20 Cancelled Doctor Who Episodes You Need To Know About

For Doctor Who, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams wrote The Pirate Planet and Shada, co-wrote City of Death and script edited Season 17.

He also pitched a story to the show a couple of years earlier, in 1976.

In typically outlandish Adams style, this centred around androids called Krikkitmen, who are trying to free their home planet, Krikkit, from a Time Lord prison… by constructing a key from items associated with the Earth game cricket. A sentence that only a show like Doctor Who could churn out, quite frankly.

The Doctor and his companion become aware of this scheme during a test match at Lord’s, when the Krikkitmen steal the Ashes trophy.

Though it didn’t result in a television commission, Adams didn’t let The Krikkitmen go, later attempting to get it made as a feature film. When this came to nothing, he used the story as the basis for his third Hitchhiker’s book, Life, The Universe And Everything (by which time the Krikkit-opening device had become the Wikkit Gate).

Meanwhile, he’d revisit the idea of a Time Lord prison in Shada – which, in a cruel twist of fate, would also never reach screens.

The Krikkitmen finally saw the light of day as a novel in 2018, with James Goss working from Adams’ original notes.