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As part of Goss’ research, he also came across not only a first draft of Life much closer to the Dr Who film script than the published second version of Life, but also the script for what would have been the first episode of a second BBC TV series of Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (whose existence was first confirmed in Jem Roberts’ definitive Adams biography The Frood), which begins with Ford and Arthur meeting the Krikkitmen. But, just as we know that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a very different story from the two Doctor Who serials it drew from freely, so Life, The Universe and Everything is more of a starting point than finishing one for The Krikkitmen.
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It wasn’t just a set of ideas – it was a full roadmap, complete with backseat driver.”Īdams worked on this film treatment for four more years alongside other commitments before it fell by the wayside, with parts of it cannibalised into Life, The Universe and Everything. It all began in 1976, when Douglas Adams visited the BBC to discuss not only the story that became The Pirate Planet but also a Doctor Who movie, which exists in the archives as (in Goss’ words) “33 closely typed A4 pages, going into a great deal of detail and including a large amount of dialogue. The book’s expansive set of appendices make abundantly clear that the story of “Whatever happened to Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen?” is a lot more convoluted than that, leading Goss quite the breadcrumb trail to follow. But that’s not to say it’s a case of “And now for something entirely familiar”… As such, since this title’s announcement late in 2017, there’s been scepticism in some quarters that adapting Adams’ Krikkit story into a lost Doctor Who adventure would amount to little more than doing a ‘find and replace’ on ‘Slartibartfast’ with ‘The Doctor’ – an uncharitable but somewhat understandable reservation. But is it an “Owzat!” or “rain stopped play”? Let’s start by taking a look under the bonnet…ĭoctor Who and the Krikkitmen by James Goss is a ‘lost’ Douglas Adams ‘Who’ yarn whose loose outline will be recognisable to anyone familiar with Life, The Universe and Everything, the third Hitchhikers book. James Goss stepped up to the plate with novelisations of both City Of Death and The Pirate Planet, taking a ‘director’s cut’ approach by incorporating elements from shooting scripts, earlier drafts and secondary material to make the experience more than a late-period Terrance Dicks ‘novelisation-o-matic’, and with Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen, Goss takes up the bat a third time. Gareth Roberts’ Shada was so well received upon publication, and the Adams-shaped gap in the original Target novels range such a fan completist-troubling one, that it was inevitable that BBC Books would amend this. Ironically, the most famous ‘lost’ story, Douglas Adams’ Shada, now exists in almost as many incarnations as the Time Lord zirself – most recently a full-blown Blu-Ray release, and a few years earlier, a BBC Books novelisation, which is where Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen comes in.
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The Masters of Luxor, The Nightmare Fair, The Prison In Space – to ones that only reached the ‘scribbled on the back of a fag packet’ stage, worked up into full audio dramas with the input of seasoned Big Finish scriptwriters.
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How do you define a ‘lost’ Doctor Who adventure? Big Finish Productions’ Lost Stories range took the concept quite elastically, with audio dramatisations of everything from fully scripted serials abandoned in utero – e.g. ❉ James Goss steps up to the plate once again.