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Nick Pegg - The Director of Shada

Keeping up with the Adamses
  What's your favourite memory of Douglas Adams?

I was given the first book of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy as a birthday present. I didn't know what it was, I hadn't heard the radio series, and I read it in about two hours which was probably the fastest I'd ever read a book because from the first page I just couldn't stop and I loved it, it was absolutely wonderful. It was given to me by an uncle of mine and I'm eternally grateful to him for introducing me to the whole thing.

I never actually saw Douglas Adams in action at a convention or anything like that - but I've seen a tape of him telling an anecdote at some convention or other about how he and Ken Grieve, the television director, had been to Paris to film City of Death and decided to go off for a little drink afterwards and it turned into the most incredible anecdote of bacchanalian excess which involved catching aeroplanes to get to another pub that was still open and things like that.

Not only was he a great story teller on the page but he was a fabulous raconteur and wit in person as well and that's something I remember very, very fondly.

Odd books
  What would you say was the oddest book you've ever read?

That's quite a hard one. I'll tell you about a very odd book that I read when I was a child and it's stuck with me. There's a book called The Search For Delicious. I think the author's name is Natalie Babbitt, an American children's author. It's about a boy who sets off through a magical kingdom to find the definition of the word delicious, because the Lord Chamberlain is making a dictionary with the definition of every word and the whole court has a huge rumpus, an argument, about what is the most delicious thing.

So he goes through the whole kingdom doing a survey, asking everybody what's the most delicious thing. I must go and find that now and read it again.

Back in the day
  What were you doing around the time of the original Shada?

I was in my first year at secondary school, so I must have been about eleven. I'll tell you an interesting thing actually.

Someone who was in my class at school came up to me knowing that I was even then a bit of a Doctor Who fan, and said 'What's the Doctor Who story that's being filmed in Cambridge?' because his older brother was at Cambridge University. I didn't know anything about it at the time because this was obviously something that was still in the works, but he said, 'Oh yes, there's a scene where Doctor Who goes along on a bicycle because my brother was watching out of the top window." So I was waiting for this to come up on TV and it never did. So I did hear about Shada quite early on, I suppose.

Directing the Doctors
  Are there different ways of working with different Doctors?

Inevitably you work with different actors in different ways, because each actor is a unique personality. How would you sum them all up? They're all so different.

Colin Baker is a very, very professional and very caring actor who thinks very hard about his part, and of course is actually quite a Doctor Who fan. He really knows his Doctor Who mythology inside out and it's great working with Colin. Peter, again a consummate professional, a very quick actor. He goes straight in and he's quite often a one take wonder.

Sylvester, how do you sum up Sylvester? He's fabulous, he's bonkers and it's glorious. [He has] a very strong individual characterisation of the Doctor, and it was fabulous fun working with him on Bang Bang A Boom just recently, absolutely wonderful.

And now Paul, who is a terrific actor in every respect. He's very easy going, very easy to work with, listens very carefully in the studio when we're talking through a scene and deciding what to do with it. He's full of ideas and he'll come up with all sorts of brilliant contributions and is a marvelous actor to work with. I just feel so lucky to be working with people like this.

Nostalgia or newness
  Are you treating Shada as a bit of a nostalgia fest or are you making it a very modern Eighth Doctor story?

That's a very good question, and an interesting thing about the casting of this, for example.

When we first started thinking about this project and I was first asked to come on board, one of the things that we talked about of course was how we were going to cast this. Were we going to try and reassemble as much of the original cast or were we going to go for a completely clean slate?

Having thought about the merits of both, we decided on the latter for a number of reasons. Obviously everyone who was in the original cast is a bit older now, and some of them are supposed to be playing students. A couple of people from the original cast sadly are no longer with us so obviously we wouldn't have been able to have them, so rather than have a sort of a half-baked reunion party that might have been a bit funny in some ways, we thought "No let's just go for a clean sweep and re-cast from scratch."

So in that respect it's not a nostalgia fest, but in other respects it harks back. It is the original script that we're using, slightly adapted by Garry Russell to fit the audio format and to fit Paul's Doctor and his Doctor's relationship with Romana, but these are only very slight tweaks. For the main part it is substantially the original Douglas Adams script, and it is set in 1979 so in that respect we are doing it very faithfully to the original intentions of the script.

Style in the studio
  How would you describe your directorial style?

I think one of the director's most important jobs after casting itself is to trust the actors. As long as you cast the right actors in the first place, and on this occasion I really think we have, once you've got them there, [you should] trust them and listen to them and take on board their ideas and let them have their input. [That] is the most important thing for a director to do. The director isn't, in my opinion, someone who stands there and says 'Do it like this, do it like that, read this line exactly like this.' It's not like that at all.

Of course, there are times when it's your job to filter the ideas and decide what's a good idea and what's perhaps not such a good idea, but it's more a case of steering the ship along than of cracking the whip and telling everyone exactly what to do. You're more like a focal point to the whole thing,

Once you've got those actors together and cast them in the right parts, from then on to actually co-operate and trust and work on an equal basis with the actors, that's what I'd say a good director does.