in the mysterious region known as the vortex, where space and time are one, sped a police box that was not a police box at all.
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 were gathered around the central console, all three feeling rather pleased with the way things had turned out.
‘Don’t you think it seems strange now?’ mused Romana.
‘You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that,’ the Doctor replied, fiddling with the controls of his beloved machine. ‘I can think of at least 137 strange things that have happened in the last 48 hours.’
‘Kindly clarify query, Mistress,’ urged K-9.
‘Thank you,’ said Romana, crouching down to pat him affectionately. ‘I was just about to.’
She stood up and started again. ‘It seems strange now, that I was so terrified by those legends of Salyavin when I was younger, and yet he turned out to be such a nice old man.’ She sighed. ‘Makes me wonder just how much else in Gallifreyan history has been distorted and exaggerated.’
The Doctor laughed. ‘A whopping great load of it, I imagine. The Time Lords overreact to everything. Just look at the way they’ve treated me.’
Romana patted his hand sympathetically.
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said, lost in thought. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, one day, in a few hundred years’ time, someone will meet me and say, “Is that really the Doctor? How strange. He seems such a nice old man.”’
He gave the Randomiser a hefty thump, and the TARDIS jolted on to a new and completely unpredictable course.
Which was just how the Doctor liked it.
Afterword
‘IT’LL BE A doddle,’ I told my agent in regard to this book. ‘A couple of months’ work at the most. A labour of love. Like falling off a log.’
Oh yeah, a log. A little log, the kind of log you might step over daintily on the gentlest of country rambles.
Eight months later, reader, I clambered from under that mighty timber, the fall of which could easily have taken out a medium-sized village and probably did, having endured the loss of brain cells, hair, even friends (but sadly no weight at all), and staggered into the daylight barely able to imagine a world without Shada, or before it, or beyond it. As always, I’d wanted to do my best. But this time, I wanted to do my best by Douglas.
In November 1978 my mum told me about a science-fiction comedy series on the radio that she’d heard about. It was written by one of the Doctor Who people and apparently there was quite a buzz about it. Douglas’s first Doctor Who story The Pirate Planet had just been transmitted, and I’d noticed something peculiar about it, or rather about the effect it had on people. Yes it was wilder, and even more colourful and extraordinary than most of the stories, but that wasn’t it. You see my family’s reactions to Doctor Who usually ranged from mild disparagement to outright ridicule, but during this story they ‘got’ it. They laughed with it, not at it. And this was despite it being so strange and complicated and crazy. What a peculiar power this Douglas Adams person possessed, I thought.
And so I retired to the bath, where the Roberts’ radio – which was indeed a Roberts Radio – could be positioned at a safe distance. Through it I listened to what the internet now kindly informs me was the third repeat of the first episode of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
I came out of that bath laughing, a different boy, and in a way I haven’t stopped laughing since. I buzzed to everyone at school, indeed to anyone who would listen, and to many who wouldn’t, about Vogons and towels and Babel fish. The story of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark – a delicious twist on Doctor Who’s The Ark in Space from a few years before – still makes me giggle to a level of physical discomfort whenever I think about it.
And that was only the beginning of my personal journey with Douglas’s genius. This was, lest we forget, the man who wrote City of Death, the finest Doctor Who story of all time, in a weekend. It took him slightly longer to write almost everything that followed, of course. But the cliché that it always felt worth the wait was, in Douglas’s case, true. Fenchurch, Agrajag, the Krikkitmen, Professor Chronotis (hang on…), unforgettable characters in unforgettable stories. And I’ve not even mentioned The Meaning of Liff, Hyperland, or Last Chance to See.
But as I settled down to make a start on Shada, I was aware that Douglas had expressed his disappointment with it on a number of occasions, had even expressed relief that the original TV version had not been completed.
The circumstances, as far as I can make them out, were these – Douglas, as script editor of Doctor Who, was slated to write the final six-part story of the seventeenth season, and desperately wanted to bring to the screen his idea of the Doctor ‘retiring’ from his job saving planets. Of course the Doctor would discover himself quite unable to retire and be drawn back into the planet-saving swing of things by Part Six, thereby rediscovering himself. I think that’s a great idea, and so did Douglas, but the then producer of Doctor Who, Graham Williams, usually so right about everything (and now also very sadly deceased), did not. Douglas thought that by delaying writing his scripts, Graham would eventually capitulate. But Graham did not. And so Douglas wrote Shada instead, very quickly and not, it would seem, altogether happily. At the same time he was overseeing all the other Doctor Who scripts in production f
or that year, writing the second Hitchhiker book, the second Hitchhiker radio series and the Hitchhiker TV pilot. On top of this he had also just become amazingly and unexpectedly rich after the runaway success of the first Hitchhiker book. There was a lot of pressure on him, to put it mildly.
And then, after all the location filming for Shada in Cambridge had been completed, and the first of the three studio recording blocks was safely in the can, with sets and costumes designed and rehearsals complete for the remainder, a strike at the BBC brought production to a shattering halt. The production team, the actors, the crew all suddenly found themselves locked out of their studio. Tom Baker, many years later, recalled that ‘we all cried’. Douglas, he admitted, years later still, ‘breathed a sigh of relief’.
Several ideas on how to complete Shada for television were mooted, even far into the 1980s, but nothing ever came of it.
I am indebted to Charles Martin for Twittering me to remind me of an interview he had conducted with Douglas where he spoke effusively and with disarming openness about his feelings for Shada, feelings which, in 1992, were brought bubbling back to the surface. Because to his horror, the story, or what existed of it, with linking narration from Tom Baker and a quite indescribably inappropriate musical score, was released on BBC Video. Apparently by mistake. Douglas had signed a document giving his permission, without looking very closely at what he was actually permitting. He donated all his fees from the project to Comic Relief, one imagines as a sort of penance.
But Douglas was too hard on himself, as ever. The effortless élan of the first few episodes of Shada is a delight, with Part One in particular a sophisticated confection of misdirection and outright trickery that is decades ahead of its time. The Doctor’s dialogue throughout the story is joyous – at times, he sounds incredibly like the 21st-century Doctors. Indeed the whole story crackles with life, energy, warmth and some unforgettable could-only-be-Douglas ideas.
It was daunting, then, as a mainstay of modern-day Doctor Who, as well as an enormous fan of Douglas’s work, to be the first writer since Douglas himself to be sitting inside this story, looking out. And I could see what had happened. And why Douglas may have felt disappointed. I could see all the things Douglas had wanted to do but didn’t have the time to. But Douglas certainly wasn’t the first writer to suffer this way.
Whole treatises have been written about the weird, rushed endings of The Tempest and All’s Well that Ends Well, amongst others in the Shakespeare canon. Why, scream Academics, pulling their remaining hair out, did the immortal Bard choose to complicate and obfuscate the characters of Bertram or Antonio, reducing them to mere bystanders and overlooking or downplaying their reactions to the strangely hasty resolutions to their plots. Well, I can tell you the answer to that, lads. Without being too presumptuous, I can look at those plays as a scriptwriter, arguably of less repute, and tell you exactly what happened. Shakespeare was on a deadline. The Elizabethan equivalent of Pennant Roberts, director of Shada, was banging on his door yelling, ‘Ye sayeth it would be ready by Monday!’ So Shakespeare, probably, screamed and cried and paced the privy, and then handed it over as it was.
And so, I posit, it was with Douglas and the scripts for Shada, roughly 370 years later.
What I wanted to do was untangle the ravelled threads of Shada, to pay off Douglas’s ideas as I think he would have done, if only he’d had more time. The really astonishing discovery, as I sat inside, looking out, was that Douglas – even a stressed, overworked Douglas – had done the groundwork perfectly. And with every new discovery it became more and more clear where this story had been meant to go.
There’s clearly something going on in the first couple of scripts between Chris and Clare. But their relationship and their characters (especially poor Clare) vanish somewhat after that. Similarly the origins of Skagra are wondered at throughout the story, but Douglas only has time to rattle them off in the final scene. Often I discovered whole scenes or plot lines leading up to something that… just didn’t happen. For example, Chris working out the true identity of Professor Chronotis is perfectly placed in Part Five and is clearly leading to an unfortunate but very dramatic blunder from Chris. In the TV version, meanwhile, Chronotis bafflingly blows the gaffe on himself at the worst possible moment, rather like Martin Bormann standing up during the judgement at Nuremberg and shouting, ‘Look! It’s me!’
There were many other details that needed nailing down. Things you can casually swerve around on television, but which tend to get picked up by an attentive reader in a novel. The nature of Salyavin – was he a terrible criminal once? How long had Shada operated and how long had it been forgotten? How exactly had Salyavin escaped? This led to many hours consultation and debate with my flatmate and sometime co-writer, Clayton Hickman. These late nights, and the fact that we always came up with answers that seemed to fit everything else in the story, were proof that Douglas had thought long and hard about all of this, but just hadn’t had time to unpack it on screen.
Added to which I took a deep breath and researched the history and traditions of the Time Lords, ancient and modern (something which I always thought best avoided in Doctor Who but something I could not swerve on this occasion). Before you feel too sorry for me, this ‘research’ consisted of myself and Clayton watching the DVDs of The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time, plus certain parts of The End of Time, frequently pausing to make notes or just to comment on a bit we’d really liked. I hope the fruits of this research have helped widen the background and the epic scope of Shada.
Of enormous help with this book was my access to the most recent, most advanced copies of Douglas’s scripts for Shada. When the VHS version appeared in 1992 it was accompanied by a lovely little blue book containing ‘the scripts’ for Shada. In fact these were much earlier drafts than the ones I was able to work from. With camera scripts and rehearsal scripts at my disposal, I was able to incorporate many of the changes made during the actual production. Many of the scripts were annotated, by hand, by director Pennant Roberts, with changes that had presumably been worked out with Douglas and the cast during rehearsals. Ranging from tiny changes to one line of dialogue, to whole scenes scored out and totally rewritten. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The greatest discovery came in the form of two pages of notepaper on which, by hand, a whole new scene had been written. Never published, its existence never even suspected, it was unmistakeably the work of Douglas. See if you can guess which one it is, bearing in mind I’ve added a fair few new scenes myself.
But back to missed deadlines, crying and screaming (all my own). As the months rolled on, I began to think this story just didn’t want to be finished. At certain moments I even began to suspect it wanted to finish me. But I owed it to Douglas to get it right, to do justice to his mind-boggling concepts, to produce something that felt true to his vision, but with a scope and scale that would have been impossible for Doctor Who to realise in 1979. To finally complete Shada, and in a form that Douglas himself would have been happy with.
Because Douglas himself could never quite bear to leave Shada behind. His 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is proof of that. I’d like to think he’d never have left Doctor Who behind either. When the show finally returned to TV in 2005, it was a terrible shame that we were denied the chance of a new adventure with the opening caption ‘by Douglas Adams’. I bet he’d have been up for it. Deadlines permitting.
I hope that this book will serve as the next-best thing. A new/old Doctor Who story by Douglas Adams. And a way for the millions of new, young fans of the Doctor to discover the work of his very best writer. To make Douglas, and his genius, live again.
It’d be a wonderful way for a book to behave.
Gareth Roberts
London 2011
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wonderful agent Faye Webber; Andrew Pixley for the unearthing of unearthly treasures; Justin Richards and Albert DePetrillo for letting those deadlines whoosh by; Ed
Victor for getting the sphere rollng; Ligeia Marsh who never stopped trying for me; Paul Vyse for startling work with his fingers; the NotPlayers, especially Neil Corry, for comradeship and testing; David S. Taylor of Bedfordshire; Ian Levine, his amazing animators and Ed Stradling for taking me back to January 1980; Charles Martin for his invaluable interview with Douglas; Kevin Davies for being brilliant as ever; Tom Spilsbury and Peter Ware at DWM for digging out the necessary; In-Vision magazine; Bex ‘Clare’ Levene for Cambridge detail; all at Balans in Chiswick, but especially Sean, David, Ben and Dylan ‘this is how you pronounce it’ Keightley; to Russell T Davies, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, Peter Harness and Steven Moffat, brothers in arms; to @pollyjanerocket for encouragement; and to Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and the cast and crew of the original TV production of Shada.
This book was written while listening to A Grounding in Numbers by Van Der Graaf Generator, Director’s Cut by Kate Bush, Clap Your Hands and Stamp Your Feet – The Best of Dutch Glam Rock, and the beautifully recreated incidental music from Douglas’s City of Death from Composer Who. You can find it on YouTube at http://youtu.be/aCnlyFm8nCI
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Doctor Who: Shada Page 32
