Writer Simon Clark Recalls Stalled Shalka Sequel

Richard Forbes is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Simon Clark, horror novelist, still remembers the missing episodes of classic Doctor Who, musing they must be “emblazoned on [his] neurons.” It’s tragically ironic then, as fate would have it, Clark was the writer of three Doctor Who episodes which may be lost forever – never to be seen, never finished.

After his work with Telos Publishing that had drew the attention of the BBC, Clark was commissioned to write Blood Of The Robot, a six-part story to follow Paul Cornell’s Scream Of The Shalka (2003) – but sadly after the announcement of the TV show’s revival in July 2003, Clark received a gut-retching phone conversation: Blood Of The Robot was cancelled.

Clark describes the lost, unfinished story as a “blend of adventure, drama and humour.”

“The Doctor arrives to find a world full of intelligent, sensitive robots that have been abandoned by their human owners, who are too squeamish to ‘kill’ them when they’re obsolete,” explains Clark. “Now ruthless salvage squads are hunting the robots in order to make room for human settlers forced to migrate from their dangerously over-crowded home planet.”

Especially important to the ill-fated sequel would be its groundbreaking use of horror, Clark recalls – describing a story full of shocks and thrills.

“I’d planned shocks for the viewer, too,” he laments, “as it struck me that, back then, people watching a drama on a computer would mean they were sitting much closer to the screen than a TV, so there could be exciting ways of creating a much more intense impact.”

If the project was ever revived, Clark says an extensive storyline and three of its six planned episodes had been written (he had been writing the fourth episode when the damning call came) and it’d simply be a matter of “blowing away an accumulation of interstellar dust” and getting back to work with where he had left off.

You can learn more about Scream of the Shalka in our exclusive interview with Paul Cornell.

The post Writer Simon Clark Recalls Stalled Shalka Sequel appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.