10 Doctor Who Episodes That Were Never Made

'The Krikkitmen' was one of several stories Douglas Adams proposed to the Doctor Who production team in 1976, before almost becoming a film.

More obscure than Shada or his more famous Doctor Who works like City of Death (1979), The Krikkitmen featured the Fourth Doctor arriving at a cricket match, only to find out it was the end of the universe. The Doctor would then attempt an intergalactic fetch-quest to stop the android Krikkitmen from building a weapon from cricket paraphernalia and turn the universe to dust.

After the idea was declined by script editor Robert Holmes, who offered Adams the chance to write The Pirate Planet instead, Adams began retooling the story as a feature film. Inspired by Tom Baker's attempts to make 'Scratchman', Adams took the screenplay to Paramount Pictures - to no avail. The BBC blocked the film due to rights issues - rights issues they refused to discuss with Adams. Unable to come to an agreement, The Krikkitmen was dismantled and used instead for Life, The Universe, And Everything - the third Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel.

Adams had also previously submitted a story to the Doctor Who production team in 1974, featuring a colony spaceship leaving Earth full of popular but generally useless members of the human race - an idea he also dropped into Hitchhiker's - but that too was declined. It is amazing and baffling to think that one of the UK's revolutionary sci-fi geniuses was so rejected by one of the UK's only mainstream sci-fi outlets.

Douglas Adams' Krikkitmen was finally released as a novelisation in 2018 as 'Doctor Who and The Krikkitmen' by James Goss - the same writer who helped bring Tom Baker's Scratchman to life.

With so many hidden gems, lost treasures, and cancelled productions from the Whoniverse trapped in the time vortex, it's only a matter of time until they materialise for us to enjoy.