Lost in N-Space

The Summer of 1993: A brand new, fully dramatised Doctor Who radio drama, The Paradise of Death, is recorded and broadcast in five weekly parts on Radio 5 - the first new 'proper' Who made by the BBC since Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred went to find cities made of smoke and people made of song in December 1989. It stars Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney, and was written by the producer of Pertwee's television era, Barry Letts. Letts went on to novelise the story for Target Books the following year. (I'm going somewhere with all this, don't worry.)

As Radio 5 was only available on AM at the time, a few months after The Paradise of Death's initial broadcast it got an FM outing on Radio 2 (not Radio 7, as I erroneously claimed in an earlier article; the repeat was from April to May 1994). Due to somebody buggering things up, the Radio 2 repeat broadcast the episodes in the wrong order, and so many people wrote in to complain that the BBC realised the show was more popular than they thought. Thus, a second serial was duly commissioned and recorded later in 1994, also written by Letts and starring Pertwee, Sladen and Courtney: The Ghosts of N-Space.

Flash forward to January 1996, over a year after The Ghosts of N-Space is recorded, and it finally gets broadcast in six weekly parts on BBC Radio 2. So it was sat on for at least 13 months after recording, possibly even longer (I can't find exact dates for when it was recorded). That might seem odd enough, but Letts' novelisation (as part of the Virgin Missing Adventures range, as the Target line was now defunct) had been published in February 1995!

So what happened? Was there some kind of breakdown in communication between Virgin Books and the BBC that led to the novelisation being printed so early? Even then, why did the BBC wait so long to air it? We have just one tiny clue as to the delay: The Ghosts of N-Space's entry at the Doctor Who Reference Guide, which includes a reference to the serial being scheduled for broadcast in 1995, possibly taken from the novelisation itself. Was it scheduled for broadcast around the time the novelisation came out, but pulled? If so, why did it take it so long to reschedule? Why might it have been pulled at all - something to do with the Mafia storyline, possibly? There's got to be something more to this than "the BBC sat on it for ages", hasn't there?

A third radio play with Pertwee was planned, but just a few months after N-Space finally got to be heard, he died. (Big Finish came on to the scene with The Sirens of Time, their first fully-dramatised, officially-licensed Who play, just over three years later; their first Third Doctor stories were part of the Companion Chronicles range, which are dramatic readings read by surviving actors from the first three Doctors' eras, but in 2015 the Third Doctor became the first one to be officially recast by the company, now played by Tim Treloar.) Letts was thus commissioned to write some radio plays based on Blake's 7 instead, but these suffered chiefly because Letts clearly wasn't familiar with Blake's 7 at all and they bore very little resemblance to the show. A Radio 4 play starring Tom Baker was possibly under consideration a short time afterwards, but did not materialise, and we'd have to wait until he finally joined Big Finish in 2012 to hear new audio adventures with the Fourth Doctor.