10 Doctor Who Episodes That Were Never Made
2. Shada
Possibly Doctor Who's most infamous unmade episode, Shada is a curious case - as part of it was actually produced.
Written by sci-fi mastermind Douglas Adams - then-Doctor Who script editor and creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Shada was intended as the final serial of Season 17 which ran from 1979 to 1980.
Centring around the Fourth Doctor and Time Lady Romana visiting old friend Professor Chronotis at Cambridge University, the story would feature a madcap villain, some Time Lord secrets, and a lost Gallifreyan prison known as 'Shada'. With Professor Chronotis being revealed as a Time Lord renegade in possession of Shada's coordinates, the villainous Skagra planned to stop by for a chat too.
Like the Time Lord prison, the original TV episode of Shada was abandoned, with less than half of Adams' script actually filmed. This was due to union strikes halting filming. When the strikes subsided, too much time and budget had been lost. Season 17 was decided to end an episode earlier, with production on Season 18 beginning immediately instead.
Location footage which had been filmed for the episode was inserted into The Five Doctors to compensate for Tom Baker's absence, and what had been completed of the story was released on video and DVD. In 2003, the BBC flash-animated sections of it in a new webcast featuring the Eighth Doctor 'returning to a forgotten adventure'. However, a novelisation by Gareth Roberts in 2012 and a more successful animation in 2017 completed Adams' original story.
Adams himself would use parts of the storyline as the basis for his Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series, as well as later instalments of Hitchhiker's. However, Shada wasn't the writer's only experience of his work on Doctor Who being unproduced...