Shadap Your Face

19 November 1979: The cast and crew of Doctor Who are working on the concluding serial of the show's seventeenth season, the six-part Shada by Douglas Adams. The location shoot has been completed, albeit with difficulties arising from a labour dispute. On the first of three studio sessions, the cast return from lunch to find the dispute has escalated into industrial action, and all recordings at Television Centre have been postponed. The future of Shada - scheduled to begin airing on BBC One in exactly two months' time - is instantly thrown into doubt.

20 November-10 December 1979: Over the course of the next month, the production team explore various methods by which they might still be able to complete the serial. The industrial action is settled on the 1st December, but many of the other programmes affected by the strike are part of the BBC's Christmas schedule, and are given higher priority than Doctor Who. The production team eventually decide there is no hope of getting Shada into the studio in time, and work on the serial is abandoned. Although there are previous examples of scripts getting quite a way into development before the decision was made not to produce them (1969's The Prison in Space had purportedly entered the early stages of pre-production when the plug was pulled), Shada is the first - and, to date, only - instance of a Doctor Who story having to be abandoned midway through filming.

Early 1980: John Nathan-Turner takes over from Graham Williams as the producer of Doctor Who. He briefly considers trying to remount Shada as a Christmas special consisting of two double-length episodes, but this proves to be impractical, and the story does not match the new - and radically different - tone of the forthcoming season. By the summer, Shada has been abandoned again, and with incumbent Doctor and companion Tom Baker and Lalla Ward moving on during Nathan-Turner's first series as producer it seems like any chance of remounting the production has been lost.

Late 1982/Early 1983: John Nathan-Turner - now in his third season as Doctor Who producer - is planning a special story for the show's 20th anniversary, which will feature all five Doctors. Tom Baker turns down an invitation to take part in the story, and the decision is taken to represent his Doctor with clips from Shada - the conceit being that the Fourth Doctor is abducted from his timeline like all the others, but ends up stranded in a time eddy when the equipment malfunctions.

25 November 1983: The Five Doctors' original transmission in the UK marks the first time any footage from Shada makes it to television (although material has been shown at conventions before now, and pictures have appeared in a Doctor Who Magazine article about the lost story).

Circa 1985: With the advent of the home video market (the first Doctor Who home video release, Revenge of the Cybermen, hit the shelves in October 1983), John Nathan-Turner once again considers trying to complete Shada, this time as a VHS release with specially recorded links from then-incumbent Doctor Colin Baker to cover for the missing material, although ultimately nothing comes of this idea.

30 June 1987: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a novel by Douglas Adams heavily borrowing from the script of Shada, is first published.

1989-1991: Having escaped one confrontation with cancellation in 1986, Doctor Who's original run comes to an end on the 6th of December 1989 with the broadcast of the final episode of Survival. Over the next year or so, with no prospect of any new television series any time soon, John Nathan-Turner produces several special releases for BBC Video, including extended versions of several latter-day serials where all the original footage still survives. In 1991, this inspires him to once again revisit Shada, and approaches Tom Baker about the prospect of recording linking material to fill in the gaps. Baker agrees, and when the necessary paperwork to authorise the release is sent over to Douglas Adams, he accidentally signs it off because it is part of a large pile of documents sent over by his agent; Adams had taken an unfavourable view of the script in the 12 years since its cancellation, and had he realised what he was signing it is unlikely the VHS release would have gone ahead. Nevertheless...

4 February 1992: Filming for Tom Baker's contribution to the VHS release of Shada takes place at the Museum of the Moving Image, which is currently playing host to a Doctor Who exhibition.

6 July 1992: Shada is released on BBC Video, combining all of the footage that was filmed with Baker's new links plus musical score and special effects, with David Brierley (the voice of K9 for Season 17) returning to record the K9 dialogue that was never done at the time. Due to the nature of the release, it comes with a scriptbook based on the rehearsal script.

12-14 November 2002: Although a version of Shada with all the available footage now exists, a desire still remains for a fully dramatised version. Big Finish Productions - who have been producing Doctor Who audio stories for nearly three and a half years at this point - collaborate with the BBC's Doctor Who website to produce an audio version which will be webcast with illustrations... but Tom Baker declines to take part, as he has been consistently turning down Big Finish since its inception (he will not come aboard for nearly nine years yet). The story is rewritten for Paul McGann, with the conceit that the shenanigans in The Five Doctors caused the events of Shada to never take place, and he heads off to Cambridge with a future version of Romana to sort things out. This version is recorded on the dates above.

2 May-7 June 2003: The McGann version of Shada is released as a weekly webcast; Big Finish also release an audio-only version on CD, and this version is later broadcast on BBC Radio 7.

22 March 2011: The BBC announce that Shada is to be novelised by Gareth Roberts.

15 March 2012: Roberts' novelisation is released.

7 January 2013: The 1992 VHS version of Shada is released on DVD as part of "The Legacy Collection", a boxset also featuring the 1993 documentary More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS. The McGann webcast is also included as a special feature. The decision to release Shada as a remastered version of the 1992 VHS rather than finding any new way to present the material causes an incredibly tedious controversy.

10 October 2017: Despite three different "official" versions of Shada now existing, perhaps it was always going to be unfinished business until Tom did a fully dramatised version. On this date the BBC officially announce that, following months of rumours: a version of Shada using animation with voice-overs from the surviving cast of the original 1979 production to finally complete it (following several previous releases using animation to reconstruct 1960s episodes which are now missing from the BBC's archive), plus new live-action footage (principally new model shots, but also a specially-filmed epilogue with Tom Baker).

4 December 2017: The new animated version of Shada is released on DVD and Blu-ray, putting the matter at rest after 38 years, unless you're annoyed that this version is in "movie" format rather than 6 25-minute episodes.

(Note: There are even more versions of Shada beyond the ones mentioned here, but they are all strictly unofficial; I decided only to chronicle "official" attempts to get the story finished.)