How a BBC strike exterminated Doctor Who adventure

Tom Baker is wearing a black hat, white shirt and black waistcoat, navy trousers and black boots. He is standing on a wooden punt which is on the River Cam. On the right is a wall leading to a field.

Image caption,

The Doctor punting in Cambridge with his companion Romana

ByAimee Dexter and Alice Whaley

Published3 hours ago

For more than six decades, Doctor Who has taken viewers across time and space.

But hidden within the show's history are unfinished episodes recorded in Cambridge.

In 1979, production teams arrived in the university city following a storyline called 'Shada', written by local author Douglas Adams - featuring Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor.

However, not everything went smoothly during the shoot.

Speaking on a new BBC Sounds documentary Doctor Who: Lost in Cambridge, Marcus Hearn said his father, who was a porter at Clare College, saw first-hand some of the challenges the crew and Baker faced while filming.

The Doctor Who Magazine editor said: "Tom Baker had been struggling to learn how to punt and he kept falling into the Cam.

"It was my dad's job to provide him with blankets and brandy, and to basically try to calm him down because apparently he was in a very bad mood."

Image caption,

Tom Baker was filmed punting in Cambridge as part of a series of unfinished Doctor Who episodes

The story finds the Doctor in Cambridge working alongside Romana and a retired Time Lord, Professor Chronotis, to defeat the evil alien Skagra who is attempting to steal the secrets to the prison planet, Shada.

The episodes were filmed for the end of the show's 17th series.

But strike action at the BBC meant studio scenes were never completed and the episodes were abandoned.

Hearn said he had "eagerly awaited" the episodes arriving on his television after hearing of his father's adventures.

"I waited and I waited and it just never happened, so it became something of a myth and something of a legend amongst Doctor Who fans from that point onwards."

Marcus Hearn has short grey hair and is wearing a navy jumper. He has a light smile and is standing in front of a white wall which has several pieces of branding on it.

Image source, Julie EdwardsImage caption,

Marcus Hearn's father was a porter at a University of Cambridge college during the filming

Author Douglas Adams is best known for writing the famous novel and radio series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Born in Cambridge in 1952 and educated in Essex, he returned to Cambridge to study at St John's College.

Talking about Adams, Hearn said: "This was Douglas Adams' world, of course, because he'd been a student at St John's in the early 70s.

"You can still go to St John's and look at his archive, and you could see even when he was a student and before that, he was actually writing Doctor Who stories, even before he was a professional writer."

With 'Shada' being set in and around the University of Cambridge, Hearn added: "Ironically, St John's didn't actually grant the BBC permission to shoot there and so they had to shoot at Emmanuel and Clare instead."

Richard Bignell, author of Doctor Who on Location, said crews also spent time at Grantchester Meadow

"They obviously did a little bit of improvisation as well because when the Doctor first emerges from the TARDIS when it lands, he points out, 'mind that cow pat'," he added.

Image source, Les McCallumImage caption,

A designers copy of the film schedule for Shada

Les McCallum, a design assistant on Shada, said most of the filming was completed in Cambridge, with the rest planned to be filmed in studios in London.

But, strike action cut the studio filming short, leaving the episodes unfinished.

"We did the recording in the morning and then come lunch time we all went off. We came back and all the studio doors were locked and chained because of the strike," said McCallum.

"We never saw the finished product, and they couldn't get the actors to come back again because they were contracted on other series or other shows, and that's why it never got finished."

Tom Baker has curly brown hair. He is wearing a brown coat and a multi-coloured long scarf. He is sitting on the right and looking towards a silver device.

Image caption,

Baker returned to complete the story in 2017, 36 years after it was first filmed

In 1983, the show celebrated its 20th anniversary. The producer wanted to reunite all the previous Doctors in a special episode called 'The Five Doctors.' However, Baker declined.

Hearn said: "The BBC very much wanted Tom Baker to be in the show, because it was a big feature-length 20th anniversary TV movie, and then somebody remembered that they had these fragments of this incomplete story in the archive.

"So they went back to the archive, found the bits of Shada, which of course had never been broadcast, and then wrote a story around these fragments and cut them into this TV movie."

36 years after the storyline was abandoned, Baker and the cast finally returned to complete Shada.

Baker and Lalla Ward, who played Romana, recorded the missing lines from Adams' original script, and the visuals were created with animation. This new, partially animated version was released in 2017.

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