SHADA

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, during my journeys to and from work, instead of demoralising myself with the generally depressing outpourings on Radio 4  confirming to me that society as we knew it really has gone to hell in a handbasket, I have instead been listening in the car to Lalla Ward, Mrs Richard Dawkins no less (and former Romanadvoratrelundar Mk II to explain the connection), reading Gareth Roberts’ recent adaptation of Douglas Adams’ so-called great “lost” work based upon his scripts created for the episodes which were never completed in 1979 due to “industrial action at the BBC” of a six-part tale called “Shada”.

Douglas Adams was a rather unique and amazing talent, if not a prolific one. Over the course of less than a dozen books he manage to spark the imaginations of a generation and made a name for himself as one of the literary giants of the late 20th century, but sometimes I think that it is his thoughts and his essays that are actually his most important legacy, because his ideas and writings about science, computing and our own place in the environment and the wider universe are certainly the things which have stuck with me during the decade that has passed since his death in California, ironically following a bout of healthy exercise, at a ridiculously youthful 49.

In those long, dark depressing days after graduating from Cambridge, failing to become John Cleese as he wished to, but before his greatest success finally made his name, in between taking walk-on parts in “Monty Python” sketches and his eventual achievement of finally persuading Radio 4 that science fiction could be funny, Douglas Adams wrote three teleplays for Doctor Who adventures, two and a half of which actually got made, and two of which actually managed to be broadcast: “The Pirate Planet” and “City of Death”.

The third of these was called “Shada” and was struck down, as I mentioned earlier, by that scourge of many things creative in the late 1970s, “industrial action”, and was subsequently abandoned, stuck on a shelf, supposedly never to see the light of day and forgotten about, which is all rather ironic really, when you consider some of the themes and tropes being played around with were precisely about that very thing.

Douglas himself, it is said, was never all that impressed by “Shada”, not least because it has the air of being a bit of a “rush job”, but he did recycle one or two of the ideas for the first of his “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” novels a few years later.

But “Shada” was never really forgotten. A few years later, a video version was cobbled together using the location and studio footage that had already been filmed, alongside the scripts in book form, and the proceeds all went to Comic Relief, so the story was at least “out there”, knowable and was actually doing some good, instead of merely sitting on that shelf, gathering dust and no-doubt gaining the reputation of being a solid gold “classic” as things that we cannot see usually do.

Later still, a new version was adapted and created as an audio adventure which was released on CD and starred Paul McGann as the Time Lord standing in for the Mighty Tom, who wasn’t much prone towards doing such things in those days. Suddenly, having been a bit of an unknown quantity, the story was rapidly becoming one of the most adapted and well-known of Mr Adams’ lesser works.

Recently, to mark a decade passing since the death of Mr Adams, the story was released again, this time in novel form, written by another author, the aforementioned Mr Roberts. It is an adaptation which, at least occasionally, actually manages to at least echo the style of Adams himself whilst also, sadly, only reminding us of what a nimble wordsmith the original was. It’s not a bad adaptation at all, in fact there are a few pages where the Adams of old comes blasting off the page, but it does tend to start to show up the shortcomings of the TV show scripted version, as the fascinating opening premise rather transforms into lots of people running around inside various spaceships and asteroids and making miraculous escapes from moments of false jeopardy. There is also in the manuscript a rather annoying tendency to overuse the word “naughty” for my tastes, but I can’t have been that unimpressed by it. After all, I did buy it twice, once to read and again to listen to in the car.

This was because, once I’d read the book myself, I happened upon the audio-book version going cheap and ordered it up so that, for ten exquisite days, my journey to work was enhanced by something more stimulating than the economic deficit, pension reform and electioneering amongst the devious and the not-so-good.

My main gripe was practical, as the book was spread across 10 CDs, all mounted on one little spindle like when you buy a batch of blank ones from Tesco. Getting the first one out of the box was fair enough, but there was a question of where to put that one whilst you tried to extract disc 2 from the box and so on. That takes a certain amount of preparation to deal with when you know that you’re going to be stuck in traffic at the end of a disc, making sure that the next one was handy, and that the ejected one could be plonked somewhere where it wouldn’t get scratched to buggery until you had a chance to park the car and tidy things away.

I’m sure, if he were still alive to work on “The Meaning of Liff” there might now be a word for that, but I’m going to dub it a “Dukinfield” until I find out that it’s already been taken.

Anyway, rather sadly, I completed the last disc on my way home last week and now it’s finished and, do you know, I’m rather missing it as I return to the morning inquisitions of John and Jim (or whoever) on the radio. I may have to start re-exploring the less-than-impressive music collection for a while instead, which should lead to some embarrassment as someone pulls up next to me at traffic lights to overhear it. Also, for a few weeks at least, the boys from TMS will at least be able to accompany me on my journeys home, so all is not lost.

It’s not that I mind John and Jim (or whoever) personally, you understand…? In fact, in many ways they have been my accompaniment to travel for many a long year, perhaps contributing to the lugubrious air of futility that I used to exude as I arrived at various work places, but also adding to that sense that I used to have of “knowing what’s going on” that I seem recently to be rather less impressed by. No, it’s not that. I think it’s just that having had my mind expanded once again courtesy of Mr Adams and Mr Roberts, putting it back inside the box each morning seems just a little bit sad.