Better Late Than Never…
Home Cinema Choice|February 2018

Almost four decades after production began, this lost Doctor Who serial finally hits the screen

Better Late Than Never…

- DOCTOR WHO: SHADA

Had everything gone to plan the 1979-1980 series of Doctor Who would have ended with a six-part serial written by outgoing script editor Douglas Adams involving a Time Lord masquerading as a Cambridge professor, the titular prison planetoid, and an alien genius who wants to absorb every living being in the universe into a single hive mind. But it wasn't to be…

While the location filming and the first of three studio shoots were completed, industrial action brought the production to a standstill. Unable to get studio time even when the strike was called off (due to delayed Christmas specials being given priority), Shada was left incomplete. Some clips were used in 1983's The Five Doctors, but Shada itself was left to languish in the vaults, never to see the light of day. Except it has, several times…

This story is from the February 2018 edition of Home Cinema Choice.

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This story is from the February 2018 edition of Home Cinema Choice.

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