User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-26285319-20150407171302/@comment-88790-20150518162224

OttselSpy25 wrote: CzechOut wrote: The BBC cancelled production of Shada. It said, we've got these scenes in the can, but we are not going to transmit or finish them. When it finally released those scenes, it was via home media, not the normal venue for its Doctor Who stories. And it made no effort to finish those scenes. Sure, Tom Baker provided context-through-narration, but the serial never went back into production and the scenes were presented as unfinished.

That's what a deleted scene is. That's entirely your own opinion — there's little more then conjecture to support that this limited idea is enough to qualify the entire story as a deleted scene, particularly when the Beeb has gone out of its way to fit it into continuity again. If the narrative gaps are filled, then the narrative is complete.

No. There is a difference between re-filling the narrative gaps say of missing stories like The Invasion, Reign of Terror, The Tenth Planet, The Ice Warriors which have all at times been released as missing stories with narration and animation. And the release of Shada which has Tom Baker filling in the narrative in the first person a style the blurrs the line between narration and performance and is something that was not in the scripts.

The novelisation of the Tom Baker version and the interviews concerning it are quite clear in that it's based on the original scripts (and not the one with the VHS).

DWM 486 has a rather good feature on "Doctor Who on Home Video" in which Shada is mentioned on pages 51-52. Here's a couple of excerpts from the article:
 * "Shada was different. It was the only Doctor Who story to have been partially shot, but never completed or transmitted"
 * "The unfinished footage had remained in the BBC archives, unbroadcast, ever since"
 * "in November 1985...The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Dick Mills was hired to complete 'special sounds' that he'd been contracted for back in 1979 and actor David Brierly returned to voice the character of K9 from a sound studio in Soho...new music came from Keff McCulloch"
 * "'I don't recall any protracted negotiations. (regarding Shada and Douglas Adams)...But with the Shada thing, because it had never gone out, I think it was fairly straight forward negotiation with the (Douglas') agent, just to get the rights to release it.'" - David Jackson (in charge of BBC Video at that time)

There's suggestion that they and JNT finished it enough to release it on VHS, there was even talk of (during the 80s hiatus) of shooting linking scenes with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant on the TARDIS set. But it's very much a sense of them cobbling Shada together over several years in order to release something. It's hardly the what the original TV story might have been, nor does what eventually was released follow the scripts (unlike recent DVD releases I mentioned above do).