Neil Gaiman's Journal

Lots of people have written to let me know that according to BBC NEWS | Entertainment the lost episode of Dr Who, SHADA, by Douglas Adams, will finally be made. Although, as this link makes clear, it's a webcast -- an audio recording of the script with limited animations, which isn't quite the same thing as them going in and actually making it, which would have been genuinely exciting. On the other hand, Douglas works better on radio. On the other other hand, I wonder if they saw the original Shada scripts, which I seem to remember were talkier than the shooting script... (Although it's many years since I read the scripts to SHADA. I remember noticing that Douglas had reused a lot of the plot in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.)

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Casting today for the film. Casting done on camera, which was good, although looking at the tapes of the auditions afterwards there was only one performance which was, on camera, different to what we saw in the room, and one other that had been sort of solid that got sort of bland.

It was truly fascinating, and at the end of the day it was mostly a matter of choosing between excellent people who did it one way and excellent people who did it another, which is so much to be preferred to staring gloomily at SPOTLIGHT and saying to a casting agent "Well, there must be someone else who could play it...?"

In the end the only part I couldn't make up my mind about is that of the actor playing John Bolton himself, so we'll have the two leading candidates come back on Monday to read the part with the actor who will be playing the interviewer, and I'll choose after that.