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Jason Haigh-Ellery - Big Finish's big cheese

Remembering Douglas Adams
  What memories do you have of Douglas Adams?

I think this is probably my favourite memory so far of Douglas Adams. I've always been a fan of his work, bought all the books, listened to the radio series, watched the television series of Hitchhiker's Guide, but my favourite memory of Douglas Adams' work has to be the day before yesterday when we were doing the read-through.

Having read the script previously it's good on the page and it comes across, but when you actually hear actors speaking his words for the first time and making something of it, especially the actors we've got here who are of such a high calibre, it brings it all alive and you see the sideways logic.

He had an interesting sideways logic to how he did things and that comes across when an actor is given the opportunity to perform his work.

Odd books
  What is the most bizarre book you have ever read?

It's a book on First World War prisoners of war. I found it in the library years ago when I was a student, and I hadn't really thought about First World War prisoners and what they had to endure because it was before the Geneva Convention. It was before the Red Cross even, I believe, and the conditions they lived in and the way they were treated was pretty appalling.

Kak kiddie clobber
  What was your most regrettable lapse of fashion in the 1970s?

Well, I was eleven at the time so you can imagine what I was wearing. I think I was wearing cords, probably with a slight amount of bell bottom, very dodgy trainers, which kids today would rather stab themselves or cut their legs off than wear, probably a flowery shirt because my mum was always into flowery shirts in those days and I had a very terrible bowl hair cut, so I probably looked appalling.

Then again I've got to say that everybody else in my class at the time would have looked the same so it's all in context.

Saving Shada
  Where did the idea to do Shada come from?

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.

The Adams family
  What was the estate's reaction to the suggestion?

Douglas was never a prolific author of any sorts. Most of his work was actually done between 1976 - 77 and 1982, if you think about it. He wrote a number of books obviously and also a number of scripts, but he only wrote three Doctor Who scripts and two series of Hitchhiker's on radio. There isn't that much there, and most of it has already been sold in terms of rights to Walt Disney. Dirk Gently for example has been sold to Walt Disney, so none of the rights are available for that.

When I went to them about Shada, although they were aware of it they were a little bit concerned about letting something go which Douglas had written, because there's so little left which hasn't been optioned. At the end of the day the agent is there to look after the interests of Douglas's widow and his daughter. So it was an interesting bit of negotiation but they could see that we really wanted to do it and they trusted us to do it well and so we came to an agreement.

Doctor which?
  Can you tell us a bit about the reasoning behind the choice of Doctor for this particular project?

Well obviously we did offer it to Tom first, but Tom and Tom's agent and I have been in discussion over a number of years about him coming and doing work with us. We haven't got to that point yet where he wants to work with us on our projects. Who knows, in the future he may well do, but he declined to take part in Shada.

Once he had done that we had to find another Doctor, and the obvious Doctor to go for was McGann, because it was a new story for a new Doctor, effectively. It also wouldn't muck up any continuity with any of the other Doctors and it made it easy for us to drop Lalla Ward's character as Romana in. We slightly changed things so that she's no longer that Romana, she's now the High President of Gallifrey Romana.

Collecting the cast
  Apart from the regulars, you've got a stellar cast. What was their reaction when you approached them?

We hit them with a double barrel I must admit. We hit them both with Douglas Adams and Doctor Who. Between the two of those aspects we managed to get the cast we've got.

I think in the case of James Fox for example, he was just intrigued by the character. We faxed over some of the pages for him to have a look at and he liked the idea of playing Cronotis. He could see why we'd gone for him and when people listen to and watch Shada I think they'll say, 'He is Cronotis, brilliant casting'.

In the case of Susannah Harker, she's a Doctor Who fan. We were discussing this the other night actually. She said when she was growing up all she ever wanted to be was Doctor Who's companion, so she just said yes within five minutes of her agent getting the call. With Sean Biggerstaff, he's a huge huge Douglas Adams fan, and therefore to take part in something which Douglas had written was a dream come true for him. So that was five minutes as well.

Then John Leeson was arguably the best K9 of the two, and we wanted him to do it and he was delighted to do it. Lalla Ward loves coming back and working with Big Finish, we have a great relationship, and she has a very good relationship with Paul McGann as well. And of course, Paul very flatteringly recently has said he really enjoys doing these with us, because a lot of what Paul does is film work, where you go on set and if you get thirty seconds to a minute done in a day you're doing very well.

Here it's an opportunity for him to have a run at acting. He gets the sheet in front of him, he goes for it and he gets to see the results at the end of the day, which is fantastic for him.

And then we've got Andrew Sachs who is a consummate voice artist and was very very enthusiastic about doing something which was connected with Doctor Who which he'd never done before. We had a few problems with Hannah Gordon because she had other commitments but we desperately wanted her, so she only ended up coming in for about three hours. It would have been lovely to have her around for longer, but she was just delighted to do it, because she always wanted to do Doctor Who.

Heavenly Hannah
  In the short time that she was here Hannah Gordon won the hearts of everybody. Would you like your computer to sound like Hannah Gordon?

Yes, definitely, yes. Paul actually went on record as saying, "I want to marry her." I don't think he meant Hannah Gordon, I think he meant the computer. She has such a lovely honey voice and it just trickled out of the speakers, gorgeous, fantastic. She's such a lovely woman as well, everyone got on with her so quickly.