I've always been a fan of Douglas Adams' work, and Shada is also one of those Holy Grails, the one that got away. It's one that the BBC never managed to finish. We had it released on video, but I think the problems with the video production was that if you looked at another work of Douglas Adams, say City Of Death, and you [only] had the location film and a couple of studio scenes, you wouldn't think that was any good either.

I think the stuff that survived from Shada, being mostly location and so forth, didn't give a real impression of how good a script this is. Although Tom Baker doing the links was a good thing, it didn't really make up the difference. So the opportunity to do Shada was always something in the back of my mind. Since day one to be honest with you, since the first day we had the licence, I thought it would be nice to do it at some point.

When BBCi came on board and we had the BBC support I thought 'Well it could be more realistic now.' We did Real Time which was a tester for us and then I suggested we do Shada, because it was the number one choice for me to do straight after Real Time. Fortunately BBCi agreed that it would be a very good project, and then I went off and spoke to Douglas Adams' estate for 10 months and subsequent to that, here we are.