40 years later, Tom Baker returns to Doctor Who for some unfinished business

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Submitted by Mike 'Ace' Maillaro on Tue, 09/26/2017 - 08:16

From The Sun:

Tom Baker, 83, completed a story that had to be abandoned 38 years ago.

He recorded final scenes for Shada, written by Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy creator Douglas Adams. It was meant to be a six-episode tale for Tom’s fourth incarnation of the Doctor in 1979-80.

But production was wrecked by a BBC technicians’ strike and only half was filmed before it was shelved.

Tom and other members of the original cast — including Lalla Ward, 66, as companion Romana — returned for the recording in Uxbridge, West London.

Only their voices will be used alongside animated sequences to replace the unfilmed material.

But that didn’t stop Tom dressing the part. An insider said: “He wore his original costume, including coat, hat and scarf — and the original K9 was here.”

Source: The Sun

Commentary: My favorite part of this story (if it's true), is that Tom Baker got back into character by wearing his legendary hat and scarf. For a long time, Tom Baker had seperated himself from Doctor Who. Hard to blame him, he had done the role longer than anyone, and deserved to be able to get away from it. But in recent years, he's been doing some of the Doctor Who radio plays and even made an extremely memorable appearance in the 50th Anniversary episode.

SHADA has a pretty interesting story. Written by Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame, it has become an important "lost" part of the Doctor Who story. As mentioned above, they had filmed the first few episodes (it was intended as the last serial of Season 17), but a production strike meant they never finished it. Way back in 2003, they had released SHADA as a radio play, with Paul McGann stepping in to play the Doctor. And in 2012, they released it as a novelization.

Typically when they do animations to replace missing episode of DOCTOR WHO, they just use the original soundtracks which remain intact. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time they have done a new recording, so it was really cool that they managed to get Tom Baker and Lalla Ward to come in to do it.