Doctor Who: Shada (44 page)

‘Bye, everybody,’ called the blonde from inside.

Big-eyes backed into the box and slammed the door. A second later, it opened and he popped his annoying curly head out again. ‘Oh, and goodbye, officer, good luck with the investigation into whatever it is!’ He whipped his head back and the door slammed shut again.

Smith had had enough. He stalked towards the police box, rapped neatly on its door and called. ‘I must ask you all to vacate this box. It is police property.’ He paused and thought for a moment. ‘And what the ruddy hell are you doing in there, anyway?’

There was no answer. Instead the light atop the police box began to flash to the accompaniment of a raucous bellowing and chuffing sound and, right in front of Constable Smith’s Hendon-honed eyes, it vanished into thin air.

With a dangerous look in those same eyes, Smith turned on the remaining company. They all had fixed bland smiles as if nothing impossible had just happened. The porter, however, was peering at the indentation left by the box on the carpet. He shook his head in admiration, muttering, ‘So that’s how he does it…’

The old man walked over to Smith, still all smiles. ‘Are you sure you won’t have that cup of tea, officer?’

Smith was not to be distracted. ‘Where,’ he said with dangerous intensity, ‘has that police box gone?’

The old man spread his arms wide and shook his head as if in bewilderment. ‘And what police box would that be, officer?’ he said

That was the last straw for Smith. He tucked his pad and pen away, and pointed at the door. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right! Coats on, the lot of you. You’re all taking a little walk with me down to the station.’

Chris and Clare, hand-in-hand and giggling uncontrollably, followed the Professor, a mortified Wilkin and Constable Smith across the quad of St Cedd’s College, and towards the main gate.

As they stepped out onto the streets of the city, the sun burst from behind the clouds, bathing the ancient buildings of the university quarter in a golden light. Some early-risers tinged by on their bikes and the massed bells of Cambridge began to ring out, calling the faithful to prayer and making sleeping students pull their pillows tighter over their heads.

‘Well, we’ve seen the universe,’ said Clare, nuzzling closer to Chris. ‘But I think I prefer home.’

Chris leaned in to kiss her.

‘Oi, lovebirds,’ Smith shouted back to them. ‘You can cut that out for a start, unless you want lewd behaviour added to the charge sheet!’

Chris stifled another giggle and Clare playfully slapped his hand.

‘I really feel I should be taking my arrest a bit more seriously,’ Chris said.

Professor Chronotis looked back over his shoulder at the couple, grinning widely. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I can’t wait to discover what the charges are going to be. Can’t be worse than last time at least.’

Clare suddenly quickened her pace, dragging Chris along with her.

‘What’s the rush?’ Chris asked.

Clare smiled a secret smile. ‘Oh, I’ve just got a feeling that something rather nice might happen when we get to that police station.’

‘Before or after the arrest?’ Chris sighed.

‘Not sure,’ said Clare.

Chris leaned in closer, frowning. ‘Then how do you know it’s going to happen?’

Clare prodded the end of his nose with her finger and smiled. ‘I read it in a book,’ she said.

Chapter 75

FAR AWAY FROM Cambridge, in the mysterious region known as the vortex, where space and time are one, sped a police box that was not a police box at all.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 were gathered around the central console, all three feeling rather pleased with the way things had turned out.

‘Don’t you think it seems strange now?’ mused Romana.

‘You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that,’ the Doctor replied, fiddling with the controls of his beloved machine. ‘I can think of at least 137 strange things that have happened in the last 48 hours.’

‘Kindly clarify query, Mistress,’ urged K-9.

‘Thank you,’ said Romana, crouching down to pat him affectionately. ‘I was just about to.’

She stood up and started again. ‘It seems strange now, that I was so terrified by those legends of Salyavin when I was younger, and yet he turned out to be such a nice old man.’ She sighed. ‘Makes me wonder just how much else in Gallifreyan history has been distorted and exaggerated.’

The Doctor laughed. ‘A whopping great load of it, I imagine. The Time Lords overreact to everything. Just look at the way they’ve treated me.’

Romana patted his hand sympathetically.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor said, lost in thought. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, one day, in a few hundred years’ time, someone will meet me and say, “Is that really the Doctor? How strange. He seems such a nice old man.”’

He gave the Randomiser a hefty thump, and the TARDIS jolted on to a new and completely unpredictable course.

Which was just how the Doctor liked it.

Afterword

‘IT’LL BE A doddle,’ I told my agent in regard to this book. ‘A couple of months’ work at the most. A labour of love. Like falling off a log.’

Oh yeah, a log. A little log, the kind of log you might step over daintily on the gentlest of country rambles.

Eight months later, reader, I clambered from under that mighty timber, the fall of which could easily have taken out a medium-sized village and probably did, having endured the loss of brain cells, hair, even friends (but sadly no weight at all), and staggered into the daylight barely able to imagine a world without
Shada
, or before it, or beyond it. As always, I’d wanted to do my best. But this time, I wanted to do my best by Douglas.

In November 1978 my mum told me about a science-fiction comedy series on the radio that she’d heard about. It was written by one of the
Doctor Who
people and apparently there was quite a buzz about it. Douglas’s first
Doctor Who
story
The Pirate Planet
had just been transmitted, and I’d noticed something peculiar about it, or rather about the effect it had on people. Yes it was wilder, and even more colourful and extraordinary than most of the stories, but that wasn’t it. You see my family’s reactions to
Doctor Who
usually ranged from mild disparagement to outright ridicule, but during this story they ‘got’ it. They laughed
with
it, not
at
it. And this was despite it being so strange and complicated and crazy. What a peculiar power this Douglas Adams person possessed, I thought.

And so I retired to the bath, where the Roberts’ radio – which was indeed a Roberts Radio – could be positioned at a safe distance. Through it I listened to what the internet now kindly informs me was the third repeat of the first episode of
The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
.

I came out of that bath laughing, a different boy, and in a way I haven’t stopped laughing since. I buzzed to everyone at school, indeed to anyone who would listen, and to many who wouldn’t, about Vogons and towels and Babel fish. The story of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark – a delicious twist on
Doctor Who’s The Ark in Space
from a few years before – still makes me giggle to a level of physical discomfort whenever I think about it.

And that was only the beginning of my personal journey with Douglas’s genius. This was, lest we forget, the man who wrote
City of Death
, the finest
Doctor Who
story of all time, in a
weekend
. It took him slightly longer to write almost everything that followed, of course. But the cliché that it always felt worth the wait was, in Douglas’s case, true. Fenchurch, Agrajag, the Krikkitmen, Professor Chronotis (hang on…), unforgettable characters in unforgettable stories. And I’ve not even mentioned
The Meaning of Liff, Hyperland
, or
Last Chance to See
.

But as I settled down to make a start on
Shada
, I was aware that Douglas had expressed his disappointment with it on a number of occasions, had even expressed relief that the original TV version had not been completed.

The circumstances, as far as I can make them out, were these – Douglas, as script editor of
Doctor Who
, was slated to write the final six-part story of the seventeenth season, and desperately wanted to bring to the screen his idea of the Doctor ‘retiring’ from his job saving planets. Of course the Doctor would discover himself quite unable to retire and be drawn back into the planet-saving swing of things by Part Six, thereby rediscovering himself. I think that’s a great idea, and so did Douglas, but the then producer of
Doctor Who
, Graham Williams, usually so right about everything (and now also very sadly deceased), did not. Douglas thought that by delaying writing his scripts, Graham would eventually capitulate. But Graham did not. And so Douglas wrote
Shada
instead, very quickly and not, it would seem, altogether happily. At the same time he was overseeing all the other
Doctor Who
scripts in production for that year, writing the second
Hitchhiker
book, the second
Hitchhiker
radio series and the
Hitchhiker
TV pilot. On top of this he had also just become amazingly and unexpectedly rich after the runaway success of the first
Hitchhiker
book. There was a lot of pressure on him, to put it mildly.

And then, after all the location filming for
Shada
in Cambridge had been completed, and the first of the three studio recording blocks was safely in the can, with sets and costumes designed and rehearsals complete for the remainder, a strike at the BBC brought production to a shattering halt. The production team, the actors, the crew all suddenly found themselves locked out of their studio. Tom Baker, many years later, recalled that ‘we all cried’. Douglas, he admitted, years later still, ‘breathed a sigh of relief’.

Several ideas on how to complete
Shada
for television were mooted, even far into the 1980s, but nothing ever came of it.

I am indebted to Charles Martin for Twittering me to remind me of an interview he had conducted with Douglas where he spoke effusively and with disarming openness about his feelings for
Shada
, feelings which, in 1992, were brought bubbling back to the surface. Because to his horror, the story, or what existed of it, with linking narration from Tom Baker and a quite indescribably inappropriate musical score, was released on BBC Video. Apparently by mistake. Douglas had signed a document giving his permission, without looking very closely at what he was actually permitting. He donated all his fees from the project to Comic Relief, one imagines as a sort of penance.

But Douglas was too hard on himself, as ever. The effortless élan of the first few episodes of
Shada
is a delight, with Part One in particular a sophisticated confection of misdirection and outright trickery that is decades ahead of its time. The Doctor’s dialogue throughout the story is joyous – at times, he sounds incredibly like the 21st-century Doctors. Indeed the whole story crackles with life, energy, warmth and some unforgettable could-only-be-Douglas ideas.

It was daunting, then, as a mainstay of modern-day
Doctor Who
, as well as an enormous fan of Douglas’s work, to be the first writer since Douglas himself to be sitting inside this story, looking out. And I could see what had happened. And why Douglas may have felt disappointed. I could see all the things Douglas had wanted to do but didn’t have the time to. But Douglas certainly wasn’t the first writer to suffer this way.

Whole treatises have been written about the weird, rushed endings of
The Tempest
and
All’s Well that Ends Well
, amongst others in the Shakespeare canon. Why, scream Academics, pulling their remaining hair out, did the immortal Bard choose to complicate and obfuscate the characters of Bertram or Antonio, reducing them to mere bystanders and overlooking or downplaying their reactions to the strangely hasty resolutions to their plots. Well, I can tell you the answer to that, lads. Without being too presumptuous, I can look at those plays as a scriptwriter, arguably of less repute, and tell you exactly what happened. Shakespeare was on a deadline. The Elizabethan equivalent of Pennant Roberts, director of
Shada
, was banging on his door yelling, ‘Ye sayeth it would be ready by Monday!’ So Shakespeare, probably, screamed and cried and paced the privy, and then handed it over as it was.

And so, I posit, it was with Douglas and the scripts for
Shada
, roughly 370 years later.