Slashdot Mirror
Tom Baker Returns To Finish Shelved Doctor Who Episodes Penned By Douglas Adams (theregister.co.uk)
Zorro shares a report from The Register: The fourth and finest Doctor, Tom Baker, has reprised the role to finish a Who serial scuppered in 1979 by strike action at the BBC. Shada, penned by Hitchhiker's Guide author Douglas Adams, was supposed to close Doctor Who's 17th season. Location filming in Cambridge and a studio session were completed but the strike nixed further work and the project was later shelved entirely for fear it might affect the Beeb's Christmas-time productions. The remaining parts have been filled in with animation and the voice of 83-year-old Baker, although he also filmed a scene. BBC Worldwide has now released the episodes, which interweave the 1979 footage with the new material to complete the story. "I loved doing Doctor Who, it was life to me," Baker told the BBC of his tenure as the much-loved Time Lord. "I used to dread the end of rehearsal because then real life would impinge on me. Doctor Who... when I was in full flight, then I was happy."
The best is often the first (people saw when they discovered the series)
Will he successfully make it to Brighton this time?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Oh shit another session of cut and paste Vogon poetry. Wouldn't it be nice if someone constructed a stellar express way through the orbit of the planet Anus where all the assholes that post this shit come from? Common you guys there must be a way to turn your incoming comments container code into a nuclear reactor to melt down this kind of shit without having to rely upon member users wasting mod points.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Yeah. That's why he was so gracious about showing up to do the 25th anniversary episode. (What, me carry a grudge?)
Meanwhile, there's been a "Shada" reconstruction (with all the shot-at-the-time footage, and Baker doing talking-head narration of the missing bits) around for ages.
Not gonna argue. My favourite was Jon Pertwee. That crystal, the inertia-less car, and companion-wise, who else rocked a mini-skirt like Jo Grant?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For people who love the book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, there's a plot point in that book that's never explained (and seems to make no sense). This plot point is explained in the Shada Doctor Who episode, as a character is shared between the book and the Doctor Who episode.
I'm amazed that this is still going after 20 years, IRC server and all. Seriously I'm not even mad.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Tom Baker is who (get it?) I think of when I think Dr. Who. That being said, I never understood the nerd love of that show. The production quality was absolutely amateur. The stories were plain awful. Sound production was so bad it was painful to hear even on tinny, single speaker TVs of the time. The robots and monsters were cringeworthy. It was like watching 1960s Lost in Space level sci-fi episodes made in 1980. Don't believe me? Compare it to contemporaries like Space 1999 or Battlestar Galactica and see which looks like a college film student project. Star Wars was released in 1977 and Alien came out in 1979. Those were the level of sc-fi expectation at the time. I cannot understand how a good premise with piss-poor execution somehow grew into a cult following. I love sci-fi, but that's one that needed to be nuked from orbit.
I have no idea if it's any better now, because I haven't seen an episode in decades.
The only true Doctor Who.
I thought I'd point out that Tom Baker is also doing ongoing Doctor Who stories with Big Finish Productions. These are entirely on audio (think audiobooks, but with a full cast) and are extremely good! He's done six "seasons" already, and there's a seventh on the way.
These are full cast productions, with original cast members, including Leela (Louise Jameson), Romana I (Mary Tamm), Romana II (Lalla Ward), and K9 (John Leeson). And occasional appearances by other characters, with Trevor Baxter and Christopher Benjamin as Jago and Litefoot (from the classic TV story The Talons of Weng-Chiang) and Geoffrey Beevers as The Master.
It's not just nostalgia. Big Finish does an amazing job! I've been a subscriber and listener for several years now. The audio stories were great when I had a regular weekly three-hour commute, but now I listen to them during a much shorter daily commute to/from work, and during quiet moments on weekends.
Big Finish has the other classic Doctors too, from 4 to 8 (and other actors filling in for 1 to 3 - Frazer Hines as Pat Troughton's 2nd Doctor is spot-on). As others have pointed out, Big Finish has already done a version of Shada with Paul McGann (8th Doctor); Lalla Ward (Romana); and John Leeson (K9).