STORY: Captain Lisa Duranne is a spacer just trying to make a living. Hired on by consortium of wealth dilettantes to pilot a spaceship through a solar sail race, she and her passengers, are suddenly boarded by a Sontaran battlecruiser. The Sontarans are searching for a Rutan spy who may have boarded the ship. The Sontarans promise to depart, once they’ve found their spy, but secretly, they intend to leave no one alive. Meanwhile, the Rutan is simply intent on killing anyone in its path, Sontaran and Human. Who will survive?

REVIEW: Let’s back it up a bit. Back in 1983, a fellow named Gary Levy, or Gary Leigh, started publishing his own fanzine. Doctor Who Bulletin. It got popular over the years. For one thing, it was always willing to take the piss on John Nathan Turner, the Showrunner of Doctor Who during those years. It was able to scoop the official sources. It provided an alternative, and at times, angry and controversial alternative to the establishment publications: Doctor Who Magazine as well as the zine of the Official Doctor Who club.

Come 1989, they hit a snag. Doctor Who was over. It didn’t make a lot of sense to keep publishing Doctor Who Bulletin when the show was cancelled. But by that time, the magazine had a dedicated readership. Gary decided to keep the initials and rename it DreamWatch Bulletin. They broadened out into covering all sorts of science fiction, British and American. Again, my ex has a few copies.

I suppose that the end of the show produced a vaccuum in the establishment publications. Doctor Who Magazine fell on hard times given that the show was no longer produced. The Doctor Who Appreciation Society didn’t have much to do. So strategically, it was one of those situations where you grow or you wither, there’s no standing still. Dreamwatch grew, keeping its audience, encroaching on the now bereft readerships of former rivals, and expanding its mandate. Readership kept on going up. In 1994, they went to full newsstand distribution. This seems to have been their high water mark.

Around this time, Dreamwatch was sponsoring or organizing its own science fiction conventions. The conventions were a major step up – a major financial venture, organizing large staffs, hotels, guests, wrangling hundred or thousands of people.

It was also at this time, 1993 or 1994, and through its convention, that they decided to get into actually producing their own Doctor Who adventure, or as close as they could legally come….

… The Sontarans would be just one way of drawing the fans to Shakedown, as the project was christened. The script would be by veteran Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks and the production could also use ‘name’ actors when casting its several human characters. Because these were new roles, actor availability was no longer a problem – if one former Doctor Who star could not make the proposed shooting dates, they could go to another….  (Simon Guerrer’s blog)

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

Simon Werriere’s Blog (it’s a very good blog) (this is a plug)

http://0tralala.blogspot.ca/

http://0tralala.blogspot.ca/2013/11/doctor-who-1994.html

Doctor Who Guide

http://www.drwhoguide.com/shakedown.htm

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakedown:_Return_of_the_Sontarans

IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111148/

HMS Belfast (why not?)

http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/hms-belfast

Reviews

http://www.michaell.org/who/shakedown.html

https://dailypop.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/shakedown-return-of-the-sontarans/

http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv44/rev-shakedown.html

WATCH IT HERE: