AT last, the Holy Grail of the Doctor Who canon has appeared on DVD.

This is one of the most famous TV adventures of the whole history of the show – and most of us have never seen it!

This three-disc box set commemorates the one story that was never completed or broadcast on TV – Shada.

Originally scheduled to be the final story of the seventeenth season in January 1980, the show suffered at the hands of the Trade Unions.

Location filming around Cambridge had been completed, as well as the first of three blocks of studio filming when a strike at the BBC interrupted production.

Eventually, the whole production was cancelled and Shada – the story of a criminal (Skagra) using technology to drain the minds of the population – was never shown.

However, the BBC, in their infinite wisdom, released a version of the adventure, starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Lalla Ward as Romana, on VHS with Tom Baker returning to bridge the gaps in the story with on-screen narrative.

Big Finish Productions also produced a version of the show online but starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor in the animated adventure.

These two versions of the Douglas Adams-penned story, make up the first of the discs.

The other two discs contain an treasure-trove of extras including a Making Of, a look at how the locations have changed in the years since and the documentary Thirty Years in the Tardis.

There are also short documentaries about the strikes, an interview with Peter Purves, and the role of women in the series.

Also, there is a lovely tribute to the late Nicholas Courtney.

It is particularly fitting that 2012 should see the release of Shada on DVD as just a few months ago we also had a novelised version.

BBCDVD3388.