INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

MURRAY GOLD AND THE DOCTOR WHO PROM, 2010

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:24:39 +0100

...the bricks echo with the overtones of the myriad musical talents who have passed these corridors, the magnificent sounds they have produced echoing in perpetuity from every stone...

What? Er... it's not what you think. Although I am in the company of the London Philharmonic Choir – unforgettably described by Murray Gold as “a 100-headed, 200-eyed, 2000-toed harmony machine” - I've not actually made it as far as the Royal Albert Hall. I'm instead wandering the BBC's facilities at Maida Vale, site of classical concerts and rehearsals... and which used to be the home of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which provided sound effects and occasional bits of music for Doctor Who for the whole of its original run. DWM spends a few moments romantically wondering if Malcolm Clarke might ever have used those headphones or if Peter Howell might once have touched that XLR cable... but conductor Ben Foster's first words, addressed to the room as a whole, bring me unequivocally back to 2010. "Let's start with Amy," he suggests.

DWM last saw Ben on stage at the O2 Arena a few months back, conducting the orchestra for Peter Gabriel's most recent tour. “I've also been doing a lot of conducting for film soundtracks,” Ben tells me. “Just finished Burke and Hare with Joby Talbot. I'm knackered! But this is Doctor Who, you know. I don't really think of it as a job or an income, I think of it as a position - as a great responsibility.”

Seeing these proceedings start with Amy reminds DWM that the music for Series, er, Fnarg (can we just say Five yet?) seemed to be pretty much entirely new, managing not to draw extensively on the library of cues Murray has composed for previous series. “To be honest,” Steven Moffat reveals, “Murray dived into this series and made it all new. He seems to relish making it difficult for himself. The first thing I heard was the Eleventh Doctor's theme, which I think is the most exciting music in the world. But every series thus far has had a whole bunch of new material. Often you work with music for a TV show and you're thinking, 'Are we really using that cue again? Seriously, again? It's quite good, but I've heard it fourteen times this episode already' - but not with Murray, it's different every time...”

Steven's programme notes for this Prom make clear his pleasure at still having Murray Gold on board for the most recent series – in fact, when DWM last spoke to Murray around the time of the preceding Prom show, he was non-commital about whether he'd be staying on past the 'RTD era' himself. What happened to make his mind up? “I saw the new Doctor being unveiled on TV,” Murray reflects, “and he wasn't anyone famous, which I thought that was cool, and he looked cool and weird. And I just got along with Piers - I liked them both, Piers and Beth. Plus of course, there was a sheer curiosity about what Steven was going to do with this show... and a sense of, wouldn't I want to find out from being in the job, rather than watching it on telly? So I just realised how up for it I was, really. And there was talk, at one stage, of reducing the amount of music per episode... although, ultimately, that didn't happen. So it is mostly new music, and nearly nine hours of it. Definitely the most intensive period was November to January, when I was simultaneously working on David's last few episodes and also starting to work on The Eleventh Hour; the crossover meant that Series 5 kind of became thirteen episodes, two of which were extended, plus the additional joy of two huge Christmas specials. It was a large load...”

“When Murray and I discussed this year's Prom,” Ben reveals, “we were initially thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to play Doomsday?', and so on. But I think it's better to give the new stuff a whirl. So apart from the theme - which has been re-worked into the new series version - the only thing we've really re-used from the previous show is Song of Freedom, and that's been re-worked too; pretty much the same arrangement, but we've added Mark's countertenor solo at the beginning.”

“I don't even count Song of Freedom as old,” insists Murray, “it's more just like the goodbye song of the Von Trapps... 'So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye, hope you enjoyed our Doctor Who show'! I did crowbar This is Gallifrey in there, but it's mostly Series 5 stuff, which I think has all brushed up pretty well. I did have to be persuaded a bit, though. Ben was more up for doing all-new stuff than I was!”

“Of course you want to make sure that people feel they've heard the tunes they expected to hear,” reveals brand manager Edward Russell. “But as the series evolved - and you have to bear in mind that we were working on this prom show as the episodes were being made and going out - we realised that this year's music was so strong, and gained confidence that we'd be able to put on a concert that consisted mainly of Series 5 music. But I don't think it was until that first rehearsal that everyone realised we'd got it spot on. That fantastic I Am The Doctor theme, which recurs throughout the series, is phenomenal... it's at the heart of the entire series and it holds the entire concert together.”

It's now two years since the last Doctor Who Prom. Who decided it was time to do another one? “It really doesn't originate with me at all,” Steven Moffat confesses. “It's all down to a bunch of other, very, very clever people. Edward is involved, and Piers and Beth did a huge amount of work on it too, along with a lot of other people.”

“The Prom in 2008 was such a huge success we knew we wanted to do a follow-up show,” says Edward. “But in the world of Doctor Who every thing has to be bigger and better and bolder! So I don't think we could have come up with the right ingredients last year - we knew we had a new Doctor coming along, and a new production team to an extent... we knew that Murray would be on board, but also that he was going to come up with new ideas for the new series, and it seemed to be worth waiting that extra year.” And is 'bigger and better and bolder' the reason why this year there are two shows – Saturday evening and Sunday lunchtime - rather than just one? “Frankly, I think if it was up to us, we'd do five! Because so much work goes into making this one show, it's a shame that it is only one show. That first year we'd taken over what was traditionally the Blue Peter Children's Prom, for which we were allocated the single slot. This year, because that had been such a success, we got a second one!”

--

A child's swing teeters desolately in a fictional breeze, toy windmills fluttering alongside it. You could be right in the middle of The Eleventh Hour itself, were it not for the huge organ and the statue of Henry Wood – the British conductor forever associated with these Prom concerts – immediately in one's eyeline behind it all. And, you know, DWM could swear Henry seems to be wearing a fez...

“I haven't got a click in my ear!” hollers vocalist Yamit Mamo, and the orchestra parps to a halt, barely a bar into the first run through the first piece, The Mad Man with a Box. This is fine – we're only at the Saturday afternoon dress rehearsal, and this is, of course, exactly the sort of gremlin dress rehearsals are there to hunt down and destroy. Sorting out this one seems to involve Yamit inviting various people to inspect her bum – one is forced, in the absence of other evidence, to hope that there's supposed to be a wire attached somewhere down there – and a bloke standing next to her precariously dangling a MacBook laptop, but after the requisite amount of giggling, order is restored. 'Giggling' seems to be a theme of this rehearsal, in fact, which is nice – it might just be a release of nervous energy, but it's amusing to witness nevertheless. Giggler-in-chief being the first person up on stage to address the crowd, Mistress-of-Ceremonies (er... is that even a phrase?) Karen Gillan...

The remainder of the first half passes without major incident – a few notes are obviously made concerning a few easily-corrected glitches, an ARP warden scripted to interrupt Karen is maybe a second or two late on his cue... oh, and then a Dalek – camouflaged ironside model - ascends from the pit in the middle of the auditorium. To be met by one of the new colour models, smoothly gliding onto the stage. Confrontation! But only one of them seems to be speaking audibly. Dalek Strepsil required? Stirring music from Victory of the Daleks provides the climax to the show's first half, and Dalek voice Nick Briggs explains that someone had been fiddling with a mixer when they shouldn't have, channels and levels are checked, lines are run through again, all is well again.

Act Two, and the orchestra launches into Carl Orff's O Fortuna – which uneducated souls of a similar vintage to me will crassly know mainly as the music from an Old Spice aftershave advert. And then, when Karen re-enters the stage to announce the next item, we seem to be invaded by a message from elsewhere... is it? It is: it's the Doctor, up there on the big screen! But advanced rumour had suggested Matt Smith was properly here! In the building and everything! And actually, now that I come to think if it, I could have sworn I saw him draw up outside in a taxi a couple of hours ago...

...but caps doffed to Steven Moffat, for this moment of the show is very cute indeed: at the last Prom, David Tennant was unable to attend and performed in a special video piece instead. This time out, there's a little tease that much the same will be happening again – thus Matt receives an ear-piercing round of applause when he first appears on-screen, only to get another one that's positively bowel-shattering a minute or two later when he appears for real. Matt's approach seems to change a bit between the dress rehearsal and the later, Sunday morning, show proper. Many people, including Matt himself, have commented on him finding the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, a strong influence. I wonder if Matt has a similarly loose approach to interpretation of the text as the famously 'Near Enough!' Troughton? “Actually, he's quite precise, Matt,” Steven Moffat corrects me. “He'll do several takes, of course, and he might do one where he messes about with it, but he's incredibly precise on lines - he won't change a word. But this Prom performance has to be a bit flexible - I told him: 'You'll be acting with a kid, so you'll have to follow whatever the kid does. And work the crowd!'. And working the crowd is kind of easy when they all unreservedly love you anyway! So there are a few carefully judged comedy moments which get a little bit lost because the crowd are all just screaming 'Aaaaargh! It's you!!!!'... which is fine, of course!”

The Doctor's departure is the cue for the first stage entrance of Arthur Darvill – Rory Williams himself, to introduce Amy, followed by Karen's introduction to the medley suite Liz, Lizards, Vampires and Vincent. This piece raises an interesting question – given that all of these cues already exist in the form used on the TV show, to what extent can those arrangements and orchestrations be re-used? “A lot of what I did on the series itself can be re-used for this show, yes,” Ben points out, “but an awful lot of re-arranging also has to be done. A lot of cues we originally did with a smaller group and those have to be expanded for the symphony orchestra. And then of course you have to stick together all the little bits, if you have a number of shorter cues. And of course, all the 'rock band' elements have to be added, as for the series those are all done by Murray synthetically in his studio after the orchestral sessions. You also might want to change things slightly - if you've got a three-minute cue for TV, you might have given it everything first time round - but if, for this Prom show, those three minutes come in the middle of a ten-minute suite, you might tone it down so you don't get a massive climax halfway through. It's a balancing act to create a whole 'piece', rather than just some cues stitched together.”

This is Gallifrey accompanies video footage of all of the Doctor's regenerations. This is a sweet notion: not only does it facilitate the ongoing 'education' of the younger viewers in the ways of the TV show, but it allows the older fans both a nostalgic frisson and a bit of a chuckle at how things have changed in recent years. I can't believe that anyone in the history of Doctor Who production teams can ever have thought, when they were putting together the likes of Planet of the Spiders or Time and the Rani, that one day this stuff would be projected on giant screens all around the Royal Albert Hall. Shame that at the Sunday show this doesn't apply - for that performance, due to a glitch somewhere, the video feed doesn't kick in until the first appearance of Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston. Shame – but nice that Matt Smith, quite rightly, gets the biggest cheer of the day again.

There are actually a lot of details in pieces such as the following Vale Decem – the Tenth Doctor's farewell music - which only really leap out at the listener in this sort of environment. After all, on TV, there's often quite a lot else going on, what with TARDISes exploding all around you and so on. “A lot of the work that we do, it's very heavily orchestrated,” Ben Foster agrees, “and on TV you don't hear all the detail - but you need the detail there. It's like with John Williams' scores, if you listen to some of his Indiana Jones music in isolation, you hear all these florid passages, string runs... you don't hear that detail when you watch the movie, but you can feel it's there. It's a bubbling excitement, and it takes a lot of energy to score, but it's worth it. And when you hear it live, you appreciate that.”

Matt stalks the stage as himself for the first time - following Vale Decem which has just functioned for the second time, essentially, as his 'entrance music' - to introduce The Pandorica Suite, from the finale of the 2010 Series. The ensuing climax – The Pandorica Suite, Song of Freedom and Ron Grainer's Doctor Who theme, in its most recent Murray arrangement – brings things to a resounding close without further glitch, and barring a few concerned questions from both Ben and Murray about the sound balance on some of the video clips potentially overpowering the music, all looks good for – gulp! - two shows in the next 24 hours....

The finished show had the same heartening warmth and energy as the 2008 Prom, with a few added frissons. Is it evil to grin approval at the sight of a 5 or 6 year old bow-tied mini-Doctor being quietly and temporarily removed from the stalls, finding the immediate physical presence of the Daleks just that bit too scary? Heh heh. Oh, don't judge. DWM vaguely remembers being terrified by giant Wombles at about the same age. What goes around...

On the way out of the stalls after the Sunday lunchtime show, Steven Moffat is essentially being mobbed by screaming children, which one can't help but imagine is a first for him. Is Steven proud of his little Prom show? “Frankly, my only contribution was to write that little piece for the Doctor. That was it. I've turned up to the show and spent all last night and this morning being congratulated. I really didn't do very much!”. It almost seems wasteful for all this effort to be expended on just two shows, especially given the number of people desperate to attend. Maybe this could run and run...? “As I said,” points out Edward, “because the 2008 Prom had been such a success, we got a second slot. I only hope that if we do it a third time, we get a third slot!”

Ben Foster is mobbed by autograph hunters after the second performance, and looks a little overcome by it. “When you turn up to something like today,” he muses as he winds down later, “and you have people so enthusiastic about it, you have to think: this is a privilege. It's not a job, it's a real privilege, to be part of Doctor Who - the same thing that enchanted me when I was 9, 10, 11 - it's the same for these kids today. To be part of that is great, it's really special, and I don't take it for granted. You don't realise, until you get to a point like today, quite how much of a body of music you've produced. And I hope it continues. We should do it again tomorrow!”

“I Am The Doctor!”

As Edward Russell points out, the new theme devised by Murray for the Eleventh Doctor is right at the heart of this Prom concert – not only does it have a programme slot to itself, but elements of it seem to infuse into other pieces such as The Mad Man With The Box and An Untimely Arrival, from The Eleventh Hour. It's noticeable because the piece, and related motifs, are in whole or in part in 7/4 or 7/8 time – in lay terms, basically, each bar is 7 regular beats long. This is mildly unusual. “That time signature just seemed to fit that melody, really,” Murray tells me. “It's not an ungainly or awkward 7/4, which 7/4 can sometimes be...”. DWM was wondering if there was a philosophical reasoning behind it. Murray looks at DWM quizzically. Well, anyone who's read Steven's Production Notes column over the last year or so knows all about Matt's perhaps exaggerated reputation for clumsiness. Might there have been some thought given there to devising a piece of music that has an off-kilter, potentially clumsy rhythm, but which somehow as a whole works beautifully despite... DWM trails off under Murray's incredulous gaze. DWM is possibly thinking too much.

Also Appearing...

Just as happened at the 2008 Prom show, there are a few 'popular classics' dotted throughout the programme, partly to fulfil the show's 'educational' brief. Unlike the 2008 show, though, there has been no new piece commissioned – instead, a modern classical piece by American composer John Adams is to be performed. A friend of DWM's in attendance is almost as excited by this as by the Doctor Who music to be performed – and even more enthused when informed of the identity of the conductor of the other pieces, Grant Llewellyn. Apparently he's very famous and respected, to those who know their stuff. The impressive, relentless and heavily rhythmic Short Ride in a Fast Machine forms an intriguing contrast with the other, very melodic and harmonically-centred pieces. And you never know – even though it's not really why they're here, there might be one or two kids in the room moved or inspired by it...

MURRAY GOLD AND THE DOCTOR WHO PROM, 2008

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:18:10 +0100

Just not happening, is it? And DWM is writing as one for whom Warriors of the Deep is a much-loved favourite soundtrack. Which is why it’s rather marvellous that these days, it seems Doctor Who music can be big and bold and brash enough to fill a space the size of the Royal Albert Hall. And from where DWM ends up sitting – row J of the stalls, directly behind a kid and his dad who were sat opposite me on the tube on the way here, if you’re counting – everyone in the building must be more than satisfied.
The main stated aim of these Prom concerts, which run at the Royal Albert Hall every summer, is ‘to encourage an audience for concert hall music who, though not normally attending classical concerts, would be attracted by the low ticket prices and informal atmosphere’. Job done, it would appear. There were kids in ‘EXTERMINATE’ t-shirts swarming the streets outside as far back as South Kensington tube station and beyond - and given that this venue, though large, can still only hold so many people, a fair proportion of those families must have travelled more in hope than expectation. And if their love for Doctor Who is such that not only have they come all this way just to spend an hour or two listening to the music from the show, but that those lucky ones who’ve made it in to hear the show will happily also sit through a formal, experimental and rather abrasive piece of modern classical music and then enthusiastically applaud the delighted composer at the end… then all concerned can be happy with their day’s work.
Not that it’s just been one day’s work, of course – much like Doctor Who itself, this is the sort of event that requires a lot of behind-the-scenes toil and sweat. “It’s mad, isn’t it?,” acknowledges Russell T. Davies. “Don’t imagine that any of us takes an event like this for granted. We’ve all worked on dozens, if not hundreds of other dramas, and not one of us has seen anything on this scale. With most TV shows, the biggest associated event is a press launch with twenty tired journalists, with one sausage roll per head. So this is just mind-boggling. Many of the team in Cardiff have worked like dogs to make this show happen – but I’ve got to praise Julie Gardner, because she’s like a force of nature. When an idea like ‘a Doctor Who Prom’ gets suggested, there are an awful lot of reasons why it won’t happen. And she demolished each and every one of them!”
“We had loved doing the Cardiff concert for Children in Need a couple of years ago,” says Julie herself, “and wanted to do another one, but make it different – to move it on a bit. And so myself and the then head of music at BBC Wales, David Jackson, went to see Roger Wright, the head of the Proms. The Proms has a history of doing family concerts, and has done Blue Peter concerts in the past. He needed a little bit of persuasion - because at that point - he had never seen any Doctor Who! So we sent him lots of DVDs, and lots of CDs of Murray Gold’s music. I think it’s very important that there is space for concerts like Doctor Who within the Prom repertoire. The point of this show is absolutely about bringing a new audience into this great building – and we are interspersing a few classical pieces into the concert, and one new piece. So it’s about bringing new music to the audience that is coming here for Doctor Who.”
“I think people would take as read that if someone suggested a concert of Doctor Who music at the Albert Hall, I’d be up for it!” smiles composer Murray Gold, before the show. “It’s kind of a permanent floating suggestion. I didn’t play an enormous role in this show – I helped decide the programme and gave a few suggestions about what other classical pieces might be played, what ‘music by dead guys’. They have to balance the amount of ‘dead’ to ‘living’! So if I’d wanted more of my own music the only way of securing it would have been for me to have been a bit more dead.” And how dead do you feel at the moment? “Inside? Plenty…!”
“I think this was probably born out of the success of the big concert we did in 2006,” agrees the concert’s orchestrator and conductor Ben Foster. “That was a great model, because we had such a great audience, and the music played so well live, in combination with the visuals. But to be part of the Proms series is something else entirely - it’s a great honour. I’ve never conducted either at the Proms or at the Albert Hall, so it’s a huge excitement for me. It’s such an institution – I regularly go to the Proms. When I was a student I would go every night. It’s such a thrill, and it’s nice that the Proms are taking the music of Doctor Who, which is so popular with kids – it’s a nice ‘in’ for kids to see classical music live, hopefully it will bring kids in to more concerts. As a conductor and a classical musician, that’s my hope – that the kids will be enthused enough by it to come to see another one.”
The noise that greets Freema Agyeman - our MC for the day – as she walks on stage to introduce the first piece at around 11am on Sunday, July 27th, suggests that enthusiasm is something this audience is not short of. Is the poor woman frightened witless by the deafening, if high-pitched, roar? Not a bit of it – you’d think she’d been presenting shows like this all her life. As it turns out, she’s essentially been doing this job since about, ooh, this time yesterday…
--
Dress Rehearsal, the previous day: Saturday July 26th, 10am: DWM is sitting alongside composer Murray Gold and executive producer Julie Gardner, watching the show’s final run-through. All seems to be going remarkably well – there’s the odd missed or delayed cue, but that’s not so much a problem as a reason for being here. Rough edges are a part of any show’s development and the two people on my left, notebooks and cameras at the ready, are here to spot these and make everyone aware of them, and thus duly get rid of them before tomorrow. And for all that this is an important function, it’s quite sweet that they – Julie in particular – seem to be giggling their way through most of the show. DWM senses that the inherent ridiculousness of sitting in a near-empty Royal Albert Hall listening to Doctor Who incidental music may be having an effect. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see people enjoying their work And anyway, as Julie admits, it’s nice to have the comparative luxury of a full, detailed run-through. “At the Cardiff concert in 2006,” she quietly confides, “we didn’t even get through the dress rehearsal – it happened on the day of the show itself, and we had to cut it off in the middle.” Well, that show didn’t seem to suffer too badly for it, so that bodes well…
Freema walks, cutely, on stage for a bash at her first link as presenter, back-announcing a piece by Aaron Copeland - and if she’s overawed by the huge, near-empty auditorium she manages not to show it. “Aw, she’s lovely,” Julie will be heard to say, apparently involuntarily, every time Freema emerges. There’s later to be a bit of discussion amongst various observers about precisely how one pronounces the composer’s first name, and whether Freema got it right. If that’s as rough as the edges are going to get, I don’t think anyone has much to worry about…
“It is such an honour to be here,” Freema tells DWM later. “When the music’s playing, I’m getting carried along on a journey too – but I mustn’t forget that I’m there to do a job, to take everyone through the story. I’m taking it really seriously, but I’m under no illusions about it – I’m not as important as the music. The orchestra, Murray’s compositions – these are the main focus of the concert, so the pressure’s off in that sense, it’s not about me. But I am there to move the pieces along, so I’ve got to do that clearly and confidently. This is why rehearsals are mandatory! We had a stagger-through on Friday, which was all very stop-start, and so you didn’t feel the flow of it. But today has been absolutely invaluable. You can have cue cards or autocue or whatever, but nothing beats familiarity with the material, because that means you can really engage with it. That’s my next stage – to prepare for the audience. When there’s an audience in it’s very different. So I feel really good, but I will feel brilliant tomorrow!” How does a big live event like this compare to a standard day at the studio? “It’s a world away. Presenting and acting are so, so different. It’s an art in itself, presenting, and it’s not my main craft. I can’t rival the people who do it all the time – it’s so difficult. I went on Blue Peter quite recently, and I was looking at the guys who present that. And they get scripts that they have to learn, and then when they come in they have to talk, and make things, construct things, while people are talking in their ear, telling them things on top of what they’ve already learnt from the script. It’s such an unbelievable skill – acting feels a lot simpler - though if you ask a presenter they’d probably say the opposite! So it’s great for me to have the opportunity to ‘have a go’, but I’m not in my comfort zone…”
--
The Doctor Who segment of the concert proper begins with All The Strange, Strange Creatures, the first of the crowd-pleasing ‘fan favourites’ and the first emergence of some real, flesh and blood monsters wandering through the auditorium threatening children. Does it perhaps seem slightly odd to think of some aspects of the show as being ‘greatest hits’ when they’ve essentially only been played live once before? “Like you say,” Murray has already admitted to DWM, “there are those ‘crowd-pleasers’ – Doomsday, This Is Gallifrey and All The Strange, Strange Creatures. They’re all quite similar pieces, they’ve all got a similar kind of soft-rock, angsty-rock beat. They’re all quite driving and have quite a similar melodic rock’n’roll, dark-ish feel… God, I’ve been doing this such a long time now!”
“Remember when the programme was coming back, in 2004?” Russell reminds us. “We kept on saying it would be ‘full-blooded’. And I chose that phrase carefully, because it meant getting the strongest actors, the strongest visuals, the strongest scripts – and the strongest music too. Standard TV incidental music just warbles in the background, it’s a bed of atmosphere, rather then proper music. And we wanted better – music you can sing, music that makes you cry, and smile. Music that now gets a concert at the Albert Hall!”
“From Series 1 onwards,” agrees Julie, “Murray had the right sensibility for Doctor Who. If you look back at the music he’d written before Doctor Who, it’s very singable themes – I really remember the Queer As Folk theme, the Clocking Off music, the Shameless theme… there’s a ‘bigness’ to them, and also I think in spirit he absolutely matches what we’re doing on Doctor Who. It’s big emotion, big themes, big melodies. There’s a lot of drama in Murray’s scores, and I think at that moment at the start of Series 1 that was absolutely in sync with what we had to do with the show. His contribution is enormous. The music needed to be fearless, and that’s one of the qualities he brings to it.” And who decided what bits of music would be included? “It was Murray’s decision,” says Julie. “We did have to make some difficult cuts – the Cyberman theme, for example, had to be cut. It was running at six minutes long and we just had to make a sacrifice.”
That doesn’t seem to be deterring those Cybermen from invading the auditorium during All The Strange, Strange Creatures, leaving overawed children scrambling out of their way. Sweetly, although the audience enjoys the ‘participation’ element of the show, it never seems to get out of hand – everyone attending seems to understand that for the practicalities to work, the monsters need to be unimpeded as they wander around in menacing fashion; after all, it’s not as if the guys inside can particularly see where they’re going. Various Ood and Judoon and Sontarans mill around steps and stage while the Cybermen enter a little pen in the middle of the audience and descend ominously into the bowels of the building...
--
Dress rehearsal, the previous day: Various contributors take a moment out to discuss the show’s programme of events. “In a series of Doctor Who, thirteen episodes, that’s getting on for ten hours of music,” Ben Foster points out. “So there’s a lot of new music composed for every episode. So it’s hard to choose - his themes are so strong, the moods we create with the orchestra are such fun, so you want them to be heard. And often in their role as ‘underscore’ in the show, you don’t hear some of the detail - so it’s really nice to be able to have this opportunity to hear it in undiluted form, as music.”
“I think Murray has now written enough ‘iconic’ pieces that you would never want to not have as part of the programme,” Julie points out. “For me Doomsday is one of those, the Gallifrey theme, Song Of Freedom from Journey’s End. We were also thinking about the concert in a more holistic way as well; the interactive elements like the monsters appearing live on stage. Their entrances have to hit particular cue points, and hopefully we’re matching those with the themes of the music.”
Julie is, in fact, getting a little worried about the timings of those entrances and exits, and those of the various on-stage soloists, announcers and conductors. Similarly, Murray – who is performing during the final three numbers - has just realised that he’s got to get on stage in the middle of the show, somehow or other. It looks as though he might have to edge his way carefully through the string section. We can’t quite work out where Freema is during her link into the Prokofiev piece, and it turns out she’s doing this link from the top of an unexpected staircase. All concerned duly note that the lighting for this link needs to be careful or the audience will merely hear a disembodied voice. ‘This is a piece I could learn from,’ notes Murray quietly, once Montagues and Capulets is underway. ‘Beautifully orchestrated.’
DWM has been wondering how familiar Freema is with the music she’s introducing here – after all, most of her work is done long before that music has even been composed. “The concert in Cardiff was the first time I started thinking about the music in the show,” Freema decides, “because it’s something that’s slightly taken for granted. You watch something and wonder why you’re being carried on this wave of emotion. Yes, it’s the acting, but the music plays a part in it, it’s so emotive. So that started getting me thinking about it – and then I got the Doctor Who soundtrack CDs. But even so, there are some surprises – I didn’t know the facts behind such-and-such a piece of music. So I’m learning! I actually got the name of one of them wrong in the rehearsal – and I’ve got an autocue there! I said ‘Song For Freedom’ and it’s ‘Song Of Freedom’! So there’s a lot that I’m learning as I go. But I am a little more savvy in terms of the music of the show now. And much as I think the words are necessary, to see something like that where you’ve got the VT running with the pictures but not the dialogue… the music’s taking you through the story, isn’t it? It really works with no words! So that proves how important the music is in the show.” Indeed, the specially-edited compilations of video footage playing alongside the music are jubilantly reinforcing for an audience that’s probably seen and heard this stuff a dozen times before the great and precise significance of the music they’re listening to. And Martha’s Theme itself is one of the most identifiable. Has Freema ever had her own ‘signature tune’ before? “No!” she giggles. “And I absolutely adore it – David Tennant sort of wound me up for the first few days, just making up some ridiculous funk-jazz, dated tune. But I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t quite know how it all works when you have a theme for a character… but I adored it! And I still do to this day, it does give me goose-bumps. I like how all of the companions’ themes are beautiful lyrical pieces of music – they have that in common – and they all suit the character in certain different ways. Rose’s has quiet, little bells and things, Martha’s has a kind of jazzy feel to it, and then I don’t even know to describe Donna’s theme, it has a ‘busybody’ kind of sound to it. It’s just so clever. As I said out there on stage, I’m slightly biased but I do prefer Martha’s Theme..!”
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Martha’s Theme – also a favourite of DWM – comes toward the end of the first act, which culminates in a specially written and filmed ‘mini-episode’ evoking the themes of the show, Music of the Spheres. “It was really done to give David, as the Doctor, a presence at the concert, because he wasn’t available to be here,” as Julie pointed out yesterday.
“The whole point of the Proms is to open up music, and make it an event,” Russell also insisted, “so I want that mini-episode to be something really special for those who are actually in the Hall. You can watch it later on the website, or on YouTube, or whatever, but frankly, you’ll never know what it was really like unless you are in the Albert Hall on that day. It can never be captured again. And that’s a reward for people who buy tickets and queue and travel.” A reward it certainly is, successfully fusing together all the disparate elements of this show: orchestra and conductor, VT footage, monsters – in this case, that pesky Graske again – roaming the stage, and adding on top both a well-judged performance from David Tennant and a timely tribute to the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the form of the original Doctor Who theme, it’s one of the highlights of the day.
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Dress rehearsal, the previous day: There’s actually a little concern that the original version of the theme tune can’t be amplified loud enough to fill the hall in the same way as the orchestral pieces do. Eventually, all involved in the discussions realise that it probably doesn’t matter, as by that stage there is likely to be a chorus of screaming, applauding children rendered even louder and more excited by a previously unseen piece of Doctor Who, so it’s all something of a moot point. It’s interesting that even at the run-through, the moments in Music of the Spheres where the Doctor directly addresses the audience get an enthusiastic response from the few people randomly scattered around the arena…
Presenting duties in the second half are being shared around – first up are Noel Clarke and Camille Coduri, two people it seems Doctor Who couldn’t shake off even if it wanted to. “Oh, we love your magazine!” gushes Camille, on being introduced to DWM. “Especially that last one, with all of us in it!” Noel and Camille are here to introduce the Daleks, it seems. Conductor Ben Foster enters into the spirit of things, being chased on stage for the next piece by one of the metal monsters themselves. For a few seconds, nothing much seems to happen, but then it becomes obvious that something unpleasant is emerging from deep in the building, up through that hole in the floor the Cybermen already descended into…
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At the show itself, the minor timing problems involving the central platform have been sorted out and the screams-cum-cheers that herald the appearance of Davros and a Dalek in the middle of the hall probably even drown out those that greeted Freema at the top of the show. And amazingly for someone so softly-spoken, Julian Bleach’s performance pretty much fills the hall. This from a guy hidden under a mask and only able to move one hand. Remarkable. But in terms of deafening screams, the show is about to play a joker: at the end of the Dalek segment, on stage walks Catherine Tate to announce the next suite of music, and the noise is such that the building threatens to take off. But then, it seems from the event programme that it wasn’t announced upfront that Catherine was even present, and the room, as one, squeals in surprise and delight. For a fraction of a second one of the otherwise impeccably-behaved crowd forgets him-or-herself - the pitch of the voice makes it difficult to tell – long enough to squeal “DONNA ROCKS!!!” at full volume, which in turn means that when Catherine exits the stage she does so nearly doubled-over with laughter. One gets the sense that everyone in the building is having rather a good time…
The emotional feel of the show then changes regularly for the remainder of the show - while always remaining ‘full-blooded’ in pitch - with a slightly beefed-up version of Reinette’s Theme from The Girl In The Fireplace gaining in breadth and depth while losing nothing in sensitivity, and the perennial favourite Doomsday making everyone insist that no, there’s nothing wrong, they’ve just got something in their eye…
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Dress rehearsal, the previous day: Having already been heard lustily singing along with the impressive, confident run-through of the big Dalek theme, Julie Gardner is now quietly making small-ish blubbing noises to herself during a few pieces, the aforementioned Doomsday in particular. Does she still, after all this time and many, many viewings, find herself emotionally involved in the episodes? “Oh, was I weeping?” she chuckles. “Yes, absolutely. Real tears, every single time.”
Tim Phillips – the song’s original vocalist from The Christmas Invasion – meanders on stage to sing Song For Ten. He looks magnificently out of place, dressed in a pink t-shirt and khaki shorts with longish hair and a scruffy beard. He looks like he’s come direct from behind a stall in Camden Market, which provides one more element of marvellous ludicrousness to an event that still, when you say it out loud (‘a Proms concert… of Doctor Who incidental music?!’) sounds utterly, utterly bonkers…
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…and at the climax to the concert, the crowd joins in the singing of Song For Ten and claps along, though for the show itself Tim still manages to look like a displaced indie kid seeking refuge from The Good Mixer - despite now sporting a suit and tie. And the show ends with a rendition of the latest arrangement of the Doctor Who theme, of course. Ends? Well, no, obviously not – a standing ovation for Ben, Murray, Freema and the orchestra mean a quick huddled discussion and quick repeated blast of Song Of Freedom, and only then does everyone finally leave the room. It’s been a great show. Let’s do it again sometime. Of which, more in a moment.
Wandering out, DWM is waylaid by a worried Nick Briggs, who checks if the modulation problems on his Dalek voice contribution were audible – apparently there had been some unprecedented interference from some other equipment elsewhere in the room. He is assured that what with the room acoustics and all, absolutely no-one in the room can possibly have noticed what will only have been a minor problem anyway. Honestly, these perfectionists…
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Dress rehearsal, the previous day: Wandering out, DWM is waylaid by a worried Murray Gold, who wants to know if his piano contribution to Doomsday was audible to the listeners. He is assured that yes, he was cutting through quite nicely. “Good,” sighs a relieved composer. Honestly, these perfectionists… “I was giving it a good old thump, but I was sitting next to drum kit and couldn’t hear a thing. Did you hear the ‘Elvis Costello’ bit?” What, the Oliver’s Army kind of motif? Yes, I did, now you mention it, though I’d never have thought of that as the source of it. “There’s always that thing, when you go to gigs,” Murray ponders for a moment. “There are those who go, expecting a gig to be exactly what they’ve got on their album, and there are those who expect it so sound like a live gig. And I want it to sound like on the album!” He laughs. “It’s hard enough to mix the electronics and the orchestra together in a recording studio, let alone to do it all live. But I think we’re doing OK.”
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In the event, ‘OK’ is damning with faint praise; the enthusiasm of the crowd throughout the show - and in giving two unrestrained standing ovations at the end - tells its own story in terms of how well the show worked for the audience. Did it work for the people working on it? Murray’s ever-thoughtful smile suggests so, Julie Gardner gabbles excitedly, Russell T. Davies is to be seen enthusiastically kissing Nick Briggs on the top of the head – did anyone ever mention that Russell is quite tall? – and Ben Foster looks exhausted but pleased. DWM corners Doctor Who brand manager Edward Russell, who’s been co-ordinating a lot of the comings and goings at this event and who looked, this time yesterday, equally blessed and stressed. How did he think it all went? “I think the only thing that went wrong today,” he muses, “is that we over-ran by ten minutes.” Really? Hardly a problem as far as the audience is concerned, really, was it? Edward breaks into a grin. “I know. Great, isn’t it?”
With a second big success like this signed off, is there a future for live Doctor Who music events? Could this work as a regular show, or is part of the success of it that it’s an occasional, essentially ‘one-off’ event? Julie Gardner seems to think the former might be the case. “We’ve already started talking about it,” she says, “not for next year’s Proms, but maybe the year after.”
And what does Murray Gold, composer, think the future might hold? “Well, the first time you interviewed me was in my flat, second time was at BBC Wales and then in Air Studios, and now the third time is at the Albert Hall. Where will the fourth one be? Where can it go next?” Dunno. Wembley Stadium? “Oh. That’s a good idea, actually. You never know. It could happen…”
Last word to Julie Gardner, though, who’ll match Murray for preposterousness. “I’m dead keen,” she confidentially reveals, “to get us into Glastonbury next year!”. Glastonbury? The Glastonbury festival? Mud and indie-rock and hippies and stupid hats and mud and no toilets and mud? That Glastonbury festival? “Well, it’s true that at the moment no-one else seems to be campaigning on my behalf, I’m a solo voice on this one. But why not? The Saturday night headline slot, after Jay-Z – Glastonbury takes risks! And I like the idea of Daleks trundling across those muddy fields. I think it would be great!”.
To be honest, after the success of today, DWM wouldn’t want to be the one to rule out the possibility.

Murray Gold - the full interview
Murray Gold: There’s always that thing, when you go to gigs. There are those who expect a gig to be exactly what they’ve got on their album, and there are those who expect it so sound like a live gig. And I want it to sound like on the album [laughs]! It’s hard enough to mix the electronics and the orchestra together in a recording studio, let alone to do it all live. But we’re doing OK…
Just as an aside, Delia Derbyshire’s very prominent in the public eye at the moment…
The Times spoke to me about her. I told them they were talking to the wrong man!
Come on, you know who she is! You’re one of the heirs to the throne. As if that means anything to you…
I do know a lot about her, and I get asked about her every now and then. Somebody at the Times rang and said ‘We need to ask you about Deirdre Derbyshire’! It’s ‘Delia’, you heathen… So, the first time you interviewed me was in my flat, second time was at BBC Wales and then in Air Studios. And now the third time is at the Albert Hall. Where will the fourth one be? Where can it go next?
Wembley Stadium?
Oh, that’s a good thought, actually. You never know. It could happen…
Was all this your idea, or were you approached?
I think people would take as read that if someone suggested a concert of Doctor Who music at the Albert Hall, I’d be up for it! It’s kind of a permanent floating suggestion. I don’t know, I didn’t play an enormous role in this show – for the Cardiff show in 2006 I wrote the links, but this time I helped decide the programme and gave a few suggestions about what other classical pieces might be played, what ‘music by dead guys’. They have to balance the amount of ‘dead’ to ‘living’. So if I’d wanted more of my own music the only way of securing it would have been for me to have been a bit more dead.
And how dead do you feel at the moment?
Inside? Plenty!
It’s interesting that a couple of pieces played here can now be considered ‘crowd-pleasers’, even though they’ve only been played live once or twice before – things like Doomsday and Song For Ten…
Yeah – within micro-societies of fans, I suppose. On YouTube, people have taken it upon themselves to release their favourite tracks themselves, even though that’s strictly speaking the job of my record company… I did go crazy with one guy who put my whole album up on his website the day it came out…
That’s just rude, isn’t it?
It was rude – we’d been in conversation, and I’d been trying to help him out with a few questions, and it did feel a bit rude.
You can forgive a bit of naïve enthusiasm, but not someone just nicking your record and putting it up there…
…the day it came out, as well! Give people a chance to go and buy it!
Speaking of which, is there another one coming? Series 4 music?
Yeah! Or maybe it’ll just be the music from series 6. Hmmm.
That suggests you might be hanging around, which would be good. Everyone else seems to be off over the next year…
Well, I haven’t quit! They keep on sending me DVDs, I keep on scoring them. And it’s definitely fun.
Given that the music is always big, and prominent, and forthright – how are you still managing to devise such different themes on such a big scale, once a week for thirteen weeks?
Well, I can’t when I don’t like the episode. But usually the inspiration to do that comes from a certain type of mood that’s required. The big themes of Series 4… well, actually, one of the very biggest themes I didn’t even get in anywhere. I recorded this whole suite… because of the way that the orchestra was available, I had to do it before I’d seen the last three episodes. And I just assumed from the scripts that there would be some space for this theme, and there wasn’t. It was massive, its working title was ‘Stadium’! It did come up briefly – I thought I’d cheat and put it in episodes nine and ten, when River Song was talking to the Doctor, and I’m glad I did because otherwise it wouldn’t have been heard at all. That’s how it works sometimes…
Is it likely to crop up in a similar moment in a future episode?
Yeah! It’s massive, it’s one of those really big pieces, and it kind of alternates between masculine and feminine, it’s kind of A-B-A-B in structure.
You do have massive music in the last couple of episodes, but not structured like that…
Yeah, there’s the variation on the Ood theme. I was trying to get a sort of Give Piece A Chance type rhythm, that sort of vibe of ‘bringing people together’. Like you say, though, there are those ‘crowd-pleasers’ – Doomsday, This Is Gallifrey and All The Strange, Strange Creatures – they’re quite similar, they’ve all got a similar kind of soft-rock, angsty-rock beat. They’re all quite driving and have quite a similar melodic rock’n’roll, dark-ish feel… God, I’ve been doing this such a long time now. I think that first time you came round, I’d been looking at fan websites. I’d done that just before Rose had been shown, because the episode had been leaked. I was actually a member of a fan forum, though, before I had anything to do with Doctor Who. I’d signed up and created an account way, way before I knew I was involved, only because I was interested in maybe catching up with some of the old episodes that I’d wanted to see. I remember being quite apologetic and nervous the first time I spoke to you about the music - because it had changed so much, because it was so emotive, so different, even before we had the orchestra.
It was always orchestral in style, though, long before the orchestra was there…
Yeah, it was still ‘the big tunes’. Some of the tunes being played at this show are from then, some of my favourite ones are still the ones from that first series. I remember feeling a very exaggerated sense of obligation to the fans, and feeling that if they were not happy, then I at least felt divided, and I couldn’t feel satisfied with what I was doing. I think I’ve lost that feeling!
You can’t always pander – there’s no point always trying to give everyone what they want…
You can’t start from that position, that’s for sure. But I’ve seen a lot of people go through that, on the show, and I’ve seen a lot of them attempt to respond to it. Even Russell has, seemingly, addressed the fans directly. Steven has addressed the fans directly. Both in their own styles and ways - but however clearly or lovingly you state your case, there’s always someone going to shoot you down in flames for it.
There’s always someone to take whatever you do personally if they don’t like it. To which my response is, how is that helping anyone? But people do feel proprietorial about the things they love, and you can never get rid of that – and it can manifest itself in unhealthy ways. I’ve stopped reading most comment, to be honest. It’s not that I love every moment of every episode or feel that everyone else should, it’s that I don’t see what benefit either the process or the product of the intense, visceral criticism brings either to the show or to my life…
No. I mean there were definitely some this season that I had a bit of trouble with, but who cares?
Yes – it doesn’t take away from the achievement of the series as a whole or from anyone’s favourite individual moments. Christ, my favourite episode is still Fear Her, for God’s sake…
Oh, it’s brilliant. I once said to somebody who shall remain nameless… he expected that we all agreed that Fear Her was no good, just because maybe something vaguely approaching a consensus seemed to have been arrived at. It was much better than some of the episodes that fans hold in very high regard, some of those celebrated by fans. But I think that if, for instance, somebody were to go on and on about how bad Love & Monsters was, for example, they’re just… wrong. It’s not a matter of taste, there is something missing from their appreciation of the episode. There is nothing there to get up in arms or upset about. It’s actually really one of the best episodes that we did, because it has such a great consistency of tone, it really successfully manages to marry two very clear and different modes of storytelling together, it was a great episode. It does annoy me sometimes when you hear people make assumptions about the quality of something. We all have personal relationships with the material as well. I’m sure Russell prefers some episodes over others, and thinks some things worked out surprisingly well and other surefire hits somehow didn’t show as much spirit as you might have wanted…
Very much, right from the first episode, you’ve been doing your own thing in terms of what the music should be – was there ever a stage where you were diluting that, informed by what you thought Doctor Who ‘should’ sound like? Or did you go straight for the big themes on day one?
I’ve said before that I did briefly set out to do something ‘chamber-electronic’, which is where Doctor Who had usually been, musically, in earlier years. But that was only from the assumption of what the show would look like. The minute I saw the pictures, that really took me away from that and toward what it should be. I’ve never really felt that I’ve backed down from anything that the picture told me I should do – I’ve tried to be as strong on the drama as possible. The one thing you can’t change is the way you react to stuff, and my job is to react and then respond, and to let my responses be heard. And sometimes it takes some keeping up with – I’ve shown parts of Doctor Who to people from Hollywood, people who are executives in charge of production on Hollywood movies, who have been unaware of Doctor Who. And they see bits of it and say ‘what you’re doing here is incredible, you’re packing stuff in in forty minutes’. The changes of mood… yeah, of course the changes of mood inherent in the style of the scripts and the filming affect the music too, so the music has to consistently maintain its vividness. Another thing I sometimes hear is that just because it’s orchestral, that it’s some kind of cop-out - that it’s not distinctive, somehow. But, I’m sorry, nothing else sounds like Doctor Who. People say it’s like John Williams, and that’s just complete crap – it doesn’t sound anything like John Williams. I can’t think of a single cue that does. From time to time it’s sounded like other things for moments, but not John Williams. It’s sounded really like itself! Partly because of the way it responds to the picture…
It’s interesting that the Prokofiev piece played at the Prom concert doesn’t sound out of place – you could picture a monster marching around to that rhythm quite easily.
I love Prokofiev. I do like the Russian composers more than the Germans, generally. The Germans are much more intellectual and the Russians are sentimental and write better tunes. And there is a Russian ‘style’…
What’s the discipline of actually sitting to write a music cue for Doctor Who? Do you just sit down and start noodling at a piano, or do you impose a structure before you start?
This is, like, going right back to the beginning! Did we never get to this question before?
It’s such a difficult process to describe that, to be honest, I wasn’t sure how to ask without it just sounding like ‘where do you get all your crazy ideas?’!
I know… there is a balance to strike. There are certain things that are Doctor Who cues right now, and certain things that just aren’t. Like you listen to that Mark-Antony Turnage piece that’s being played at the Prom concert and it’s great music, but it’s very serious – it’s got a very serious intent. There’s only been one episode where that serious intent could have been used, and that was Midnight – the music on Midnight was a different type of sound – but almost everything else has got a warmth about it. Even the dramatic cues, the monster cues. So it all exists within a world that, even if it’s frightened, it’s still very playful. There’s playfulness and warmth. I know this isn’t really answering the question you asked, but was I was going to say is that when I approach a cue on Doctor Who now, I think: Okay – we’re in the world of Doctor Who, so let’s just take a look at the episode, see where we are with it, is there a love interest, is it one of the big romantic ones – has it got River Song or Madame De Pompadour or a companion relationship thing going on, for instance? Or, do I need to write something completely new? Because sometimes these days there might be forty minutes of music but only fifteen, twenty minutes of it might need to be new…
Like if you’ve got Martha back you’re using her theme, Rose is back and you’re using her theme – that sort of reincorporation where even though you’re using it in a different context you’ve got the core of it there already?
Yeah! But it still feels like you’re writing a lot when you’re left with twenty minutes. Technically, twenty minutes is still a big ask to get through in one three hour recording session. We do fly through the recordings… but yeah, I think the funny thing is that a lot of these cues don’t really sound out of place here, at the Albert Hall. It’s a funny idea, imagining the Proms people sitting around saying ‘what are you going to play?’ and Julie saying ‘some of Murray’s incidental music’… and them thinking ‘is that going to fill the Albert Hall?’. But it does - I’m quite pleased that the show is very peak to peak to peak.
Yes – you’re not sitting for long periods of sustained chords or loops. Which is how a lot of TV incidental music works, and indeed is expected or required to work – but with your music there’s nearly always something going on… going back to composition, do you sit in front of the episode, first time out, with a piano or keyboard in front of you?
Yeah, I start straight off. I don’t even stop to find out what happens next - I write the sequence that comes before the titles without knowing what’s going to happen, I just watch that little prologue bit and think ‘this feels spooky’ or whatever. Every new season does have a kind of ‘arc’ – the middle ones are always the hardest, because we tend to have an orchestral session in January, so maybe I can get some stuff for episodes 1, 2 and 3 out of that. And then we tend not to have another orchestral session until May… so this last season, we then had four ‘space-war’ type episodes all in a row, and the orchestral session fell just in place for the only episode that could conceivably have been a smaller, chamber piece, which was the library story – although even that was huge, in scope. But we had Pompeii and then Ood which were small-ish, and then alien invasion in 4 and 5, then 6 was war between two tribes, and then the Agatha Christie one had been done first of all anyway, back in November. Where we had a clarinet and a saxophone for Miss Marple. I mean, for Agatha Christie! Freudian slip, there… but the parts of the season where it really gets difficult - and this has, weirdly, been the case on every season - are episodes 5, 6, 7. Those kind of episodes are really difficult because you’re nowhere near through the series, and yet you’ve already done so much work…
Is it because you can’t resolve themes you might have initiated in earlier episodes?
Yes, but they’re normally one-off episodes as well. 6, 7, 8 are often self-contained, one-off episodes – before you get to the gigantic season ending! If you’d had to do a season that started from Silence In The Library, it would have been huge. But at least one advantage of the longer season is that by the time you get to that stage, a lot of stuff has already been recorded. If you’d just sat down from Silence In The Library, that’s two episodes, then Midnight, that’s a one-off, and then this three-part ending which involves everyone you’ve ever met over the four seasons… it would take forever to do that! But because a lot of stuff has already been written and recorded, we get through it quite quickly…
Was the big climax of Series 4 harder or easier than previously? You had a lot of returning characters and so a lot of returning themes, but you did have to work out ways of making all those things gel together…
It was easier, yeah, I knew where the finishing line was. I also knew, well in advance, that I was going to re-use the Ood song – otherwise there wouldn’t have been any reason to re-record it. All I’d had before the final orchestral session was Julie on the phone describing to me the gist of what was going to happen in those final episodes, so I had that piece ready for that session. And she was telling me about this bit with everyone you’ve ever known flying the TARDIS and dragging the Earth back to its orbit, and saying that it was the happiest thing ever, characters breaking the ‘fourth wall’… and Russell really wanted the Ood song to come back. So I thought, let’s use it there! And then there was that piece for Donna, which was always signalled as being Donna’s death – that piece with the electric guitar and the whistling. So there were some big new themes knocking around in episodes 12 and13. 12 was almost like doing the episode 42, with a relentless rhythm running through everything…
I loved your work on 42…
Well, there are some episodes where the music has ‘moments’ – which 42 definitely wasn’t - and then there are those where the music just has a ‘way’, a ‘feel’. 42 was one of those, and Midnight was one of those. The structure of Midnight was so clear – I wrote ten minutes of the most annoyingly cheerful stuff, even more cheerful than regularly on Doctor Who, and then made it just… sink. Then you had the juxtaposition between that and this sudden burst of complete off-the-hook atonality, it was really fun. It was fun making it really nasty! Midnight was fantastic.
It was one of those episodes that I actually had a physical response to – I find myself tensing up and getting closer and closer to the screen…
I need that kind of response to write the music as well – and when something like that comes along it’s very refreshing for me, it’s totally different. Russell sent me Turn Left and Midnight at the same time, and I think he was personally more proud of Turn Left, but I wrote to him saying that I loved the total lack of waste in Midnight. Not that there was any waste in Turn Left, but Turn Left was ‘epic’, and I liked the confined sensation you get from Midnight. Where did that come from? And it was vaguely misanthropic, which is very unlike Russell. Misanthropic’s maybe not fair to say, but I think it was – it was saying ‘people are shit’!
It was also very unusual for Russell in that he didn’t tell you where you were or what was going on at all times. In terms of the plot, the viewer was deliberately left a little bit lost as to what was actually happening, which is really not a feature of Russell’s writing usually. I loved that he’s showing he can do that superbly - if he chooses to!
Yeah, and that’s the point – it’s ‘if he chooses to’. That thing you’re talking about is a Spielberg technique, of always making sure you know where you are, where everyone is, and exactly what’s happening. But even he comes up with things like Duel or Jaws…
It’ll be interesting to see what transpires next, because Moffat’s scripts tend more to leave you in the dark, waiting for an explanation. Though I like both approaches, and I think they can both produce great Doctor Who…
‘Steven’s episode’ has always been a bit of an Escher drawing! ‘Are those stairs going upwards or inwards?’ What’s going to be really interesting, though, is that those tend to be ‘numbered’ episodes, 8,9 and 10 – that’s the slot for those sort of complex episodes. And it will be interesting to see what Steven does with, say, a big, hearty episode – that’s going to be fun to watch. I suppose The Empty Child is quite a hearty one, it’s not so ‘Escher’…
No, but the actual plot of the nanogenes and why they’ve made this kid into this creature is still something you don’t find until the last five minutes – there’s still a ‘puzzle’…
Yeah, there’s always something contained in the wallpaper rather than coming at you face-on… oh, it’s going to be brilliant!

Whooked On Classics?
It could be easy to forget that it’s not all about Doctor Who here today – there is a smattering of additional, well-known classics being played throughout the show, most of which are familiar to elicit recognition from most listeners - from the likes of Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. “There were discussions about whether we should do a tie-in with a theme of ‘ time and space’,” Julie Gardner reveals. “But our worry was that it would inevitably lead to us including pieces that are used quite extensively in cinema - the big sci-fi tracks used across the likes of 2001 A Space Odyssey. So we avoided that, because it would make the concert feel too much like a ‘film and TV soundtrack day’. The discussions were about how many bits of classical music should be played across the concert, and then I was involved in discussing how we spread them across the two acts of the concert. I think at one point we were also trying to go with ‘the Doctor’s love of humanity’ as a theme, and how Earth is his favourite planet, so we kind of tried to find pieces that connected to that, in some kind of thematic way.”
It’s pleasing that moments that could easily end up as longueurs for the younger and less attentive members of the audience also seem to go down well. It probably helps that a lot of the pieces are identifiable from other media sources – many who couldn’t name you Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets from his Romeo and Juliet might still know it as ‘that thing from The Apprentice’, for instance. Your DWM correspondent, being of course of higher mind, prefers to think of it as something The Smiths used to use as their intro tape before concerts… the one newly commissioned piece, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Torino Scale, is particularly interesting. The composer is present for the performance and takes a deserved bow. Not being a musicologist, DWM doesn’t really follow or understand all the details and intricacies of this marvellously dissonant composition, but sure as hell likes the unusual noise it makes.

RONA MUNRO

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 15:06:21 +0100

If you were feeling uncharitable, you could describe Rona Munro as 'the woman who killed Doctor Who' – for, as writer of Survival, the last serial broadcast in the show's first 26 year run, she undeniably undertook the unenviable task of bringing it to an untimely and premature, if thankfully impermanent, end. Me, as someone who loves Survival more that should really be legal, I prefer to think of her as the writer who strove to enable the show to go out at maximum power, all guns blazing. In the years since, she's done a lot of respected and award-winning work in the theatre and for the cinema, but not so much on television – and, more perplexingly, she's hardly ever spoken on the record about her brief, bright-burning stint on Doctor Who… until now!
Doctor Who seems to stand alone in terms of your writing career – you've not done much mainstream television in that respect. How did you get into writing, and how did you then get from writing to writing Doctor Who?
I got into writing really through theatre, and that was way back in the 1980s. And then I suppose I got into Doctor Who through doing Casualty… or was it the other way round? It was the other way round! I did the Doctor Who first, didn't I? So… how did the Doctor Who come about? I know! The BBC set up a little workshop week for people… I'd done quite a lot of radio at that point as well as theatre, and they put together a whole bunch of us, and the idea was that we'd go on this training week about writing for telly. I think Andrew Cartmel, who was then the Doctor Who script editor, was along at that, and I think I just grabbed his trouser leg and said I'd kill to write for Doctor Who.
So had you been a fan of the show before that?
God, yeah! I remember the first ever ones. Everyone has their clichés about hiding behind the sofa, but I did that, you know. I must have been about three or four, and I don't remember what the plot was, but I remember – it was William Hartnell, wasn't it? And they were going through some kind of tunnel or something, which aged them. And they had to carry something incredibly heavy, and as they were going they were getting older and older, and the human people with him were ageing and ageing and fell over dead. And I found that utterly terrifying – that terrified me more than the Daleks, it was one of those intimation of mortality. I think that was the first one, or it was pretty early on…
As you were talking I twigged which one it was – it was a thing called The Daleks Master Plan, a very long story, twelve episodes long, that went everywhere in the universe. One that doesn't exist any more!
Really? Well, it's in there [taps head]! That sequence is embedded, it's hard-wired in my head…
What sort of stuff had you been doing before Doctor Who, though – I did a little bit of research and discovered that you worked on [BBC comedy sketch show] A Kick Up The Eighties…
Oh God, yes I did. I co-wrote comedy with a guy called Jerry Chester – we started doing that in university, and then doing shows at the Edinburgh Festival, because you could put on a show for tuppence-ha'penny then, and people would come and see just about anything, it wasn't the big, slick commercial machine that it is now. And we did that, I think, at three Festivals, and then we did A Kick Up The Eighties and something else of that stable…
Were you just part of a huge team on that? You tend to think of a huge room full of writers sitting round a table…
It wasn't even that, it was us sitting in our wee student bedsit bashing out sketches, and sending them in, and if you were lucky you were one of the ones that was used that week.
Give us one of your gags! Or can you not even remember them…? I remember the show but not any individual moments from it.
Can't remember the sketches at all – they had a topical element as well, so they probably wouldn't even mean anything now.
What about your theatre work – what sort of subject matter were you covering, and in what sort of styles?
Not self-consciously any style – the first professionally produced work I had was two that came in the same year. One was a thing called Hardware for Scottish Television, and one was a stage play called Fugue at the Traverse theatre, and I think those were in 1981, 82. Hardware was kind of an analysis of… er, oh dear.
Is this going to be very pretentious?
Oh God, yes! It was at that time – and it didn't seem self-conscious or clunky, but the kind of sexual politics was the thing, and I suppose we were all examining that, and I was particularly. I got very involved with 'Women Live', which was an arts organisation at the time which was funded by the GLC, and at one point actually had national funding - though of course when the GLC went, it all went. And that was really about promoting women in the arts, and it was through that really that I got my first gig, which was a play called The Salesman – and from that, going on, I got Fugue and Hardware. Hardware was about everyone's ideas of pre-history – kind of like Survival in a way, the idea that there are savage… that people killing other people is what made us evolve as a species, whereas if you actually look at what anthropologists say, the emphasis is actually on the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You look at how hunter-gatherers live, and killing meat would just not sustain you – you'd simply die, you'd burn up so much energy trying to catch something and your success rate is so low that in fact what sustains you is walking around as a group, grabbing what you can, 'gathering' – so it was about co-operation, about working as a group, and your meat is your treat. So the idea that we evolved as a culture or a species by dunting other things on the head is… one I would question! And I questioned it in this play.
It seems that there is a very political undertone there – you mentioned GLC funding a moment ago, and this certainly sounds like the sort of thing that would have annoyed the Daily Mail a bit at the time.
I suppose. Again, when Scottish Television did this - these things don't seem to exist any more, do they? – it was to give breaks to first-time writers in telly. So they were very low-budget, and everyone knew that they were 'baby plays'.
Kind of like Play For Today on BBC1 used to be?
Yes, but nothing like as high-status, or as big a commitment behind it. And it was a one-off, I don't think they did it again! We killed that golden goose…
And what about the radio work, was that in the same sort of vein, or were you working for other series that had been established?
I was writing for a series called Kilbreck, which was a kind of Scottish version of The Archers. It ran for quite a few years, it was a guy called David Campbell at Radio Scotland who fought and fought to keep its funding going because they kept trying to axe it. Much like Doctor Who at the time I was working on it! But just as The Archers was set up to give farmers information about what they should be putting on their crops – it's hard for us to believe, but that's how it started – this was supposed to be doing the same thing with a health education message. I remember one of my first scripts, I had to do a whole story segment about thrush, and how to deal with it and how to identify it, within the context of a drama. Which was quite interesting! But the thing about Kilbreck was, there were four writers, and there were five episodes a week. And you would be responsible for a week, so you'd basically have your turn come round, and then it would be over and you'd have a bare three weeks to write another week's worth of episodes – and they were twenty minutes each, so that was a hell of a lot of script. And you had to produce it really fast – actually, that was a really good training for me, because I remember when I was doing the telly play, explicitly getting the advice from the producer of "Ddon't go down the route of writing for series and serials or writing for soap operas, because that will turn you into a hack writer". And you think, well, thanks, but I do kind of need to eat!. And Kilbreck came up, and I went for it, and I really feel, looking back, completely vindicated - because I think I learned my craft doing that.
It's easy to be aloof and say 'my art is my art', but if you haven't got the techniques, you're not going to be capable of producing your best work – you do need to learn how to write to order, almost…
Absolutely! And I think this idea that there's high art and popular art and that one is in some way superior to the other is just a load of absolute tosh – it's such an artificial definition created by academics and the 'quality' press, and it really makes me cross, actually. Makes me very cross.
So, when you grabbed Andrew Cartmel and said "I want to do Doctor Who"… what did he say?
He was really thrilled! I think, because of what we've just been talking about… obviously at the time, as you probably know, Doctor Who was absolutely struggling. The BBC would have killed it quite happily if it wasn't for the fanbase keeping it going, I think. So Andrew was quite beleaguered. And also we were at this workshop where we were all supposed to be coming from theatre, and I'd done a couple of stage plays at that time and one had won some awards, and I think some of the others had as well, and so to have someone come up to him all excited and saying 'Doctor Who!!!' – I think he was quite chuffed really.
So did you approach him with an idea – I want these big cats, I want these themes about misunderstandings of Darwinism, about how we evolved, about the animal inside of us all – or was that something the two of you chatted about endlessly for months?
I wish I could remember in more detail, but we did do a lot of talking, and I do know, looking back, that for all I'm going on about learning my craft and mastering plot, I think I was still way too sloppy on basic things which are really crucial, like the logic – I adore science fiction, I absolutely adore it, and I think one of the reasons I adore it is that I don't feel that I'm brilliant at achieving it. And I think one of the reasons I'm not brilliant at it is that you've got to have a consistent logic of whatever your concept it, whereas I tend to be a bit "Never mind about the logic, it would be cool if this happened". Yes – but why is that happening? And Andrew had to do quite a lot of work with me on that, and looking at Survival now, I still think I could have probably have been hammered a bit harder to simplify it.
Terry Nation, who invented the Daleks, I think came from the same side as you in that case – he would say "It's my planet and I can do whatever I like, volcanoes with ice coming out of them or whatever". But the other side of the argument is that if you're going to have volcanoes with ice coming out of them, someone has to explain how that works…
Exactly! And of course I have that thing about "How do the cheetah people get from their world to our world" – that whole thing about the cat coming through, the cat forming the portal… how do they get back the other way? I think – I wouldn't care to do it, but I'm sure studious people like yourself might have done it – if you nail down that whole logic of how they get to and fro… it might start to creak a little.
I'm not sure about that. You have two things happening – you have a catflap, albeit a catflap on a five-dimensional scale, and also the predators, the hunter-gatherers if you like, can only return home with their prey. And that seems to make sense – possibly not in a purely scientific way, but then it's Doctor Who and you can't really do detailed science to the nth degree anyway.
I think it's complicated because I wanted the little pussycat coming through – and the reason I wanted that was because it looked so cool, to have something so ordinary actually be the forerunner of incredible violence, of hideous things happening. But I think it was one level of logic too many, possibly.
I think you're being hard on yourself, but fair enough. So, at the time, Andrew had brought in quite a lot of new writers, and I get the impression he was almost trying to form a 'rep company' of his writers, the people he wanted to employ and that he felt comfortable working with. Did you get that feeling that you were working as part of a team in that way?
Yes, very much so, and he was great at that, at making us feel like we were working together really. I was coming down from Scotland at the time, and it was just a great chance to hang out with other writers in London. Very briefly, but it was still really nice - I really enjoyed that side of it.
Did you get to meet the lead actors, as well? Apparently quite a lot of the writers got the chance to meet Sylvester and Sophie and chat about what they wanted to do…
No I didn't, I think for two reasons. One was the expense of bringing me down, but more than that was that I was then heavily involved in politics at the time. There was a whole group of us going over to Nicaragua – it was the time when America was stealth-bombing and the spy-planes were going over, so the idea was that we were supposed to go over to coffee plantations and be a human shield. I did not have a clue, by the way! I had no idea – I just thought, let's do that, it'll be exciting. So I was kind of committed to doing that at the same time that they were filming. It's weird, as well – and I was thinking about this as I was coming in to meet you – I had an instinct that I kind of wanted to let it go completely. I think that was partly my nerves, feeling that I was a bit of a spare cog, just a wee writer, you know? And partly I was already… the design was not going the way we had hoped, and stuff like that. And I just thought I didn't want to go along and be upset, really. Because the Cheetah People shouldn't have looked like that.
What should they have looked like?
It should have just had cheetah eyes and a very faint pigmentation round of cheetah spots, and big canine teeth. And in fact, I think the actors that were cast, from what I was told, were doing all this wonderful expressive facial work, and then these 'Puss In Boots' things were dropped on them – and so then you can't see what they're doing under there. Particularly Karra and Ace, there were whole amazing scenes between them and for me, that was supposed to be my lesbian subtext – and you can't see it!
Oh, you can..!
Oh good! There's a lot of stuff about moonwater and things…
Now that one didn't even occur to me… but in preparing this interview I checked with a few mates in case I was forgetting anything obvious I should ask, and three straight men came back to me straight away saying "Ask her about the lesbian subtext!".
Oh yeah, definitely. And I couldn't kick up a fuss, either – if I'd said "Hang on a minute, you're killing my lesbian subtext", they'd probably have screamed…
Why did you think that Doctor Who was the place for a lesbian subtext?
Anywhere is the place for a lesbian subtext! And again, it was the eighties, and we were all really conscious that there were certain elements missing from mainstream culture and, as far as possible, if you got a chance to chuck them in there, you were duty-bound to do it. The same as having an Asian character – it looks a bit clunky now, but at the time you actually had to fight for those things, and you could only do it – Alan Plater told me this trick later, and I'd inadvertently done it – he told me that basically if you say "This character's Asian" they won't let you have that character, but if you give a character an Asian name, a name they can't assume won't be anything else, then they'll get you an Asian actor, or a black actor, or whatever. And what's that? Fifteen years ago? Seventeen years?
It's easy to forget, I suppose – this was the period when EastEnders was still getting in trouble for having gay characters in. It seems like the dark ages…
It does – and the fact that things like that were even noticeable…
Yes – whereas these days there seem to be half a dozen gay characters in Coronation Street at any given moment…
…and they're in The Archers now! And middle England is not happy about that.
I'm sure middle England is not happy about a great many things! Coming back to what you were saying about the anthropological side of things, that's all very much to the fore in Survival, it's all about how we have baser instincts and we shouldn't be giving in to them. It's actually quite thematically heavy for Doctor Who – on television, at that stage, it was just starting to put ideas like that in. Were you aware that this was quite unusual as you were doing it, or did you think 'this is how it should be'.
I suppose that didn't occur to me – and I suppose also that the episodes of Doctor Who that had stuck with me had been like that. And I was a huge Trekkie. Was I a Trekkie by then? When did Next Generation start?
1987 – it had been going for a couple of years…
Yeah – and I think they really pushed that up a notch in terms of having big metaphorical episodes, and I loved all that.
Not always the subtlest things in the world…
No – especially the early ones. But I loved all that, and I also think that I had come from this background of slightly worthy, potentially pretentious kind of pieces of theatre that were supposed to be 'saying something'. So it was automatic, that that was what you were supposed to do, really.
So by the time it actually hit the screen, were you still feeling disappointed with what was there, or had you adjusted to it?
Still disappointed, yeah – at two levels. It was nice, actually, not to have been involved in the shoot, because then when I saw it, the things that worked well in it were lovely surprises, and the things I didn't like I already knew about. So that was okay really. But there are really just two areas of disappointment. One is the design - and I'm sure it's some poor soul whose name I don't even know who I'm slagging hideously by saying that – and the other is some of my own plotting. I wished I'd had more time to write it. Oh, and the other thing I really, really regret is that of course we didn't know we were writing the last series. We hoped we weren't – and also we didn't know what order they were going in, so I didn't know that it was potentially the last Doctor Who ever, and thank God it's not. Had I known that, obviously I'd have written that third episode differently. And in fact, the very last section is written by Andrew - that little dialogue is all Andrew, because I was out of the country when he realised this was going to be the last one and he had to tie it off.
What would you have done differently, in that case? I actually quite like the fact that there's nothing obviously 'final' about it, apart from possibly in terms of what it does with Ace, bringing her back to her origins – but other than that it's a Doctor Who story that's not hugely, universe-threateningly portentous, it's just a story, a good one, that finishes well and then it stops… and I quite like that.
And it's probably good now that it has been revived, and if I had provided them with an epic ending it might have been harder to revive it! You're probably right, but at the time I felt that I had let the fans down a bit. And the other one that gets me - and oh, I'm so ashamed of it! – how does the Doctor survive the collision on the motorbike? He goes up in the air, does he? What happened there?
Are you blaming yourself for that?
I am blaming myself for that, I am!
Because I think that bit is potentially a little bit eggy, but you get away with it because the line's very good – the Master laughs and runs off, and the Doctor says "Oh, very good, very amusing" and Sylv delivers it well. So it could have been quite silly, but they managed to ride the slight stickiness of it…
I think my fond hope was that some wonderful piece of special effects was going to go in there which suggested whatever it was that the Doctor had done, possibly involving a quick leap through a catflap – but in the script, there was a hole…
To be fair, you were neither the first nor the last person to make the mistake of assuming that they can do more with special effects than they can… were you always aware that you were going to be writing for the Master, and did you know of his history?
I did! I was given the Master at an early stage and I was thrilled, because I think in terms of Doctor Who's adversaries, because he's got a character… do you know what I mean? Daleks are fine, everyone's got their favourite monster, but the thing about the Master is that he's the Doctor's equal, his nemesis, and his dark twin, in a way, and that's all, in character terms, so rich. So I was really happy to have that, actually. There were the two actors who did it – what was the first guy's name?
Roger Delgado…
He was fabulous! And whatshisface, Anthony Ainley, was good as well – but Roger Delgado terrified the bejesus out of me as a child.
It's interesting that a lot of people who had gone off the Master for a while liked him in Survival, because he actually got to kill some people in that one! It was nice to see him really getting to be the bad guy because he had become a little bit silly and inconsequential after a while…
Yeah, a bit pantomime villain.
Whereas in Survival he was a vicious bastard, which worked quite well. Something most writers were doing at that time, and you did yourself, was novelise your script…
Yes, it was just automatic – you were just told you could do it.
Had you done anything like that before?
No. And again, I don't think that book's too hot. What happened with that was, I think I was quite pregnant while doing it, and I had to do it really fast, so I don't quite know how well that turned out…
It's interesting because the Doctor Who books range went on to become something else entirely, a range of original novels that could be detailed and complex – so going back to read something like Survival these days, it can look quite thin, which it probably didn't at the time. It's only in retrospect that you realised there's not as much meat to those books as there might have seemed.
And I think the remit we were given was very much 'novelise what was on the screen' – it was kind of a missed opportunity to add lots of backstory and character detail that might have been quite fun.
I did notice, though, that when flicking through it again, that a couple of details had been changed, and I wondered if what you were doing there was filling in things that you'd had to drop for time reasons, or if because you weren't happy with how they were done.
I do remember trying to have a better stab at the motorcyle crash, but I didn't really achieve it – one of the things that stuck with me was when the novelisation was reviewed, this guy was kind of saying "I would have forgiven her, any excuse, she could have made up anything – but it's just the same, it's a big bang and he's kind of okay…". And I thought: Guilty!
The worst kind of review – where you go "Yep! Got that wrong!". But I noticed, for instance, that the Julian Holloway character was a policeman rather than a TA guy.
Yeah, they'd made me change that because 'children shouldn't see the police in any way negative'. But I thought… he's not a negative character, he's a bit inept…
He's a buffoon, really, he's not a bad guy…
Yeah – and they camped him up a bit, and made him much broader a buffoon than he should have been. But that was the reason, that you can't show the police in a negative light.
And also, toward the end it's quite noticeable that you kill off a lot more people in the book than you did on television – on TV Derek, the young boy, just runs off home, but in the book you follow him and kill him off, and then you kill off the shopkeepers, Len and Harvey. Why did you do all that?
Because otherwise… where's the power? Again, I'd had to bring my body count down in the script… Stephen Greenhorn always says "Oh God – she's going to the dark side again!" - I think I've got a tendency, to make it credible to myself, I need to just… push it a little bit.
I was wondering if the script might have been toned down partly because it was the last story – reading the book, there's a lot less hope at the end than there is in the TV show, there's an added darkness coming from you doing that…
Yes! [laughs] I like writing happy endings, I just find them hard!
They're much harder to pull off, aren't they? Something else in the book that isn't in the TV show, is that you had Ace set fire to everything at the end…
Did I!?
Yes! All the motorcycles, and the dead bodies that were sprawled around the place – Ace got a can of petrol and set the lot of it on fire!
Oh yes, it was my Valhalla moment!
There's obviously something very cathartic going on there – but was any of that ever in the script?
Oh, I think so, yeah – it's interesting because I had forgotten all that, but they were the things where I was told 'You can't do that'! But that was kind of my Viking funeral…
…but when I just looked at it, I was curious as to whether you thought you'd have got any of that on screen…
Burning teenagers and a can of petrol [laughs]! Yes, I really was that naïve… I was clueless! It was, what, my second piece of writing for telly, I think – so, no, I didn't have a clue.
Something that's so obvious I've almost forgotten to ask is that there have been very very few women writers on Doctor Who – did you feel that you were being treated differently inside the BBC because of that, or that you brought anything to Doctor Who that would be appreciably different from how the blokes were doing it?
I didn't really, no, to be honest. I think I was much more aware of that in theatre, but that's probably because when you do new writing in theatre, everyone focuses on who the writer is. And I think still, very strongly, there's this perception of 'It's by a woman writer' and therefore the critics, at least – I don't think audiences give two damns – the critics will have a certain stance when they look at it. I mean, Doctor Who was mercifully free from that. I've since been asked quite often to speak on various documentaries or radio things on the very fact that I am a woman who has written science fiction – because they are so few and far between. And like I said, I still feel that while it's something I aspire to do well…
…it's not your comfort zone?
It's not. But that's why I really want to do it!
There are a lot of women fantasy writers, but not SF…
Yes, and if you look at Survival it is kind of 'fantasy'. Two things I'm doing at the minute are veering more into 'hard science' – looked at naturalistically, but with hard science themes to them. And maybe that will give me a bit more of the kind of muscles I need to write science fiction. I'm doing one commission for the Traverse which is about zoologists in China, and another one for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, about neurologists – but they're both at very early stages.
And you have to put in a lot of research?
Yeah! Which is always the fun bit…
…or the deeply boring bit, as I assume you mean? Or do you actually enjoy it?
I love it! It's the lovely bit!
Steven Moffat says there's nothing he hates more than having to read a book before he can start writing a script…
Really?! I love that bit, because I would do anything rather than have to sit down and write the script…
Ah - suddenly I understand!
I'll do my ironing, anything! But I'll say "I'm working now - I'm reading a popular science book about neurology, I'm working very hard". With my feet up on my sofa! I actually love writing dialogue, that's fine – what I think is the horrible bit is plot structure. Getting which plot you could do – you could do that, or you could do this… working out the right plot structure and getting it effective, that's the one where you sweat blood, and I put off that moment as long as I can.
To go back to Doctor Who for a moment – you had a parallel running about the hunt, and Ange having the 'hunt saboteurs' collecting tin. You were almost introducing a subversive, left-wing, perhaps even anarchist agenda or undercurrent into the show. Was there any resistance to doing that, in what was perceived as a lightweight kids' show?
I think because there wasn't from [director] Alan [Wareing] and there wasn't from Andrew - and they were operating on the assumption that no-one else was going to notice, which was probably true! – I think it was clever enough that it wasn't obvious agit-prop. It's good you noticed that, actually!
And has Doctor Who been in any way important, in terms of your career? Or is it just one small job you did years ago? Do people think of you as someone who wrote Doctor Who?
They don't, no – apart from the very loyal fanbase, which has had alarming aspects as well as positive ones. Mainly positive. I think in some ways, because it is science fiction, because it is popular culture, and because of course for most of my career it was dead… there was almost a feeling around of 'Don't put that on your CV in the programme for the theatre show', slightly. And I think for me what it's always been is the one thing… when you're getting your hair cut, or you're in the dentists, or you're stuck on the tube and you end up talking to someone, and they find out you're a writer – Doctor Who was the one thing they would always know. Even all those years it was dead, it was still the one thing they would always know, no matter what age they were. And I think in that sense it's been a way of telling the world – most of the world – that I'm a writer. That 'most of the world' that doesn't come to the theatre, they know Doctor Who and Casualty.
But even then, don't you find that with Casualty, if you tell people you wrote a script for it, people will be less inclined to ask "Oh, which one?". Isn't a bit more generic?
I think they did early on, but you're right, yeah…
When it was more political? Actually, I suppose when you wrote for it, it was still only three or four years old – you forget about that because it's become such a fixture.
And Charlie's still there, which is unbelievable. Very good actor, actually. I suppose it was his choice and it must be a choice he's happy with it. It seems such a long time to choose to do one thing…
I can't understand would go into acting to do the same thing every day…
Exactly! You're being the same person…
And to me, that's the antithesis of the job! I suppose after a fashion, a regular paycheque will make up for a lot of things. To get back to Survival… what you wrote ended up being the last one for quite some time. Had there been another series immediately afterwards, would you have been happy to do another one? You weren't put off enough by how Survival ended up?
Oh yes. I think – it felt like we were a beleaguered team, it didn't feel like you were being treated badly by people you were working with, it more felt like the entire project was being treated badly by the BBC itself. And that's a very different atmosphere. I think we all knew quite early on in the process that it probably was going to be the last one, so…
That aura, though, had been hanging over the show for several years – fans wouldn't have been surprised to have heard it was ending the year before, or the year before that – but still, when it didn't come back for a 27th series, there was a tiny hint of surprise that they didn't manage to squeeze mayb one more year out of it. Had you gone on to do another story, do you have any idea what sort of idea you would like to have done? Or did that simply never occur to you?
No…er… no!
Fair enough – I was just curious that you might have had an idea floating that you might have pitched had Andrew asked you for another one.
Oh God – if I had, I'd be pitching it now!
I'll come back to that, believe me! Your story wasn't even always called Survival, was it? It was called Catflap at one point…
Yes, it was – I'm crap at titles. I can't remember who changed it. I think I was asked to change it, and I can't remember who came up with 'Survival', whether it was me or Andrew. I think it was me, having been pushed – but if it's Andrew's credit, I won't take it off him!
It's one of those stories where the title is repeated quite a lot in the dialogue, which doesn't happen all that often in Doctor Who – I thought maybe you'd had the title imposed, so you put it in the script.
I don't think so – it might have been the other way round. But like, I say – I don't know. I might be grabbing Andrew's credit…
It's so odd that it seems so long ago that you've forgotten details like that – to me, Survival still seems current! I was reading fanzine updates, and remember the name change happening… I mentioned the Virgin book series of Doctor Who, the New Adventures. A lot of people who'd been writing the show toward the end got involved in that through having novelised their own stories – were you ever invited to do that?
I was, I think – Andrew had moved on to Casualty quite soon after that and I'd gone with him, because I wrote Casualty after that. And that was a whole other thing to get to grips with – and I was having my baby, and also it was at that time that Ken Loach approached me to write the film Ladybird, Ladybird. So with those three things, it was a pretty huge workload on all levels, so I think it just wasn't an option really.
Is it something you would have liked to have done, if things had fallen into place? Because it would have been very different kind of work for you…
I think probably not – and probably because it would have been all the restrictions of the format, with none of the bonuses. Because you'd still have to be true to what Doctor Who was, but you couldn't reach that mass audience. And actually the money was a bit crap… so it probably didn't tempt me as much as doing a feature film, you know.
How did you come to Ken Loach's attention? I can't imagine he was sitting watching Doctor Who…
No – I was doing a play at Hampstead Theatre called Bold Girls about women in west Belfast, and he saw that – and it was on the back of that he asked me… in fact, Palace Pictures were trying to get a soap opera off the ground, something to rival Brookside, and Ken was going to direct and Alan Plater was going to be one of the writers – it was a cracking team.
Yeah, that's aiming high, isn't it?
It was! It was supposed to be set round the car industry, the death of the car industry in the midlands. And we all went and did all the research, specimin scripts and everying and then Palace Pictures went bust. And it was while we were travelling around doing the research that he asked me do Ladybird. I'm now working with his son, who was in college I think when I was working with Ken. I'm working with Jim Loach at the moment, who's a director as well. Balls of steel! He's very good news, Jim…
Ladybird, Ladybird is very unlike Doctor Who, but actually – given that it's all about strong women trying to cope in a tough, council estate environment, you can actually vaguely see a thread there that ran through your Doctor Who as well – it's very much based in the real world.
I would agree with you, yeah – I suppose that's coming to what I said, because obviously any kind of critic or academic commentator would put those things in a completely different box, and would probably consider Ladybird, Ladybird to be high art and Doctor Who to be something trashy. But I don't think there's any difference – I think Doctor Who in some senses had to have a simpler level of human emotion, because you can't – for a kids audience - really push the darkness too far.
The kids do like a bit of darkness, though… it's probably bleakness they couldn't cope with…
Exactly!
But it was noticeable at the time – Survival was probably the first Doctor Who in a very long time that was largely set on a council estate, the first Doctor Who story in a very long time to have 'working-class' characters in…
I know, and actually funny enough that wasn't what they meant when they gave me the setting, and that was partly to do with my ignorance of London. I think Ace was supposed to come from a sort of boring middle-class suburb – but because I wasn't living in London, I heard the words 'estate' and 'London', and imagined something much more urban and desperate than they actually meant. Because Perivale is not that bad, is it?
No, and it's way out in Middlesex, really, you wouldn't really think of it as London - it's much more suburban than urban.
Exactly – so I'd kind of written everything a little more extreme and dangerous and threatening – and then you've got these nice little leafy streets! But yeah, I suppose…
So it was Doctor Who invading the kids' own world for the first time in quite a long time, and something I think it could have done a lot more of – and it's very noticeable, and has been commented on by many people, that when Doctor Who came back a couple of years ago, it was much more like Survival than it was like an awful lot of earlier stuff. You had the kid from the council estate, stuck in a boring life that she needs to escape from – it's not just blokes in silly costumes with stupid names, it's very grounded. Did you watch Doctor Who when it came back, and, if so, did you make that connection yourself?
Oh God, yeah – I mean, I didn't see much of the first series, and then I started watching properly, I think, with David Tennant, though I did see some of the first series as well. But it's weird, isn't it – I don't know how you felt, but I know that I was watching with a 'Don't you dare mess this up!' kind of feeling. So you came away with 'Oh, it's going to be alright'. This is going to be one of those really offensive things to say, to a lot of people – but to me it's like comparing original Star Trek to Next Generation, because I do love both… but I really love Next Generation, because it was the people who'd loved it as kids now making it as adults. And Doctor Who is the same thing. It's more thematically complicated, and it's just so much better done – you look at that last series I worked on, everything about the sets, and the time they've had to rehearse, all the production values are so low. And to see it done with love behind it is a joyous thing, isn't it?
Absolutely – but I was wondering if you had seen elements of what you had brought to Doctor Who, thriving in the modern incarnation…
No – I wouldn't have presumed! I'd love to believe that's true, but…
I don't even know if it was an intentional thing, or just that minds were thinking along the same lines as you were – but you couldn't do Doctor Who now without grounding it like that, because no-one would watch it. If it was a fantasy show entirely about spaceships and costumes and effects, it would be on BBC2 – it wouldn't get that slot. So it needs to be in a world that people will recognise, and then take you somewhere. I know you've worked with Stephen Greenhorn, writer of The Lazarus Experiment, who introduced us. What did you say when he said "Guess what I'm doing next?"…
His version of this is that he loves the idea that it really annoys me hugely! So he'll drop the fact that he's written Doctor Who in to conversation at any opportunity. But I can't even remember when he told me actually! Stephen's fab, and the thing he does – he's just consummately brilliant at it – is the plotting thing. He does it with such ease, so I think I thought he was a really good person to do it. But I think it was more that it was one of those things that he always would say to me, 'You've done Doctor Who!!' and now he's 'But I'm doing it now!!'. Yeah, whatever, Stephen! But he will still needle me with it, and I can't protest…
You've actually worked with Stephen on a collaborative project, Gilt, which strikes me as an unusual thing to do in theatre. How did that come about?
7:84 Scotland just decided that they wanted to use three writers, working collaboratively. There was myself, Isabel Wright and Stephen – and it was good fun, actually. We had, I think, two workshopping weeks with actors with a gap in between, and we kind of found the concept through doing that, really. And it was sort of about greed in contemporary Scottish society. A little bit diffuse, but that was sort of what it was supposed to be…
I suppose if you have three different writers, it's not going to be the most focused thing in the world – three minds are never going to be precisely compatible, so you have to assume from the ground up that that's going to happen anyway…
But as an example of what Stephen can give me a hard time about, about the darkness – we had two days of lovely little character scenes, Izzy and Stephen had been feeding in these nice little character scenes, people sitting in a cafe chatting about fathers being estranged from sons, and husbands and wives having problems, all beautifully written, beautifully crafted scenes that I could only aspire to. And so when it comes to mine, the waiter in the café goes to the freezer and lifts the lid to get the ice cream out… and there's a dead body in there! And that was just me going "For God's sake, let's get some darkness in there! We need blood and entrails!"
So you just bled nastiness all over their lovely script? Marvellous! Something a few writers on Doctor Who have mentioned is the Paines Plough theatre company, which seems to loom quite large in the story of recent Doctor Who, quite a few of the writers have had some connection with it… and until quite recently, I was quite ignorant of them. Why do you think they're quite so prominent?
Well, of course who they are has changed over time – who Stephen worked with and who I worked with when I first worked for them and who I'm working for now are completely different. When Stephen worked with them a couple of years ago, it would have been Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany who are now running the National Theatre of Scotland. I'm working with Roxana Silbert, who was at the Traverse in Scotland. And when I first started working with them, seventeen or so years ago, it was a woman called Pip Broughton, who went on to produce or direct telly, I don't know what she's doing now actually. But the thing about them as a company – as they've had their ups and downs and their quality blips – is because they're a new writing company, and a touring new writing company, a big part of their work has always been writers early in their career. They've always had quite raw, new stuff to put out there. And I think particularly under Vicky and John and now under Roxana, they do an awful lot of development work with writers, so that's probably why a lot of the new talent coming through has had contact with them. And they kind of do it a very exciting way, you know – it's about writers finding their voice, about finding approval if you know what I mean. I think – this is a real generalisation, and I should stress this is a personal opinion and it's based on gut instinct rather than anything I can substantiate in a lot of detail – I would say, for instance, that in a place like this [The National Theatre Bar], there's still a sense that when you come in as a young writer with a script, that you're getting it wrong, and you'll be gently led to a place where you'll be getting it right. Whereas Paines Plough, I think – and some of the Traverse work has been like this as well – will sort of assume that you could well be getting it right in a way that nobody's thought of, yet – and what you need is support to find out what you want to do, which is a different thing altogether.
Is it about being self-critical, as well?
I think it's more about the experience of seeing yourself as well – no writer is ever going to be anything other than self-critical, endlessly, on a daily basis. But what you need is to actually get it out there and look at it and see what's working and what isn't, in an environment where you feel empowered, and where you don't feel that if you get it wrong they'll never commission you. So many of the commissioning theatres operate that way… and you've got the same thing in telly – in telly you've got the worst scenario in some ways, which is that you have to do it all in the 'treatment'. When I started off writing telly, treatments were as vague as they were for theatre - you knew they were vaguely interested in you as a writer, and you kind of went "burble, burble, I want to write something like this", and they would commission it or not…
So a 'treatment' would be a vocal thing in a pub or café, as much as being written down?
Almost – it was about being able to vaguely waffle about the things you were interested in. But now, you'd think you were working for Disney or something – the treatments are selling documents. And you spend months and months and years refining your treatment, to finally get to write your script. I'm loath to talk about this because it's fallen through so often but I'm pretty sure it's happening now at least to script stage – I'm doing another time travel thing. It's a sort of one-off, feature-length idea I've had for ages – years, literally about four or five years – and the treatment has gone round and round and round, gone through all these different identities and changes. You can imagine, being a time travel story, as soon as someone questions the logic, you're like "Don't question the fucking logic of time travel! Don't you know anything about the genre!? Would you like me to show you why no time travel story ever, ever conforms to any logic you could defend!?!". But it's finally, finally at least had the go-ahead to go to script stage with Granada. And at the last meeting we had, God love them – because it was one of those ones where you kind of go in, and they're asking "Well, how it will that work…?", and you start going [high pitched squeal] aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!". So the woman said "I suppose that's the sort of thing you can only demonstrate by writing it…". And you're like, "Yes! YES!!!". I don't remember it being that tough when I first started off – I really don't….
Doctor Who is my area of most detailed knowledge on the subject, and the writers who have worked on the new show have all spoken to me about how many drafts and stages everything goes through. The commissioning process I don't think is difficult, although I suspect that's because Russell's grabbed hold of it and said "No, I'm in charge of this" – but there's still an awful lot of work has to be put into it after that. Whereas, an awful lot of Doctor Who scripts in the seventies and eighties are the second draft, put on screen…
Absolutely, yes!
…which just wouldn't happen now!
And with the script editor just doing last-minute rewrites because the writer wasn't there, or wasn't experienced enough, or was just going "You need what?"
…and "You need it when?!"
Exactly! And there are plusses and minuses in both approaches. One of the things I loved about Russell getting Doctor Who on again, was the courage of it – even now I think if someone came in and pitched something like Doctor Who I think they'd get "Ooh, no, I don't know…" – to push that through must have needed enormous energy, and that's just extraordinary. Because in telly I think everyone's so nervous, and you get this feeling that everyone's chasing this shrinking audience, and they chase it by playing to the audience they already have – and you think "Well, that ain't going to work! Especially since that audience is getting older and older and older, you know…". Sorry, I'm off on a rant again…
Yeah – you're not going to get people back to television by giving them a less refined version of the thing they're already not watching. And Doctor Who, not only is it that it needed the courage and the energy, it seems to have been a good thing in a way in that it seems to have knocked a few bricks out of place – there are now things 'a bit like Doctor Who' being pitched and commissioned getting to hang on to its coat-tails. None of them are as good, but they just wouldn't have happened five years ago – so even if they're not quite as interesting pieces of work as Doctor Who, at least there's something new there that wouldn't have existed without it…
Torchwood as a concept has got good legs – and a great cast. I didn't see Sarah Jane – but Sarah Jane as a character… that episode [School Reunion], for someone who had seen her first time round, was brilliant. Her whole mid-life crisis being your mid-life crisis as you watch, is just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Made my cry my eyes out!
I'm just too young to really get that! I don't have her character as that childhood imprint…
But it was more that Doctor Who didn't love her any more and he'd got a younger replacement… "I did used to love you, but I'm off now". Oooooooooh! Awful, but brilliant! They must have been aware of that subtext, must have been.
This is interesting, because I've usually only heard a bloke's perspective on it, saying "Oh, yeah, he did do that, didn't he…?", whereas the women are more thinking "Look at what he did to me!". Suddenly I feel guilty and it wasn't even me! Anyway… tell me about the MsFits!
MsFits are Scotland's only touring feminist theatre company! And it's been going – was it before I was writing for Doctor Who? Yes, because we've just had our 21st anniversary. It was me and an actress called Fiona Knowles – this was at the time of Women Live, and we were sitting in a pub talking about the type of comedy sketch show we'd like to see on stage. You could put comedy sketch shows on stage then, there were all these kind of arenas and benefits, people doing theatre all over the shop when you could do that kind of thing. And we wanted to do one that had a feminist agenda. I think it's the one bit of my work where I have always had an explicit agenda, and the interesting thing about it is how much more complicated that's got over time. I used to perform it with Fiona, and then after [Rona's son] Danny was born I dropped out of that side of it, and she does it as a one-woman show. The shows, I suppose, still have the same agenda in that sense, but they've become more and more complicated and subtle in how they demonstrate that. And they still pack 'em in, which is good!
Why have you kept it going? Is it because it's a success?
Also because all that stuff we did in the 1980s when we thought we were going to change the world, "Maggie Out" and the miners' strike and Solidarity and Nicaragua… I don't look back and go "Well, we were all so wrong" – I think we were right, it's just… we did use words like 'struggle', and I don't know how else to express it. And I think what you learn is the naivete of that idea you are a warrior in the struggle. Get you, middle-class missy! But at the same time, I still feel that informs what I do, and that's still the reason I should be doing it. And the MsFits is the overt bit of that. I would never stop doing the MsFits as long as we were getting an audience for it…
Are there parts of that fight that have kind of been won, though? We mentioned earlier that when you were writing Survival, EastEnders couldn't just have gay characters in, or if they had a black character in there had to be an issue involved. Twenty years on, the world is by no means perfect, but something does seem to have been achieved…
Exactly – and the thing you have to think of now is how to take it further, how do you have a gay character where it's not an issue? How do you have the love story that's just a love story, and the fact that they're gay is neither here nor there? And I think we're kind of getting there as well…
Yeah, that's probably where it is at the moment – there will still be an element of… I was going to say 'the audience', but it's probably more that the people who are pointedly not watching it who will object.
I do think we're living in a kind of bubble in London as well – particularly on things like race issues, there is a kind of general tolerance here, whereas you go out to somewhere like Norfolk and realise the world still doesn't necessarily agree with you. I suppose to me it's always been about just putting in real human characters that an audience is going to identify with, and the process of making people identify with characters who they might have been hostile to or consider 'other' and 'different' is, in itself, a political act – I suppose that's how my own politics have developed is in realising that. It's not about saying "You should think this! Look how bad you are for not thinking this!" – it about saying "I've just completely put you in the skin of this person that you have all this attitude towards", and that is the most political thing you can do. I suppose in a very convoluted way I'm just saying "If you just write incredibly good drama, you're being political!". And it's about whose stories you choose to tell… it's like a wee wedge, once you get it in there, other things can follow.
So would you be interested in doing Doctor Who again if the opportunity arose? Are you sitting trying to come up with an idea..?
Er… that's being pro-active, isn't it? That's probably what I should do. That's very interesting, because I haven't realised until you said that, but I suppose I've been sitting back saying "Why don't you ask me what I'm interested in writing?". Which is unbelievably arrogant! You're right, I should think of an idea and pitch it…
Well, you've met Russell, haven't you?
Well, I've read Russell's version of this because Stephen showed me it, in the back of the mag [DWM]. And it was a huge relief to me, because my perception of it was… I'm at the ICM party at the Edinburgh Festival, and I'm with this lovely producer, Cheryl, who is going "Okay – we need to introduce you to lots of people". So she introduced me to Steven [Moffat] and to Russell [T. Davies] – and so I'm thinking these are people Cheryl thinks I should meet. It never occurred to me that there was a Doctor Who context to this. And they both went "Ah! Survival!!". And I did that awful thing of thinking "Oh no – how do you know about Survival?". It never occurred to me that they were actually producer and writer on Doctor Who. And I went on to this great long rant about how I wrote that but it was years ago and how I'd like to do another one but I don't suppose they're ever going to phone me… and then Steven said "Oh, well, we should get on to your agent". And I sort of went, "…yes.". One of those moments when the penny dropped really slowly. And I think I was ranting on about much the same stuff as I was doing to you, because I thought they were fans. "Oh, I'm so glad you like it, but the motorbike crash is really crap and I never got the plotting right and they looked like 'Puss In Boots'…". And then the penny dropped. And I was quite pissed! And then they vanished very abruptly – so my perception was that I was absolutely pissed and rambled at them and they fled. So when I read Russell's account of it I thought "Great – he thinks he was really pissed and rambled a lot!"
So that's fine – nobody was hurt, no casualties! And you've got an "in" now and you all have an embarrassing anecdote to share… the other development recently is that Survival has come out on DVD. Have you paid that DVD any attention? It seems you didn't have time to be involved, but have you even looked at it?
I haven't, no – I got my free copies a couple of weeks ago, but no I haven't. It's such a long time ago, it's a weird thing if you look at a piece of work that's that old, it's such an intense burst of nostalgia for that time, and sometimes I think you need to brace yourself for that. Because what you're bracing yourself for is the fact that twenty-odd years have gone by, and sometimes one doesn't like to be reminded of that! I'm sure I will, but I haven't managed to do it yet…
The original show is all cheap, but when it's good it transcends that – and I think Survival is a case of that. The cat costumes aren't as good as they could be, but I didn't see the script or know what the original intention was, so to me as a viewer it didn't matter so much. Something that annoyed me about the DVD was listening to the commentary; any time one of the Cheetah People appears they're all complaining about the costume. And I think "Yeah, make that point once – don't keep making it over and over…"
Well, I'd have been doing the same. I'd have irritated the hell out of you!
But okay, those costumes are not brilliant – but if you keep repeating that, you're just going to draw undue attention to them. And I think they look quite good in the distance, they look fine on horseback, they sound great and there are people acting inside them, so it all works, kind of despite itself.
It's probably just those who saw it in rehearsal and saw some really talented actors doing a lot of 'eye work', the power that brought to it, and seeing that stripped away…
But on Doctor Who, 'twas ever thus – anyone playing a monster is under latex and fur - it's going to happen. It's a shame, but you have to live with it.
Yeah – get over it!
You've done a lot of theatre work and some movies and what have you – do you have one thing that you think of yourself as being, or do you just do whatever comes up?
It's quite interesting, because people who know you from one area put you in one box, people who know your from another put you in another – and I suppose that's what I've been saying, that I just don't accept 'boxes', really…
Do you have goals or objectives for what you're doing, or do you just write, and see what happens?
I definitely have goals and objectives, in terms of where I want to push myself as an 'artist', to be pretentious. And also when you're writing for telly you've usually got an agenda you have to make. But I suppose it's about trying to do something better than you did it last time, really… and something you haven't done before. I think it's as simple as that. And the other one is to actually be accessible to any audience, or the widest possible audience I can. I know I keep banging on about it, but I think a lot of the stuff that's considered 'difficult' or 'arty' or whatever, if a general audience is exposed to it, they're fine with it. I think a lot of the time, there's a perception of 'art' in our culture that tells people 'that's not for you and that's not for you' – but if they actually get into it, they go "Oh wow", if it's good. If it's good, then it works for everybody. And I suppose that's my biggest 'bottom line', is that I'm not interested in writing things that only appeal to five or six academics writing theses on the development of theatre or whatever, or the development of film. It's never the development of telly, is it? Because that itself is 'corrupt culture'…
Does that mean you'd cheerfully write for EastEnders and Coronation Street?
Yeah! I mean, I probably wouldn't now, because the thing you have to do then is be a team player and I'm rusty on that – and I probably would find that slightly restrictive. I think there's enough vanity and ego to this idea that you've got your own voice – and I kind of think that's what I've sort of cracked. So you'd kind of have to squash that to be able to fit in. And I'm not saying one's better or worse, I'm not even saying I'm particularly proud of that, but I know I'd find it hard now, to be a team player.
And I suppose also, nobody who's making a soap wants an episode that's 'authored', do they? It's going to put your audience off, if it looks as if someone's worked too hard on it…
Exactly! And it's not only that – with those sort of things you invest in the characters as being 'yours', and if someone else says "They're mine this week", you think, "Sod off – they're mine!". It's a little jolt and your suspension of disbelief is shattered because someone has gone all arty with your characters – I think that would be quite insulting, actually, and on that basis I should steer clear…
So if someone said "On you go – write a six-part TV series" – what would you do? Would you need more parameters than that?
No – in fact I'm pitching something at the moment, to whoever will fund it – which would be a six part TV series. And if it gets green-lit, I will be emailing you and asking "Please can I talk to you about this" – because I think the Doctor Who fanbase is the audience I would be aiming it at. But I have to be pretentiously secretive about it – it's one of those 'strong concept' things I'm sitting on at the moment… but that would be my dream, actually, if I could get something like that going. To actually 'author' a strong concept, more in the graphic novel, science fiction, fantasy arena, that's my dream really.
Is this a long-held feeling, or have you been inspired by the fact that there are a lot of things like that going on on television, in the aftermath of Doctor Who?
I think it's been a long-held ambition of mine – I think the thing is that until I'd really learned how to do it… like I said, I can do dialogue, I can do lots of poetic stuff that makes people see pictures, but plot… you know, that's the hardest thing for any writer. Some people really have the knack of it, but I've really had to work and work to learn how to do 'plot' effectively. I think I've got there – but I would, wouldn't I? I hope I have…
Since Doctor Who – or even possibly before Doctor Who – what would you say is the thing you've done that you're proudest of?
Oh. [Long pause] I was very proud of the stage play Iron, which came out in 2001. It's probably been the most successful stage play I've done, it's gone all over the world and it's still going on in all sorts of places. I just think I cracked something with that, in terms of like what you said of going outside your comfort zone and pushing things. Because my comfort zone is writing very poetically, and writing quite 'fantastically' in a way – and that was very spare, and very much all the action is in the subtext of the dialogue, and I cracked something in doing that and I'm really proud of that. In the same way I'm really proud of the play that's going on at the Edinburgh Festival – I think I've got make banter right, which is one of the hardest things - particularly as a woman, when you rarely get to hear it.
Male banter being entirely based on insulting each other…?
Exactly! And you sort of know that, but it's so much subtler than that, isn't it – because you demonstrate affection through insulting each other, and you are competitive – sorry to generalise about you! - but there's a competitiveness in the insult as well, and it can be hostile or it can be deeply, deeply loving. And it's getting which, and getting it right… because this is set in the world of mountaineers as well, which is something I could never do because I have no head for heights, so it fascinates me. So in terms of theatre work, I think it's that. In terms of film and telly… that's interesting. That is interesting. [Another long pause] I've not got a lot made – there's an awful lot that's written that never gets bloody made! And I have this thing where I completely forget chunks of my own stuff. I was very proud of Rehab… I think in terms of a kind of 'authored-voice' piece of telly, I don't think I've had one. That's something I kind of aspire to…
That's what your current projects are, in fact?
Yeah! I mean, in terms of film, the thing I'm proudest of has got to be Ladybird, Ladybird, really. I really love Aimee and Jaguar as well, but because that was written in English and translated into German, it feels like a shared writing credit in a way. And Ladybird was my first feature – I didn't realise that what I was doing was hard, so I just did it, you know? Whereas now I think "Bloody hell..!". I think I was lucky, in that there wasn't a script editor, there wasn't script interference from the producer, and it was kind of me and Ken Loach – and because Ken's instincts are so sound, he's so experienced and so clear about what he needs, I just learned vast amounts without realising I was getting an education, if you know what I mean. And it's only since then, when you see people starting to muck about with your script… someone who has a clear vision about what is and isn't working about a script is rare – really, really rare. I think there's a terrific shortage of good script editing in television drama, and I think that clearly the current series of Doctor Who does have it – but there are various other shows where it's like they don't even know what they want. Everyone's flailing around, going "How do we keep getting a salary?", and it's partly just people doing it for the wrong reasons. You want people who have a natural passion for what they're doing, and then you can say "this isn't right" or "this isn't working" or whatever, but coming from that place of shared passion. I think we could do with more of that, really…
And why do you think Doctor Who has it, when other things don't?
I think it's Russell. As I say, I don't know the guy – I didn't even recognise him at a party – but he must have a passion for it, a passion for whatever it is that he loves about it, and there's a team around that, and that passion comes spilling out of the screen, and that's why it's working. If there was that around every drama series that anyone tried to put on, there would be some cracking drama on telly…
If the call was made to you to get involved in Doctor Who, would you like to be given a shopping list of parameters and concepts to include, or would you like to conjure up your own idea?
Either – I'm not proud! I think one of the interesting things about this conversation has been one of those 'D'oh!' moments – if I want to do it, I have to think of an idea, don't I? What am I doing, sitting – I've just realised I'm sitting waiting for the phone to ring, and how unbelievably stuck-up is that! In my defence, I hadn't actually twigged that that is what I was doing… I think, if I was to do it again, I think I would want to write the absolute best Doctor Who episode I was capable of. Because I feel with Survival, I didn't know what I was doing, enough – and, again, the atmosphere at the BBC was so unsupportive. More than anything else, I would want to write the one that made the hair stand up on the back of my own neck. I don't know what that would be… but you've given me food for thought. I need to go away and think about that!
Just to finish off – what sort of other work, prose, TV, movie, whatever, inspired you to start in writing or subsequently in your career as a writer? What have you seen or read that's made you think "That's what I want to do" - that has been instrumental in that way…?
Oh, God - I'll think of eight zillion things after you've gone…
Well, my mate Simon asked me to mention the Moomins…
Oh yes! Yes! I'm a huge fan of the Moomins. Have you read the Moomins?
I'm only familiar with the TV cartoon thing. Is that wrong?
Oh God. Urgh. That is not the Moomins. The Moomins are adult, really – they are such poignant little haikus of emotion, it just happens to these little characters in Finland. No, the Moomins are fabulous. Moomins, very much! Funnily enough, I was just thinking the other day of one of the single dramas – oh, I'm going to forget the director's name… I hope it's science fantasy enough for you to know. There's a film called Penda's Fen, that had the guy from Timeslip in it, years later – he was the lead in it. Oh, and it's by a really famous British director [we both later remember that it's David Rudkin!]… he's one of these directors that had a reputation in the seventies, and he kind of… stopped. I think he's still working, but because his work was so kind of 'out there', it kind of fell out of fashion. But extraordinary pieces of work… Penda's Fen, again, I haven't seen for about fifteen years. I first saw it when I was about sixteen, so what's that – about thirty years ago. Argh! So whether it holds up I don't know… but in my memory it was unbelievably brilliant.
What grabbed you about it?
It was a mix. The storytelling of it was incredibly visual – which was kind of what this director did – but absolutely fantastic and surreal, but pointedly fantastic and surreal, just choosing to tell the story in that form without commenting on it. So you have all these dream images that tell you about this character's emotional journey, and he was using Elgar's music as well. It kind of about a guy who's living in rural middle England, is in the TA, and his father's a vicar, and he plays the organ in the church, and is absolutely po-faced. He's verging on fundamentalist Christian – "We must defend the empire, even though there's nothing left" – so that dates it a bit, but his thinking is that everything should be very, very proper. And in the course of one adolescent summer, he discovers that in fact he's not the son of the vicar, he's adopted, that his parents were – it's not clear, but I think they were - Nazis. That he's gay, that the beautiful English countryside that he thinks represents 'Jerusalem', is in fact being taken over with nuclear bunkers and chemical dumping. And it's all done with this swelling Elgar music and these images – it's almost like he's having these waking fantasies. I saw it in the summer of '76 when we had this freak heatwave, even in Aberdeen, and it's a hot summer landscape, this setting. And I was just turning sixteen… and I think I still want to achieve a piece of TV drama that does to others what that did to me… and then there's Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sorry! It's true!
Fair enough - it was a landmark show for its time…
It's the quality of the acting – Patrick Stewart. I did a thing for the RSC last year, and I was all like, Please can I have Patrick Stewart in it? "Yeah, in your dreams!". The one with the Borg, he's fabulous in, First Contact.
Next Gen at the time was great, yeah – though I think Star Trek as a whole got slightly diluted by going on for so long. Possibly like Doctor Who, in fact, by the end – "You've been making this for too long and the viewers have lost the fondness for it". By the time it stuttered to a halt, nobody cared…
Oh God, I did! It probably says something about me, but at that time I was a single mother, getting about two hours' sleep a night, living in one room in West Hampstead. And the only thing that kept me going was Star Trek: The Next Generation! I was buying them on video as soon as they were released, and watching them and watching them. And when the very last one was on, I remember sitting in front of the telly sobbing! And then putting on Voyager and going "Oh. Okay…".
The one I really like was Deep Space Nine…
Yeah, I liked Deep Space Nine, latterly. Much darker.
They seemed to try to turn it into Next Generation eventually – giving them a spaceship and so on, trying to turn it into something it wasn't.
There was that time when Next Generation had stopped… had Voyager not started yet?
I don't think those quite crossed over, no… but I always liked the way DS9 had an identity of its own, and I was forever wishing they would stop messing with it. And then when you got to Voyager and Enterprise…
Oh, don't let's talk about Enterprise. I lasted all of Voyager, just on my Star Trek hunger, and then when Enterprise came, I tried. I really tried. But halfway through series two, I thought "You know what? I've given you enough…"
I did that too – during fourth or fifth series Voyager. Too much!
And they were repeating all the best plots, as well.
It's bizarre to think, though, that Star Trek in all those various forms lasted about sixteen years uninterrupted…
Doctor Who's got it beat, though, now, hasn't it?
Oh yeah… anything else inspirational that springs to mind? I know it's one of those questions that's so open ended.
Blade Runner – just in terms of… again, it's way outside… it's a zone I want to prove I could get to. If I could write something like Blade Runner… there's been so much that imitates it since, but when you rewatch it now, it doesn't date. Something about the style of the costume, a bit – but even then, they were doing that kind of retro, forties, thing, so it sustains. The fact that they've got this kind of messed-up climate – it all kind of still hangs together.
You do forget, watching it, that it was made nearly thirty years ago. When it came out, I watched it with a mate and his family, and I was the only person in the room that liked it. They thought it was boring. Nooooooooooo! It was hypnotic, is what it was.
And actually, I had a wee breast cancer scare. It all turned out to be fine, but the day I got the diagnosis that there was something dodgy and they'd need to do something about it… you can imagine, I was in this absolute state. And we were supposed to go and see Blade Runner that night. And I completely forgot that there was anything else going on in my life! And that was the version with the clunky voice-over…
I still do love it, too. Looking forward to the third version!
Me too! [Laughs] And my son's going "You're not going to buy it again, are you?". Yeah!
So am I. There's no point denying it. If I pretend otherwise, I'm only kidding myself!
I've got to mention Star Wars as well – the experience, I think, again, of its time and what it meant for you emotionally at that age, and the fact that there were three parts. The Empire Strikes Back is the only one that is in any way a decent movie, but the whole journey… and I had the experience of having watched the originals years before when I was a student, and when they re-released it, Danny, my wee boy, must have been about eight, and I thought "I've got to take him to see this!" – and he was already at the 'rolling the eyes at me' stage! But I took him to see Star Wars, and he came out of the cinema… finally I had something where I could say "See! See! Told you it was brilliant!". And we were going down West End Lane doing the 'light sabres' thing. I ended up working with Pernilla August on a film that never got made. And that was at a time when The Phantom Menace was out. Over which we'll draw a veil, because it was a terrible film! But when The Phantom Menace got its screening in Leicester Square, Pernilla rang me up and said "Oh darling, I'm in this thing, do you want to come?". I'm thinking it's a cast and crew screening, and saying "Oh yeah – can I bring Danny?". And she said yes, and put the phone down, and then about ten minutes later she rang back and said "Darling… I think you have to wear special clothes".
She makes it sound like you need overalls or something…
…so I kind of twigged that maybe we'd need to dress up. So I ran into John Lewis with Danny, and I just grabbed the first thing that fitted me. Danny got this little-boy posh shirt. But I've still not twigged yet that this might be a big event… but then there's this red carpet, and we're walking up this red carpet… and people clapped! And Danny hadn't had time to get his tea, because Pernilla had rung me about four in the afternoon, so Danny's walking along eating his sandwiches and his crisps, and these people started applauding him. "Good on you, son!".
And they haven't the faintest idea who either of you are!
No! It was the most fabulous experience… so we saw the whole film sitting behind Prince Charles. Again, it's not a great film, but the experience of being there was so good. And we went to the cast and crew party afterwards, and the guy who played Darth Maul, bless him – I can't remember his name…
Er. Ray something, yeah…
…he was so good, actually! Because he was there as himself, obviously – and then Danny's looking around and he sees him. 'It's Darth Maul!'. And the guy looked at Danny as himself, and thought, 'Ah! Child!', and gave him this evil stare and started advancing on him menacingly. And I thought, bless you – because Danny's never forgotten that. "Remember when I had to fight Darth Maul…?".
I saw that with the kids at the Doctor Who concert in Cardiff last year – there were monsters wandering through the audience, and it was a great thing to do.
It's like you were saying – they like the darkness, they like being scared…
…as long as there's a bit of security there, yeah.
But with Star Wars, again – we've seen so much since that imitates it and eclipses it and is so much more powerful… but it's one where you had to be there. And for me, the cool thing was being able to give that to my own son, years later.
It's kind of happening with Doctor Who now – it was noticeable even before the show came back, that conventions suddenly seemed to acquire a lot of kids attending them, and it was people had been fans hitting their thirties and having kids of that sort of age getting into the show as well. And that has exploded in the last two years, obviously – it's the kids' own favourite again. And it's great! For years it was just a geek thing – by the end of the original show, that's kind of all it was on television, which was a shame, because it had come out of its lull – and by the very end, was a great programme again… but no-one was watching.
Yeah, that was the BBC perception of it, unfortunately. But again, what doest hat word mean, 'geek'. Is it people that are passionate about a particular genre? Why are you pejorative about it? You don't do it to detective stories, and how many bloody detectives are there? I still think that all the television channels underestimate the hunger for science fiction, and I think that's to do with their prejudice. And I think it they actually commissioned a pile more, of all different types reflecting what you get in science fiction novels, they would get a big surprise, actually.
Quite possibly. Is the prejudice partly fuelled by knowledge of how expensive science fiction is?
It depends how you do it, doesn't it? I think if you commit to a concept… I suppose that's kind of what I'm trying to develop at the moment, is the idea of something that is science fiction or science fantasy, but is not going to cost a million bucks. Because it doesn't have to be about effects or sets or costumes or props, does it…?
So you've got a gap right in front of you. Go and fill it!
I'll do my best!
The 'geek' thing is interesting these days – the whole concept, if perhaps not the word itself, has been grabbed and reclaimed. That's what Tarantino is, that's what Kevin Smith it… and Russell, probably! "I might be a geek, but I'm a geek who can do this, and do it this well, and I'm now this powerful – so what are you going to say about it?". And I think that's marvellous…
Oh! Just you saying that reminds me – the first Matrix movie. The other two, well… but the first Matrix, oh my God…
Don't get it. Looks great, sounds great… didn't sell itself to me. A little too self-important for me!
Oh, you could see where they were going to go! Whereas I was just overwhelmed by Keanu Reeves and the whole… yeah, the acting. And those effects that we hadn't seen before – though now, it's "Please, could you stop doing that?".
That 'bullet time' thing? If I see it once more, I'll be using bullets of my own… it's interesting that all the SF things you're talking about are the real mainstream blockbusters, the flashy-bangy things. They're not subtle…
And it's not what I write, is it?
Presumably there must be something inside you that would be capable of doing it, though – if you're a good writer and you've absorbed all this stuff…
I don't know. You look at the making of Blade Runner and it's clear that it was almost a happy accident, it sounds like a chaotic process – which is why there is a 'version three' coming out. So… who made that film? Who made the thing that we're all responding to? It's almost like it happened by default, and maybe it's just that the original concept, the short story, was so strong. I don't think, even if I were even to achieve something like that – and it's very unlikely anyone would give me the opportunity to write something with that huge a budget – I would have started down a road twenty years ago that I'm still not even on, yet. And even if you did, it wouldn't be 'your film' at the end of the day. Those films are just immense machines, aren't they? Immense… but I suppose to be responsible for that core thing, the thing that makes it work, would be extremely cool… I think what Ridley Scott does brilliantly as a director is that he gets the maximum from every single scene. Every single scene gets pushed to its emotional max, whatever that is. And he does it with his other movies as well, but they're more or less successful depending on how strong the narrative is that they're supplying him with. And the very fact that the very narrative of Blade Runner has been re-structured several times - but yet we still love it – there's something in that whole 'What is human? What is love?' thing that I think is what makes it. And that amazing speech that Rutger Hauer has, which is about mortality, really, isn't it – 'All those moments lost like tears in rain' – it's about the human condition, isn't it? You can't get bigger than that…
WITH THANKS TO RONA MUNRO AND STEPHEN GREENHORN

STEVEN MOFFAT 2007

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:02:21 +0000

Steven Moffat's son Joshua has made him a Doctor Who coffee mug. A rather lovely thing, with the Empty Child on one side and a Clockwork Robot on the other. "No-one gets to drink out of it except me!" Steven thunders, before completely contradicting himself and handing it to me anyway, because he's put milk in the wrong mug. I feel rather privileged, for a few seconds. "I hope your interview technique's up to scratch these days" Steven begins. Er, why? "Well, just the other day I was interviewed about Doctor Who, by Doctor Who, on the set of Newsnight. So, you know, no pressure or anything…". Well, here goes…
You've won some awards since last we spoke…
Two awards in fact! The Hugo Award's up there, on that shelf. You've got to love an award that's got a detachable rocket… and there next to it is the 'TV moment of the year' for 2005, for the end of The Doctor Dances.
For the Hugo, I seem to remember that you mentioned in the acceptance note you sent to the States that you'd been aware of these awards because of David Gerrold's book about his Star Trek episode…
The Trouble With Tribbles, yes. I'd sort of forgotten about them, I was a bit vague when I got nominated, to be honest, you know – "What is that?" But then I remembered - of course, it's a thing that Americans win for Star Trek! And as the memories came flooding back, the best thing was – and I wish I'd said this at the time – do you remember a science fiction magazine called Starlog? I'm sure it's still around somewhere. When I was young, in Paisley, I used to see Starlog, and it would never ever talk about Doctor Who, it was all Star Wars and Star Trek, and I would leaf through it in the hope of finding a little piece about Doctor Who that would in some way confer status on it. And then one month, I saw on the top right corner of the Starlog cover, the words 'Doctor Who'. Fantastic! And I had to save up to buy it, that's how long ago it was – and then it wasn't even a proper article about Doctor Who. It broke my heart! But it did contain the sentence "Doctor Who is unlikely ever to win a Hugo", and the rest of it was just as patronising. And I was devastated. But all these years later, Doctor Who got the top three places! And I came top! So get it right up you, Starlog - get on your knees! That was a great moment of personal triumph…and The Girl in the Fireplace has also been nominated for a Hugo now, along with Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and School Reunion. I'm a bit relaxed about it now; "I've already got one, guys - if one of you would care to join me… but it still won't be level, because I'll have a Hugo and a nomination!". And I've been nominated for a Nebula. Er, whatever that is…! It's kind of like the RTS Award to the Hugo's BAFTA…
Does winning these 'niche' awards mean as much to you as it might to some of the other writers? You're not really as 'steeped in fandom', as Paul Cornell might put it, as some of the writers…
Oh, of course it does, it means something every single time. I mean, to be singled out of a series like Doctor Who, on a couple of occasions now, is phenomenal, because it's a phenomenally good show. The standard of Doctor Who - we can get relaxed and cynical about it and have our favourites and our least favourites, but the fact is that there isn't an episode of modern Doctor Who that isn't hugely entertaining and enjoyable – even the weakest ones are funny and engaging, and I've definitely watched them more than once. And anyway, what do you mean, "not steeped in it"? First Thursday of every month, I'm out in the pub with all my little Doctor Who friends… Paul's more of a serious science fiction buff, I think it's kind of his lifetime ambition to win a Hugo.
These days he says he wants to win one for one of his novels…
Yeah… but I don't think he'd turn it down, do you? And, you know, Human Nature has always been a phenomenal book, probably the best of that series, and if they bring it to the screen with all those values intact, I think it will romp home. It always has before! And David Tennant playing that material will be good – David can be a fantastic alien, but you watch something like Recovery and he's suddenly a human being again, and that will be amazing…
Moving on to The Girl in the Fireplace - I have vague memories that that story might, at one stage, have been the hook for the first Christmas special…?
It may be that that's true, although it's not something I've heard. I know it was at one time posited, tentatively, as episode one of series two, in place of New Earth, but that was not really what Russell wanted to do. At that time what he really wanted to do was Madame De Pompadour - as it was then called - as episode two, with what became The Christmas Invasion - David's first modern-day story - as episode one. But then getting the Christmas special meant that was lopped off and 'journey in the TARDIS' became the first episode. So it wasn't very satisfying that the first episode was going to be a Madame De Pompadour historical story. And when I handed my script in, Russell was doubly unsure – because The Girl in the Fireplace is not your 'traditional' adventure at all. And that's how you have to start a series, you restate in the simplest terms, what the series in – you get in the TARDIS, go someplace, and come back from there, from the framework of modern-day England. And so The Girl in the Fireplace could not have been as early in the series as originally intended. Because if you'd put that as episode one, you're saying 'This is what the series is…'
…and it's absolutely not – it's very atypical of the series as a whole. So what were you handed? Was it purely the title Madame De Pompadour?
That, plus the fact that in reality there had been a clockwork man brought to her, which played chess. So Russell suggested that, that the clockwork man might be an alien space monster. But I ended up going quite a long way from that idea…
How different was your first draft from the script you think they were expecting?
Hugely different! Majorly different. I now sort of realise – I've grown up since then! – that mine was a bit of a swizz. I put a spaceship in there. It ended up as 'Doctor in love'. They thought they were getting 'Historical Celebrity', but what they got was Tom's Midnight Garden with sex. They were very keen on the script, and it changed almost not at all as it developed, but nonetheless this time round Russell actually sent me an e-mail saying "Okay – is there anything you haven't told us? Just like the last one wasn't 'Madame De Pompadour', it was 'Doctor in Love'…what are you not telling us this time? And here's what I'm doing for the rest of the series…". He very kindly does give me the brief of 'whatever you want'… as long as I tell them what that is!
Given that it was 'Doctor Who in love', were you worried that you might be undermining - or undermined by – the extended Doctor-Rose love story that formed the spine of the first two series?
Yeah, but where my episode existed in the series – in the first series there is really very little 'Doctor and Rose in love', I think the first real display of it is the "Why do you assume I don't dance?" bit in The Doctor Dances. It's really only toward the end of that series that Rose stops popping out of the TARDIS looking for the first available male. She regards herself as absolutely available. So it wasn't a major element at that time – and her boyfriend Mickey had just come on board the TARDIS, anyway. And in point of fact, the Doctor and Rose are not in a relationship. They're not doing the one key thing that distinguishes a relationship from a close friendship, so there's nothing wrong with him having an infatuation with someone else. And anyway, who says the Doctor would have a problem with having two girlfriends? When I got stopped at the Gallifrey convention in LA by people saying "How could the Doctor love Reinette when he loved Rose?", I just say "Have you ever met a man?". No problem!
How did Mickey fit into all this? Did he complicate things, or make life easier for you?
Initially I wasn't at all keen on having Mickey, I wasn't sure what to do with him – but in the way the story was structured it worked well, that Rose had her boyfriend and the Doctor had his girlfriend. But anyway, I say it's 'Doctor in love', but we never really know what he thinks. It all takes place in a few hours for him – in the whole time he knows Reinette he doesn't change his shirt or shave – whereas it's her entire life. She's definitely in love with him, I think, and he's obviously quite smitten, but it's all just in the space of one reasonably long party for him. He wouldn't have made a major decision about his life in that time. He was keen, and in a wonderful moment of naivete he was going to invite her on board the TARDIS. Can you imagine how that would have worked? "Rose – good news! Been getting a bit blokey round here with me and Mickey, eh? Well, here she is – another girl!" And Mickey taking the Doctor aside and saying "Look, mate, this isn't how it works – you don't steal my girlfriend, then steal the King of France's girlfriend, and then put us all in the same box and think it's going to work!".
And on a more practical level, she'd never have got through the doors – not in that frock…
There was a line about that in one draft, which I think we dropped because it was a bit saucy - "Lose the dress"!
Why fix on the fireplace as the point of focus?
That's where I started from. I was reading a book – because I had to read a book for research, which I hate - and it was quite a long book. It's not really my kind of thing, that sort of period stuff. By 'period stuff', I mean 'history'! Stuff that happened 'ago'! It's all rubbish and I'm glad that it's over… so I was ploughing my way through this interminable book, and there was a bit about a man, Duke De Richelieu I think, who discovered his wife was cheating on him because she's installed a revolving fireplace. And as clues go… what happened, he was leaning against it and it fell open? "Darling! Are you having an affair with him?". So I was roaring with laughter at that idea, and thought I should have a revolving fireplace. But if it's Doctor Who, it's got to be a 'space and time' revolving fireplace – that's a given, isn't it? And I was thinking, how do I parachute the Doctor into this woman's life as quickly as possible, and decided "What if I just revolve the fireplace?". Initially I was thinking about just having him arriving in her bedchamber and her being grown up, but then I started thinking along the lines of Tom's Midnight Garden with lots of time windows into her life, and it all sort of evolved from there.
But I've heard you describe the TARDIS as 'the wardrobe', as essentially the route into Narnia – but here you kind of created another one…
Yeah, it's a weird thing, but I think the TARDIS has to be left where it is. It's the arrival point. There could be a version of that story where we used the TARDIS throughout, stuttering through time, you could do it that way… but instinctively I don't think the TARDIS should be at the centre of the story. It rarely is, and I never feel that it should be. It's how the Doctor arrives – he leaves the TARDIS and doesn't go back until the story's over – and he sort of, pretty much, never uses it during the adventure even though on many occasions he could presumably solve the entire problem using the TARDIS. There seems to be a fundamental unspoken rule about that – the TARDIS is a device to start and end the story, but isn't used during it. Maybe because it's too powerful – if the Doctor was allowed to use the TARDIS during a story, you start to think "Why doesn't he use it every week?". Never mind the time travel function, it's bigger on the inside – you could rescue the entire population of the Ark inside the TARDIS. Running out of air? Open the doors! I know I've had some stick, and quite rightly, for the bit where Rose asks why they can't use the TARDIS to rescue Reinette and he says "We can't – we're part of events now". I like to think that underneath that, that is part of the reason. The TARDIS is such a powerful, magical thing that the Doctor can only use it to enter and exit and he knows that if he tries to use it to cheat, that something terrible will happen to time, that the way it works has such an effect on the causal nature of the universe. I think there's something sensible about that, and also in story terms, this man arrives with the most powerful piece of kit in the universe and never uses it. So you have to wonder… why doesn't he?
Did the episode always open with the 'flash-forward' moment of being at the party?
First of all, it's technically not a flash-forward – we see her at the party at the beginning, and then 3000 years later the Doctor arrives on the spaceship and then we start travelling back in time. But no, I didn't – originally there was something else, someone being hacked up in Versailles by a clockwork robot. The reason I eventually opened it the way I did was that I knew if we had a reasonably big star playing Reinette, what with all the childhood sequences it would be about fifteen minutes before we met the guest star, and that would be holding back too long. So the scene at the beginning says "Look who's in it!". And then also, as it evolved as a kind of love story, I think you needed warning. So she says right at the start, "the only man, except you, that I have ever loved… Doctor! Doctor!". So you're told in advance, hang on tight, the Doctor's going to be in love - I think we needed to say 'this is where we're going to take you this week'. It now seems very quaint and charming, now that it's been a popular episode, but at the time it seemed quite a radical thing to do...
And what is it that's supposedly, logistically wrong with the broken clock?
It's very simple – the Doctor says that the clock is broken, but it's the wrong clock. Because the fireplace had turned one hundred and eighty degrees, so that the clock that was in Reinette's room is on the other side of the fireplace now. So someone had broken her clock to stop it ticking, so that its own ticking would not be noticed… but the clock that the clockwork man had broken is now on the other side of the fireplace. But actually, if you take that logic further, it's not really wrong, because the clockwork man would have to break the clocks on both sides of the mantelpiece, because you can hear through the fireplace anyway. And I think I was clever at some point, she says "It's weird that clock, sometimes it's broken and sometimes it's not", which I thought was quite a spooky idea, but I never developed because at the sort of pace these scripts have to work at, you'd never get that idea in.
Apparently the horse smashing through the mirror – or, as you described it last time, 'a thing on a thing going through a thing' - caused a lot of production headaches and was nearly dropped. What might you have done instead, if it really had been impossible to effect?
I had a couple of versions. There was one version that we all loved for a night which was exactly the same as what you saw, hearing the hooves drumming, and then the Doctor coming somersaulting through the mirror and landing on the floor, getting up and saying "there are times you don't want a horse to stop". We all loved that for a night and then all came to our senses, all emailing each other pointing out that we were making a joke out of the Doctor's big romantic gesture, so we dropped that. And then we got rid of the horse altogether and just had the Doctor leaping through the mirror. So we lost the idea of the mirror being difficult to break, and just kept the idea that if he did break it he'd never be able to get back…
So it was the horse that was the problem, rather than just the mirror?
It was all those elements combined. I think it's still the greatest number of most difficult elements they've had to combine in one shot. It was huge, one of the most complex things they've done. But I think it was worth it! If Doctor Who is going to make a big romantic gesture for a woman he loves, he'd better be on a white horse coming through a mirror! It had to be that big… it's one of my favourite things that I've written, that bit, it's so big and so mad and so perfectly romantic that she waits all that time, fifteen years or so, and he arrives at the crisis moment.
And did you always have it in mind that the audience wouldn't follow the logic of the plot until the very last shot of the spaceship exterior? And that Doctor, Rose and Mickey would never find out at all?
That was part of it from the start - I always had a vague sort of map, that that was absolutely going to be the case. I love things where you find out what's going on in the last frame. It's Citizen Kane, isn't it? And that reveal works really well. And I think it was also kind of necessary, because there are some other aspects of the plot where we never quite find out how they work. I had a logical system for how the spaceship works, for instance, but it's never shown on screen. Those aren't plot holes so much as plot omissions, and I think that's legitimate if it's a story in which the Doctor himself never finds out the whole picture – he finds out enough, but not quite the whole thing. He doesn't find out why the time windows operate sequentially – why does each one take him to a different place, why is it always in the right order? And I had stuff supporting all of that, and I did have a version of the script - which we threw away - where we made much more of that. But it was boring, and it took away from the romance and the mystery. I think as it stands, you have just enough to understand what's going on, although there are things you never learn. Like why the robots are clockwork, for instance - which I actually think should still have been in it – which is that they will continue to work even if the power is turned off. But if you want to keep the story romantic and enigmatic you don't want someone getting a flipchart out and explaining with a pointer how it all works. It was an exercise in mood - the logic of the visuals, of having a fireplace on a spaceship, stepping through the tapestry from Versailles to the spaceship corridor… all those things work visually and emotionally, rather than practically.
It's kind of the stuff you'd have explained in the novelisation, if you'd written the episode twenty years ago?
I suppose so! But I think even if the episode had been twice the length, there are things you would hold back on. The Doctor dashes through this adventure and I think it really affects him. It's not that he's actually in love, but he's definitely infatuated, it's a giddy, extraordinary whirl for him, and he never gets a complete handle on why the robots were after Reinette, he goes away not understanding that, and you want the audience to be swept up in that. Exposition doesn't half make the shadows less creepy! The Doctor often doesn't understand the whole picture - look at The Satan Pit - and that's okay, as long as you have him say "I don't know", as long as you make it clear to the audience that it's okay that they don't know. I hate it when I'm watching something and thinking "I don't know whether or not I'm supposed to understand this? Am I supposed to recognise that man, or what?". But if someone tells you "You're not supposed to understand this", that's fine.
Once again, your episode looked rather beautiful and expensive…
I don't know where The Girl in the Fireplace stands in the pantheon of expensive episodes. The 'mirror moment' was certainly expensive, but overall I don't think it was as big as the two part stories. The Empty Child was pretty expensive. My new one's cheap!
But even though The Girl on the Fireplace was a single episode, you did create two very different 'worlds' to situate it in…
They're very smart, though, and Russell is very shrewd. They can do 'period', the costumes exist, you just go and hire them. And as you heard Russell say on Doctor Who Confidential, let's not worry about them being accurate, let's just make them gorgeous. And I don't think it is all that accurate, it's 'Hollywood-biopic' accurate…
Which is the same philosophy as the Blitz in the previous one – it's not really what the Blitz was like, but it's how we want to see it.
Yes, it's a 'pretty' version of reality. So they went for gorgeousness rather than authenticity. And originally I wrote the spaceship as gleaming and hi-tech, a sort of Star Trek: The Next Generation Enterprise. And Russell pointed out "That's expensive – if we make it a tatty old spaceship, we can do that really convincingly". If it's gleaming, then one tiny thing out of place, one door frame a little bent, and the illusion is gone. But if it's tatty, you can get away with murder!
Both your episodes thus far seem to have been moulded to the classic short-story form – they're kept focussed and self-contained, with one main theme and a twist at the end. Is that something you're conscious of, or was it indeed deliberate?
I think for these 45 minute episodes, that's not a bad form. And I like the short story form – I've written very, very few, but I think I've written them rather well. And I like a twist at the end - I don't think it hurts, if you've done everything else right. Maybe Russell would disagree, but I don't think it hurts to be a little bit clever now and then, to show how all the plotlines really do meet up, when the viewer didn't think they would. I do take the point that Russell has made, very eloquently, that being cleverer than the audience means that audience is not on the rollercoaster with you – it's about the ride, not the destination. But I think if you get the ride right, I don't think it hurts to have a clever bit at the end, that you've worked quite hard to conceal in the build-up. I do think Doctor Who's biggest strength is that it changes in every aspect from story to story, it can have a totally different ambition from story to story. I would probably argue, for purely selfish reasons, that a bit of full-on cleverness has its place in Doctor Who. But it's like Russell's always saying, and again I think he's right, that 'funny' is better than 'witty', and I'm probably guilty of writing 'witty' rather than 'funny'. I always feel personally admonished by his interviews! But being witty, now and then, doesn't hurt either…
Your dialogue does feel slightly different to that in other episodes – not enough to be out of place, but clearly coming from a different mind…
There's probably - and it's not necessarily to my advantage - a slightly more 'studied' element to my dialogue. I probably try to pack as many funny - or witty! - lines in as I can…
You previously claimed not to like 'bittersweet' endings, but the one area where your previous two stories have differed very much is in the ending – The Doctor Dances is the happiest thing ever shown, whereas The Girl in the Fireplace certainly isn't…
Go back and look at that interview – I did say "You haven't seen my next one yet"! It's a sad ending – it's not a bitter or cheap or nasty ending, it's just sad. It's about two people who miss each other – quite literally, they miss each other, rather than her being eaten by a Klargthon or whatever, she just dies when she was always going to die. She reaches her allotted span. So it's bittersweet. On the whole, I do like happy endings… but that was the right ending for that story. I mean, you know that if someone's become Doctor Who's girlfriend and you know she's not going to be in it next week that she's going to croak! It's like saying "I love you" to James Bond…
Moving on to your new episode, Blink – at the moment I only know two things. Firstly it has the them of 'haunted house', and secondly it's this season's 'cheap' one, without much use of the regulars. Were these both presented to you or did you chase for them?
A bit of both. At the beginning there was some possibility, even quite a strong one, that I'd be doing a couple of episodes, which I was quite keen on. And then I worked out that I just couldn't, what with the time I was spending on Jekyll and other responsibilities. But I was still meant to be doing an episode early in the run and I couldn't do that either – they'd allotted me a slot and said I had this much money and so much CGI, but again I just couldn't do it. So on the third attempt, I said "If you want, I'll do the cheap one" - the bottom-of-the-season-poll one with no special effects, that doesn't have the Doctor in it. So I've done the season cheapie! I've fallen on my sword for Russell…
And was it a different challenge to your previous episodes, working within different restraints?
It's not different, really. I've written lots of things that Doctor Who doesn't turn up in! And Doctor Who kind of lends itself to that anyway. There's a strand of Doctor Who, if you think about it, where the scariest and most iconic moments take place in the main character's absence – because the one thing that can vitiate the impact of a monster is the presence of the man that can defeat them. So there is a strand that's about the companion being alone against something terrible coming out of a wall at them. And that's what this episode is – scary monsters appear, and the Doctor isn't there. He's in touch, but he's not there! But at the same time, I don't know how it will go down. I doubt it will top any polls, because of the simple fact that Doctor Who should do what it says on the tin, which is provide you with David Tennant popping out of his TARDIS and kicking the crap out of alien nasties.
But I think it needs an episode every now and then that's not just that…
I think ten weeks in, it's probably exactly the right moment to take a side step. And remind you of why you normally like it so much! But to do something slightly different with it. What Russell chose to do with his story in this slot [Love & Monsters] – which would have been my first choice too, but I didn't get first pick! – was to do something about Doctor Who fans, really. It's stepping outside a Doctor Who story, imagining what it looks like to someone outside it, which is the point of the Scooby-Doo chase gag. I didn't have that option, so I came up with another story which tries to be Doctor Who by being genuinely scary. And the Doctor is there, you're never in any doubt that it's Doctor Who – he has a presence by various means, and it's not like he's never in it. David still has a phenomenal amount of dialogue, pages and pages of the stuff, so you get your hit of 'Doctor', there's more of him than there is in Love & Monsters. There are some good, iconic Doctor Who scares, it's just that they're the sort of Doctor Who 'moments' you get where the Doctor's not there.
And what about the 'haunted house' aspect – everyone knows what genre you mean, but it covers a wide range of possibilities…
At the tone meetings, Russell always says one word that covers the tone of the entire episode. So for The Empty Child the word was 'romantic', and for The Girl in the Fireplace it was 'gorgeous'. And for this one, he said 'haunted house'. What he also said was "Don't get clever – there will be people watching this series who will never have seen 'haunted house' on television at 7 o'clock, and let's give a haunted house. Don't think you have to do a twist on it, or your great new take on what 'haunted house' should be – let's give them classic 'haunted house'!"
So it's sort of the classic Victorian ghost story?
Yes, it is that kind of setting, there's a conservatory and so on. And it is creepy, people have told me that it's scary - I find it quite hard to judge.
How are you finding writing for Martha, compared to Rose?
It doesn't affect me much, but I think it's hugely effective, the Doctor-Martha relationship. I think it's a very good plan for David's Doctor, to be in the presence of Martha, who really fancies him, but he doesn't really notice. He likes her, he warms to her, but he's playing it a lot more like one of the old Doctors – that she's a plucky, clever little thing! – whereas she's thinking "Phwooar! I wouldn't half!". David's character doesn't realise he's a hot young guy, and that's effective – he's got his tight suit on, and walking around looking gorgeous, girls are swooning over him, but he doesn't know, he's being a boffin. It makes him a bit of a 'Professor' again, it reminds you that he's an old guy, that he's not really going dancing…
'Dancing' again - is the metaphor extended further this time?
Not in Blink, no. I think I was getting a bit up myself when I did that, to be honest. It shouldn't matter that it's me writing Doctor Who this week – I shouldn't make it a sequel to my last episode, it should be a sequel to the episode before mine. I think I was being a bit arsey with the banana gag and so on. I never even thought people would pick up on it as much as they did, when I put the banana gag in again for David, that they'd remember Chris doing it. And the 'dancing' thing, I sort of drifted into – the Doctor and Reinette were actually going to dance, the scene just worked and creates a tremendous cliffhanger of ambiguity when she drags him off. It somehow makes a show bigger if you realise you've got to speculate on what happened after a moment like that. You have to work out what happened afterwards – no one knows, not even me. It's not canonical! Nothing that happened after than happened, I can have my theory but it's no more 'real' than anyone else's…
I get the impression some fans don't approve of the scene that follows that, the 'drunk' bit. Even though he's not actually drunk anyway!
There were a lot of people thinking along those lines when I was young, when Tom Baker took over. Doctors up until that point had been quite patrician and older, and he was the outrageous, student-y one, who seemed so young back then. But I think getting the Doctor right is partly about trying to get him to do the most surprising thing that you can imagine – that's when he's being the Doctor, when he says the most ridiculous thing, when his response to a situation is so unexpected, I think that's Doctor Who. And there's something weirdly down-to-earth about it, he's always talking about something really trivial in the middle of a crisis. So the idea that in the middle of this moment with every hoary cliché of science fiction – I specified the tables at forty-five degrees, the metal bands around Rose and Mickey, the robots threatening them, it's total sci-fi nonsense – and into this waltzes the Doctor, being the absolute opposite of it all, being apparently pissed-up…
You can see a parallel with the moment in Genesis of the Daleks, where Sarah and Harry are strapped up in the same way – though that was tonally very 'melodramatic', it's a perfectly legitimate thing to have the Doctor come in and undercut that sort of mood.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say – the 'undercutting' thing is very Doctor Who. The Doctor undercuts the mood of the moment, and that is frequently what he does in any scene – he's too casual or too flippant, he's off-key for the melodrama of the situation, which is one of the glories of the Doctor. And that scene was just an extreme version of it. And also, at a technical level, it was the exposition scene in the episode – it's as much exposition as you ever get. You have to get across all this rather boring information about the robots and the spaceship and Reinette having to be 37 years old – so you smuggle it in during a comedy scene, where the Doctor has his tie round his head and his shades on. I didn't specify the tie but I did specify the shades! But the two things that category of Doctor Who fan to which you refer absolutely hated, were that, and the wink – the wink from horseback, later on. Which I thought was fantastic - and it's David's wink, nothing to do with me. But some people have reckoned the wink was silly. Up until that point it was all quite sensible, apparently! Clockwork men from the distant future are trying to steal the brain of Madame de Pompadour to repair their spaceship… and you're worried about a wink?! I thought it was delightful – the fact that the Doctor's so pleased with himself. He knows what he's done, he knows that he's messed up and split himself off from his companions… but he's pleased he did it, and he knows he looks cool on the horse! "I smashed through a mirror on a horse, how cool is that!". And in that moment, he's quite pleased with himself. He's solved a problem and he looks cool!
As one of very few people involved on the scripting side across all three series, have you noticed the process getting easier as more and more people get more to grips with what the show actually is?
I think it has changed. The most interesting person to ask that would of course be Russell…but I'm much better at it, I'm much quicker. On Blink, my one and only script meeting was ten minutes before the tone meeting, which was about five days before they started shooting! I did my own notes and my own draft two. I sent that it and then the next day I sent in another draft, because I'd read it by then! And up until that point it hadn't been called Blink, and I said to Russell "I'm thinking of calling it Blink", and he said "Brilliant! But if you call it that you'll have to get the word 'blink' in there as much as you can". So I ended up having to change the entire script because of the title, and it's become this thing of "Don't blink! Blink and you die!". I could tell you a lot more, I could tell you the intimate connection of Doctor Who Magazine to this episode… but I won't. We got to the finished script really fast, there was very little that we had to do to the script. I think it actually broke down into its schedule really neatly, too, so we really did shoot the first draft with tweaks. I mean, I've been a sitcom writer – so contrary to what I imagine Phil and Julie might think of me, I really do know how to write to limitations! They probably think of me as the guy who gave them the London blitz and a horse jumping through a mirror – but the fact is, if you tell me I haven't got those sort of things, I absolutely can write to restrictions. So this time I devised a monster that wouldn't be too taxing, and so on. So it all broke down pretty fast, and it is pretty much the first draft. On Jekyll I'm doing this all the time – because I'm also an executive producer on that, so all the time I'm having to do that job of moving scenes between locations, and there is a buzz in that, although it can get wearisome. But I would characterise myself as really good at that – I'm smart at being able to write my way around anything.
In both your previous stories, it's apparent that there are no real 'bad guys' – everything is just a misunderstanding. Have you noticed that yourself? Does that continue or develop in Blink?
In both of them it was repair robots gone a little astray, yes. I think there are legitimate 'bad guys' in Blink… but I remember one morning that Russell and I had a long email discussion about the banality of evil. Before we got bored! But I think it's boring to say that something is just 'evil' – it's bad writing. 'Evil' is just someone who has reasoning you don't understand, and I think it's bad for the Doctor to oppose that – the Doctor is able to decode the universe from the other guy's perspective and understand what it means from his point of view. It's a bad thing to say, and I hate myself for saying it, but the guys who flew those planes into the World Trade Centre were engaged in a selfless and heroic act, which gained them nothing and cost them everything. I mean, it was an act of hideous evil, unequivocally an appalling thing to do… but from their perspective, they died as heroes. It wasn't for personal gain, it wasn't petty. Very few people are really cynical, we just accuse other people of cynicism because we don't agree with their particular take on the world. So dramatically it's much more interesting to have two people with opposing views, each of whom thinks he is the hero of the story and the other guy is the villain. That's interesting. I think the more Doctor Who–centric answer to that question is that you've got to give the Doctor an appropriate thing to fight – if it's just 'evil', then all you have is a war, and the Doctor isn't much of a warrior. I would prefer Captain Jack or the Brigadier or someone like that if you have a war – the Doctor retires to the lab and whoever he's hired to be the gung-ho one brings the bazookas out. So to keep the Doctor at the centre at the drama you should have a mystery, and to keep the story alive, you keep the mystery going for as long as possible - only solve it at the end of the story, at the last possible moment, in an ingenious and clever way that demonstrates the Doctor's brilliance. There are, of course, terrible things going on, people being killed and so on – but from the point of view of the bad guys, they're doing what they think they should be doing, and you have the Doctor trying to understand why they think that and trying to put it right, and that's a good story. It's a better story than saying "There are people over there who just like to be baaaad, and we're going to stop them with this bomb". That's boring, it's not a story. Whereas the Doctor saying "What are those things and why are they doing that?"… if he understands why they're doing it, he can stop them doing it, and the process of finding that out, and the surprise of finding out what it is they're doing – it can be horrible but satisfying to find out that a spaceship has been repaired with meat, for instance, or that the nanogenes are just trying to repair people. It's satisfying because it looks sinister, but the Doctor says "If you look at it from this other viewpoint, it's not sinister at all", and that's a role I think he fills very satisfyingly.
Your own kids are 5 and 7 now – what do they make of Doctor Who, and of Daddy's involvement in it?
Oh, they're loving it. I think Louis is a bit vague about Doctor Who, he's on the cusp of getting into it, but Joshua loves it – and yes, he's incredibly proud that daddy wrote two of the stories, and they've been talked about among his friends as two of the best ones. I love that! I took Joshua to school a few months ago, which I hadn't done for ages, and he walked in in front of me and announced "This is my daddy, he writes Doctor Who, and he's actually here!". The first time I've been in a school playground without being bullied… I've been to the school to talk about being a television writer, you know these things where they bring parents in to talk about their jobs. And of course, all they wanted to talk about was Doctor Who, quite reasonably and sensibly, so that's what I talked about. But they understand that it's written by someone and acted by other people and so on, they've done their own school shows so they know how it works. They know that the Doctor is played by David Tennant and that David is an actor, that's all absolutely clear to them, the lines between fiction and reality, in the same way it is to you and me. And they've all got their ideas for stories. I don't know what it is about Doctor Who, maybe it just makes it look easy, but everybody wants to write one. All the kids want to make up their own monster, they've all got their own ideas for monsters, and ideas for scenes in Doctor Who. It's a kind of magic thing, it does sets kids aflame with thoughts of 'what should happen'. It's not a show which is distant like Star Trek, where they think "I wonder what will happen next week?", the kids all say "I'll tell you what should happen"! Maybe it still seems a little homespun, as if you could make your own. It's quite domestically scaled, it doesn't look huge and imposing and 'other', it fits in your living room and you think you could have a go at it.
And that's actually feeding back into it – kids appear on TV getting to design monsters and pretend to be companions, but also the show's started to do "what have the kids always wanted to see". You have shots of a million Daleks flying through space, or Daleks fighting Cybermen and so on. So there's possibly a sense of involvement there.
Absolutely, yes. Russell's very good at those things. And he's a fan and has lived through the pain of seeing things done wrongly. It used to really annoy me when people went into the TARDIS and didn't react strongly enough. You wouldn't just walk in and go "Uh, bigger than it looks", you'd go "Bloody hell, this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen, it's extraordinary". Every human being who walks into the TARDIS should do that, I think that scene always works and should always play. It's the Doctor's big secret, and it should always be shown. Is it Black Orchid where the policemen just says "Strike me pink!"? You just wouldn't do that – this is the show's biggest surprise, it's the secret we all know and we want to see people do it. Just like every week you want to see Columbo fool someone into thinking that he's stupid and then mention his wife – you don't want short-changed, you want to see it done. And Russell is brilliant on this – on Blink, he said "This scene where those two characters go into the TARDIS; they are surprised, and we see the big shot round the TARDIS. Do it again like it's brand new!". So he's got that fanboy gene, but it's sitting next to a huge television brain! That's why it's both fan-satisfying and audience-satisfying.
You've now created a drama series of your own, Jekyll. It's not especially like Doctor Who, but it's vaguely in the same sphere, with elements of SF, fantasy and horror. What appealed about the Jekyll & Hyde story as prime for reimagining for TV now?
I always liked it as a kid, or the generality of what 'Jekyll and Hyde' mean, anyway. The story is quite different from what people think it is. I don't want to spoiler you, but the big twist at the end of the original is that in fact Jekyll and Hyde are the same person! So, you see, that story just doesn't work now… it's one of those stories that has escaped from its one specific telling. Everyone has a go at it, and this is my go. It's set in the modern day, a post-watershed show, but it's been moved now to a Saturday night post-Watershed show which means it's a little shorter and I had to take all the 'fucks' out. You can't say 'fuck' on a Saturday, before 11 o'clock! But I'm absolutely in favour of that, I wish I hadn't used the word in the first place – this show has an underground lair in it, and you can't say 'fuck' in an underground lair, it's just wrong! There are some genres you just can't swear in… but it's such a mad idea that you turn into this other man. What I focussed on in this version is that he's a descendant and he's inherited the condition – he doesn't drink the potion, he just occasionally turns into this other man. The bits I liked in 'Jekyll and Hyde' stories were never the bits where he drinks the potion. I always think that you want to get through that bit to the point where the changes are uncontrollable, because that's where it's scary. It's not scary if he has to go down to his lab, lock the door, knock back the potion and become a party animal. Because we all do that, to a degree! But when he can't stop the changes, which is where we find our modern-day Jimmy Nesbitt character, who's the descendant of the original Jekyll… that's scary. There are lots of things going on, and it's essentially a sequel to the original. Jackson – as he's now called, as you can't go round being called Doctor Jekyll, can you? – has a life which he's trying to conceal from Hyde. There's an ancient organisation that's been tracking him all his life which he hasn't known about and he's starting to realise in the series. And at first he doesn't realise he's the descendant of Dr. Jekyll, he just assumes he has this strange condition which he doesn't make any connection with what he assumes to be a fictional story. And there is the ongoing mystery of how he can be an identical version of Dr. Jekyll when Jekyll had no descendants at all and wasn't married. So there's an ongoing mystery about where he actually came from… we're sort of playing with expectation. We don't actually see Hyde turn up for half an episode, and he's not like a werewolf or anything, he's just a different version of Jimmy Nesbitt. Keeping you guessing as to just how bad Hyde is, is part of the gig of the show. He's quite frightening, but as in the original story, it's not that he's necessarily evil, it's more that he's not particularly bothered whether he is or isn't. He just wants to have a good time and to shag ladies! It was originally six hours, but now it's six lots of fifty minutes…
Presumably you didn't have ten minutes worth of 'fucks'…
No, but we were slightly in trouble already, because a lot of the shows were coming in either short or just right on length at an hour, and you really don't want to be in that position. You always want to be trimming stuff out. So to our great relief, the timeslot was reduced and we were able to remove the things we didn't like. There's nothing worse than having every last shot you recorded up there on screen… an hour is a bloody long time, anyway. When I started on Doctor Who I thought it was a shame it wasn't an hour, but actually an hour is too long. We're not used to an hour any more. All American shows are forty-five minutes. Every show should be forty-five minutes! If Doctor Who can do it, any show can do it…
Doctor Who stories that used to last six weeks can be done in three-quarters of an hour these days, and the only thing that's really missing is the cliffhangers.
And you sort of get that anyway. I think you now get the entire first episode of an old Doctor Who, right up to the cliffhanger scream, in the minute before the credits roll!
So do you now see yourself as a drama writer, rather than a comedy writer who dabbles in drama? Drama does seem to be all you're up to at the moment, and it's a long time since you wrote a sitcom…
I see myself as a writer, really. It's ages since I've done comedy, but I really comedy and I'm sure I'll go back to it. But the kind of comedy I like writing, though, was the most unfashionable thing. I liked big, studio-audience sitcom, the big night out with the audience laughing. And I do appreciate that has sort of died…
I thought it had died but is sort of coming back – The I.T. Crowd and so on…
Yeah, and that's a good show – but I think what's happening is that if a show like Coupling was starting up now, you wouldn't even dream of doing it in front of a studio audience. It's sort of a drama show with laughs, it takes place in more or less the real world, which The I.T. Crowd clearly doesn't – it's a mental world, like Father Ted, it's a hugely heightened world. And I think that's what sitcom has become, whereas something like Coupling would now be made Cold Feet style. By the time Coupling was ending, we were looking round and asking "Is there anyone else making a vaguely real world sitcom in front of a studio audience?" and not seeing any. And that was the kind of comedy I liked, almost as a lifestyle choice as much as anything – the week's rehearsal, the studio audience, the boozing afterwards. Because there's nothing more boring than single-camera filming. The results are polished and lovely, but it's so boring! I don't do much at filming, I just keep up with rushes – otherwise your entire writing life would pass you by. Because for the most part, as a writer, you don't do anything on the set at all. And if there is something for me to do on the set, it means something has gone wrong! I've already been to 28 meetings about that day's filming, so I shouldn't still be fixing things. But it was such fun doing Coupling for all those years, I miss it.
Is Jekyll self-contained, or might it continue?
It's both. Like the wise old television tart I am, I've given it both an ending and a cliffhanger, so that you can take your choice. From the final scene you could absolutely take the view either that it could never come back… or that it must come back! I've got used to writing those over the years. So if it fails entirely, I'll tell people it was a one-off. "What do you mean? It was a one-off, it's finished, it had an ending!". And if it comes back, "Come on! Look at all those things I left trailing…!".
And I understand you're working on a Tintin movie with Steven Spielberg…?
Well, I might have been sacked from it by the time this is printed – there are Americans involved, and they do tend to sack people. That came from Doctor Who! The people at DreamWorks liked The Girl in the Fireplace and The Empty Child, so they got in touch with me. And because Spielberg was involved… how do you say 'no', exactly? I have now started to say "I'll take my phone – Spielberg might call!". Because he might! Or someone might say "Spielberg called while you were out" – well, yeah. That happens now! My wife Sue got to hand me the phone saying "It's Steven Spielberg". "Hello, Steven, how are you? Mate?". It will get miserable, I'm sure.
And is there anything else, or are all these projects occupying 52 weeks of your year these days?
Oh Christ! I've got a romantic comedy TV pilot I'm writing for my wife, called Adam and Eve, which I still haven't finished and I'm trying to juggle with Tintin at the moment. I suppose Adam and Eve is comedy, but done in a drama slot. Because truthfully, when I look at Coupling now, a few years later, I become aware of a certain amount of damage inflicted on the intelligence of the show by the braying of the audience laughter. It sort of coarsens it. Coupling is not a stupid show, it's quite a clever show, but the clever remarks are ignored and people saying 'arse' gets a bellow from the audience. So it's a smarter show than it came off as. So this Adam and Eve is kind of in the same area, romance and all that, just without a studio audience and without quite so many sexual references. More granny-friendly!
Any plans for more Doctor Who, now that we know for sure we've got at least a fourth series?
I've got a good idea what I'm doing…
…but you're not going to tell me what it is?
No! It's an idea I suggested, I think after I'd written the first episode of my two-parter, The Empty Child. So it's an old, old idea that I proposed ages ago and Russell really loved and we've kept meaning to do it, but he gave me Madame De Pompadour instead, and on the third series I volunteered to do the Doctor-light episode. But now at last, this idea's time has come…!
First published in Doctor Who Magazine 383 and reproduced by permission of Panini UK.

CHRIS CHIBNALL 2007

Wed, 7 Feb 2007 14:56:00 +0000

Okay, I'm a Doctor Who fan – I'm an expert at seeing patterns that aren't there. But it does seem to me that there's a pattern emerging with the new writers who've been brought onto Doctor Who this year – they all seem to have a lot of theatre experience and to have moved sideways into telly. I can't work out if that's significant in any way, though, and as Chris Chibnall points out straight away, "There is no such a thing as a 'standard' writing career!"
I think that's probably a good thing – it's so hard to get into writing, it's not like there's a training school to go to. Now there are degrees in script writing and stuff, but even if you do that, you're still going to spend years having to earn some money elsewhere before you end up writing full time. I spent pretty much all of my twenties doing a variety of mad jobs with mad people – fantastic mad people! – and it was when I was about 30 that I got the first paid writing job. But throughout my twenties I was doing all these different jobs and writing at evenings and weekends. And at work, when nobody was looking! And there's an element that it's a test of how much you want to do it, as well – when you end up in that situation you realise 'this is what I really want', because you're devoting a lot of time to it when you could be going out, meeting people, having a social life… so it's a driving force, and you don't realise when you're doing it. It's only when you look back that you think 'I was insanely driven when I was 26, to do that'. The other thing is that you pick up experiences and, although it sounds very poncy, you learn about life. You don't go straight from school or college straight to being a writer without any knowledge of what it's like to earn a living. Once you are a writer, you can be in danger of being cut off from knowing what it's like to go out to work at half past eight every morning and come back at half past six.
When you say you spent a lot of your spare time writing, what sort of things you were working on?
Theatre work, it was always theatre. My first 'play', in inverted commas, was a 45-minute piece I wrote when I was eighteen. I submitted it as part of Contract Theatre in Manchester, who were running a young playwrights festival in about 1988-89. It was accepted and they workshopped it and put it on as part of their festival. So this is all their fault! That was the first time I'd been in a rehearsal room with actors and a director, and seeing what that was like, and writing drama. So that was a big thing, and from then, it's one of those things that once you start doing that, once you've been in a rehearsal room with actors, it's kind of like you're infected for ever! There's something very addictive about it.
Was that because it was your words they were working with, or was it just exciting to be there anyway?
No, I liked being there anyway. I always thought maybe I would be a theatre director, I quite fancied that. I went through my teens thinking I might be a journalist, because I did a lot of writing - fanzine articles, stuff like that.
Yes, I was coming to that – because I understand you were quite an active Doctor Who fan, in a former life, but you seemed to vanish from the scene. What appealed to you about Doctor Who, as a child, that you got involved as an active 'participant' rather than just a viewer?
Well, it was just the show I most loved on TV. My first memory is, literally, of Doctor Who, of The Sea Devils, and I checked back – and I can't have been more than two, or three at most, when that was on. How can I possibly remember them, coming out of the sea? But the show was always on in our house, so it just kind of got into me, in the way that the show does. And I see it now, with my son, who'll be four this year – I see exactly the same thing happening to him. Maybe it's genetic! I see it taking him over in the most fantastic beautiful way, firing his imagination. So it just got into me, I always followed it, bought the Doctor Who Weekly comic [which eventually mutated into DWM!] and when it was taken off-air in 1985, I was like 'Where do I get my fix from? It's not going to be on for eighteen months - that's, like, forever!'. I was living on Merseyside, and I kind of looked around to see whether there was any fan clubs - I wasn't been a member of anything at that stage. I've no idea, now, where I found out that there was a Local Group, but I did, and started going there, to these Local Group meetings which were kind of extraordinary. It was just forty people sitting in a darkened hotel room watching a really flickery copy of The Celestial Toymaker episode 4. All day! From mid-day to 8 o'clock they would just screen episodes. But also, it was incredible, because all those things you'd only seen pictures of, in the old Radio Times 1973 anniversary special… the Mind Robber robots and things – suddenly you had the episode in front of you. So I joined that, and between about 1985 and 1988 was my time being part of all that. But when I went to college in London to do drama, I fell out of all that, and drama and theatre kind of took over. Looking back now you can kind of trace the pattern and think that it was that love of drama and that love of television that Doctor Who gave me. Doctor Who came first, then a love of television, which then spreads into all the other things you watch. And you start to trace the directors and the writers, and you start to notice a Robert Banks Stewart episode of Bergerac… that's where my love of TV comes from. I fell out of touch. But the show was coming to an end then, as well…
And I have to mention Open Air - the 'viewer's reactions' TV show which you appeared on back in 1986, slagging off The Trial of a Time Lord - as DWM #375 revealed. So… are you happy to admit to that, these days?
You do things when you're 15, 16… the interesting thing is, having joined the BBC Wales family through Torchwood and now Doctor Who, and these things pop up in conversation, and you think 'My God – I did that!'. These things that you can barely remember… from my point of view, I was a 16 year old who got a phone call one Sunday night, asking 'Do you want to come on the telly tomorrow to talk about Doctor Who?'. And all I really thought was, a morning off school – fantastic! A morning away from the A-levels. And also, nobody got to go on telly then. It wasn't like now where you can get on doing a tap dance in the street. I had no idea what was going on, really. I know the show was Open Air, but I don't think we knew who was going to be on – it was just 'Come on and talk about this series of Doctor Who'. There was no agenda, really, it was completely cack-handed. [Writers] Pip and Jane Baker were there, and [producer] John Nathan-Turner was on the phone, I think. I haven't seen it for twenty years! What's weird is sitting here talking to you about it, something that was just one morning when I was 16, and bears no significance on my life other than that people now come up to me and say things. I went to the Children in Need concert in Cardiff last year, and someone came up and said "I like your glasses now – they're better than the ones you had in '86!". So it's a significant event, I suppose, in fandom terms, but I have no sense of the context of it. And also, I think, when you're a 16 year old, you're opinionated and mouthy, and if somebody asks you something, you're just going to be honest. I think I was pretty unfiltered! I wouldn't ever want to watch it again, put it that way. I can't believe people have still got videos of it…
Wait up for the Trial of a Time Lord DVD, whenever that happens. It's bound to be on there!
Yes, I guess so. Oh God. The suit is terrible, the glasses are terrible, the hair's terrible, the tie is my dad's… it's excruciating, on every level! But also the chances of me sitting here talking to you now being a Doctor Who writer twenty years later, were minuscule. That was never going to happen! So it's so hilarious, actually…
You weren't sitting the day after your first Torchwood episode went out, waiting for Pip and Jane to turn up on This Morning saying what a lot of rubbish it was?
No, but that would have been absolutely fair enough - I'm a fair target! But if you'd done something like that as a 16 year old, and someone came up to you in the street tomorrow and said "…and another thing about that!", it would take you a while to realise what they were talking about – that they thought it was the most significant thing about you. And it will be the thing that Doctor Who fans of a certain age will think is most significant about me, until my episode actually goes out. I've done all sorts of plays, four series of Born and Bred, Life On Mars, all that kind of stuff… but yes – I'm absolutely fair game! And I'm sure there will be plenty of sixteen year olds foaming at the mouth at my episode. But that's part of the circle of life isn't it? Do say I smiled at that point! But it kind of is. You never know what's going to come back and haunt you. I wish I was as elegant a fan as Paul Cornell, where all that would come back and haunt you is a string of beautifully written fanzine articles. My enthusiasm betrays me at times! I have to say that I actually saw it about a year later and thought "Oh blimey, on TV that came across much more viciously and vituperatively than it felt in the studio." And also Pip and Jane reacted badly to it, it hit them. But my memory is that I was struggling for words, and things came out that I thought in retrospect weren't the most polite words. But we did correspond about a year later, both of them and me, I did apologise for being rude and they accepted that. So it ended on good terms, which a lot of people wouldn't know…
So when you moved on to study drama, what did that involve?
It was a BA in Drama and English, at St. Mary's College in Twickenham – a bit of everything, that was kind of why I did it. Although I say that like it was some grand plan - I didn't get the A-levels to get into Manchester or Kent or places like that, I got into clearing at the last minute, and got into St. Mary's and did their course, which was a bit of everything – study of texts, modules on acting, stage management, lighting, theatre design, creative writing, all that kind of stuff. The summer before I went there I'd done the Contact Theatre thing – no, actually, it was the November of my first year that was on, I wrote it between A-levels and college. And I just went in really enthused about all aspects of drama – it was a great course, brilliantly taught, and I met a lot of very good friends. It was a terrific time, three years of doing millions of plays – acting, reading… the English part of it I busked embarrassingly, but the drama stuff fired me up even more, and I went on to do a little bit of acting in fringe shows after college. And quickly realised that I was no actor, as so many do! And after that, there was no going back in terms of where I wanted to work, the sphere in which I wanted to work.
It seemed to take you a few years to take it anywhere, though…
Six weeks after I graduated, my then-girlfriend wrote to Sky - who were, and still are – in Isleworth, to get a job placement. And while she was there, they asked if she knew anybody else. They had just merged with BSB and they were chronically understaffed. What had happened was, in their merger, their VT library had inherited a load of tapes, and they didn't know what was on them. And it was mainly football tapes. And so my job, when I started, was to sit for six weeks - at a fiver an hour which was fantastically good money – in this refrigerated tape library, in the corner of the room at a very old computer, logging tapes of Italian football matches - Fiorentina v Lazio, and so on – into the Sky system.
Oh God – so, essentially endless 0-0 draws…
Exactly! The guy who had been at BSB labelling some of the tapes was now at Sky, but even he couldn't read his own handwriting – he told me he didn't envy me my job. So I did that for six weeks, and then they took me on in the VT library. Then, they got the Premier League contract, completely unexpectedly, and realised they had to set up a system within Sky Sports, where they logged every shot, every goal, every close-up… so that when they did those fantastic music montage pieces, they could go to the computer system and search for a close-up of Alex Ferguson looking purple-faced, and it would tell them it was on X tape, at 14 minutes 32 seconds. The producers would log the stuff, and we would put it into this system which I built from scratch with another guy, Mark Scott. A great guy. Probably a producer now. Probably running Sky Sports! We set up this system from scratch with the software developers. So all this was really exciting, but a million miles from where I'd been – suddenly I'm a football archivist at Sky, where a year previously I'd been at a pub theatre in Richmond playing the lead in Martin Sherman's Bent! It was a career in the old-fashioned meaning of the word, meaning 'to go all over the place'. I did that for about two years, and then, as is the way with Sky, they were so short-staffed - because they're so parsimonious – the executive producer came to me one day and said "We've got an outside broadcast at a match this Sunday – you guys should come and floor-manage". So Mark and I alternated floor-managing the five-hour live Super Sunday outside broadbasts – just from being the guys in the corner of the room! Very much the Sky way…
Did your stage management training help at all, or was it a different set of skills?
It was the same set of skills, but it didn't necessarily feel like that, at 1 o'clock on Sunday in Norwich in the freezing cold, trying to get a striker into the studio for an interview. It was with Richard Keys who'd come from TV-Am, and he's still their anchor – and he's brilliant at holding the show together. But they had to bring in people, because they were doing more and more live shows – back then it was just Sunday and Monday. So they were trying to bring on people, so you got put in there. "Go and fetch George Best from his car!". In fact, the instruction usually was "fetch George Best from this door at Old Trafford, and find out whether he's match-fit"! So you go to a door at Old Trafford, and there's a white stretch limousine there being mobbed by fans, and you have to help George Best through Old Trafford, with him nodding to everyone and knowing everyone. It was a completely surreal experience. And then on Monday morning you'd be back logging the tapes again! I didn't do that for too long, only for a couple of months really – but while I was, you'd be tape-logging during the week, and then on Sunday you'd be taking round Mike Walker…
Mike Walker… Norwich City?
That's him. I remember him giving me the coldest stare. He was on the same OB as George Best, and I remember I called him "Mike". And he obviously wasn't used to being called "Mike" by somebody my age! So he was "Mr. Walker"… even though George Best was "George" to everyone. I had very long hair then and little round glasses, so Andy Gray christened me "Julian" – as in Lennon…
So how did you get from the world of football back into drama?
Well, to be honest that sort of stuff tells a better story now than it lived at the time. Retrospectively it's exciting, but at the time I'd graduated from college thinking I was going to work in theatre or whatever, and ended up doing a job about football. It was great, but either I carried on down this path, and there's a good career there and I could become a producer on the football in seven years, there would be opportunities… or I can pursue the thing I actually really want to do. I was working in TV, but it was completely the wrong bit, which is almost worst than not being there at all – how would I ever go from working there to working in, say, drama at the BBC which is what I always, always wanted.
It sounds kind of like being 'typecast'…
Very much like that. You would start to develop relationships with the people at Match of the Day because they would call up to borrow footage, and they would say "If you ever want to come over here", and you would think, aaaarggh!! But at the same time, all of my mates were working in pubs and I did have a great job. I was being bloody-minded, really. So I applied to do an MA in Theatre & Film in Sheffield, and got funded by the British Academy, which was just fantastic. It's another one of those things where you think "How did it happen, that I got that?". I don't know, but I did, and I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. So I did this MA at Sheffield University for a year, which was great – again, I met a lot of good people, and it felt good to be back doing theatre, directing stuff and all that. And living in Sheffield for a year was brilliant, it's a beautiful city, an amazing place to be a student. My then-girlfriend was still living in Twickenham, and had seen this job in a local paper for a local theatre company – one that operated out of Teddington, that did tours all round the country. They wanted an admin assistant. They were paying what might have seemed less than nothing, but I'd been a student for a year so it was like riches. Even though it was much less than I earned at Sky. So I got this job at DGM productions, run by a guy called David Graham. Not that David Graham – instantly you're thinking "City of Death", aren't you?! That would have been even better, wouldn't it...? You could trace my life like it was Doctor Who Connections. No, different David Graham, although he had once been an actor. And what he specialised in was very cheap touring theatre shows that did compilation musicals. So you'd do a 60s show called Twist And Shout, which would have a threadbare script, and a brilliant band, and forty songs from the 60s. There was always a story in there, just about. He put on these shows, and Twist And Shout was the first one I worked on. In the lead – and this was considered a big coup for the company – was Mike Holoway, of Flintlock and Tomorrow People fame. It was him and Paul Shane, from Hi-De-Hi. The show that audiences have been waiting for! But it toured round and, I have to say, it's very easy to be cynical, but you put that show on stage, with a couple of genuine old pros like them who knew stagecraft, and every night, whichever theatre it was in, it got a standing ovation. It must have played for about forty, fifty weeks across a couple of years, all across the land – and people loved it. It wasn't sophisticated, but it was tight and entertaining.
It can be easy to be cynical about that, but entertaining a mainstream audience is a difficult thing to do…
The easiest thing is to be cynical about anything, because it's very easy to pick things apart. The most difficult thing is to be creative. That's not to say this is the most difficult job in the world, but actually to bring something into existence that wasn't there before is inherently a positive, exciting act – but it also makes your head hurt. You'll know that, with the music you do. And to tailor it for a mainstream audience who are going to be paying 25 quid or 20 quid or even a tenner… you've really got to hit the marks, you've got the give them a 'good night out', in that old John McGrath sense of the word. And DGM did that! So I stayed two or three years there, and we did a couple of those – and I wrote the script for one. David said "We're doing a 50s one, it's called Tutti Frutti, we don't have a script, we're going to start rehearsals in two weeks… do you want to write it?". And it was pretty much that this was Friday and we needed to get casting going on Monday… it was so awful. So awful!
So you were given a bunch of songs and told to string them together…?
Yes, basically! It was a terrible, terrible script. All the seventeen year old clones of me who are going to bang on about my Torchwood and Doctor Who work – they should read Tutti Frutti. It played either Glasgow or Edinburgh, I think it was Edinburgh, and the review, which was a damning, damning review which I still have framed, said "The cast perform the script like it was written in capital letters – as it probably was". And I thought, that's probably fair. It was not a work of subtlety or genius. Bang to rights! You can never get angry about a review like that, you can't think you've been misrepresented, you just think, absolutely – it's a fair cop!
Presumably, though, your writing got better thereafter…
Well, let's wait and see! It's definitely got more efficient… that wasn't the main thurst of my writing, though. In the evenings and weekends all through Sky and DGM, I was writing, and I got a play accepted by a Fringe theatre, a room above a pub in Hampton Wick. And this was a play about three college mates who meet up every year for a reunion. They get drunk and they reminisce and things go disastrously wrong – fairly standard stuff, it was a standard theme around the time, that kind of Mojo, Jez Butterworth, Royal Court thing. A lot of plays about 'blokes'! I don't mean that I was a part of that, mine was a year or two after that, it was me being influenced by them…
Was this, like, part of the 'Loaded' generation…?
A bit before that, I think – I think the Loaded generation came almost as a result of that. It was before 'bloke' was a bad word. But context aside, it was about three lads in a room, and the guy who ran the theatre company, Grip Theatre – they'd advertised for plays, and I'd written this one specifically for that purpose and sent it in, and the guy rang me up and said "This is great! And not only is it great, but we can do it! All the other plays I've got are set in forests with 97 year old wizards, and I can't do that in a room above a pub!". So he put it on, and said "You can be our writer in residence, and for the next year or so, we'll back you – write whatever you like, and we'll put it on". Which was the most extraordinary act of faith. The guy was my age, our age, and this one play had struck a chord with him - and it had a few jokes in it, so it was sort of a black comedy, I suppose you could say. So I wrote another two short plays that year, and got very involved with the running of the theatre, brought in another writer to be the writer in residence the year after. And suddenly there was like this powerhouse of new work, in this tiny corner of south west London! The great thing about somewhere like Hampton Wick is that there's a great theatre-going audience but no other fringe venues, other than the Orange Tree in Richmond – so we'd be sold out all the time. Amazing audiences seeing these barmy new works where we'd all be trying things out. And often there would be ladies in their sixties coming to see shows about blokes and swearing. But it was, essentially, where I learned stagecraft – because you would write a play, and it would be on four weeks later, and I lived round the corner and I would go along every night to see what worked and what didn't, and hone it and hone it. So it was amazing – you learn about jokes, about stagecraft, about getting characters in and out of scenes... it was interesting what you said about the mainstream, because – how do you entertain people? I'm very interested in that, I'm not a writer who sits in a corner writing the dark, dark piece. To me it's about, as well as saying the things you want to say, how do you entertain people – and that's where I learned some aspects of it. Whatever little I know, I kind of learned there! The third play I wrote for them was called Gaffer, which was a one man show about a football manager. Because in my last year at DGM Productions, the director David had seen the George Best and Rodney Marsh show that went round theatres. They would go out and sell out a theatre and answer questions and stuff, and he looked at that and thought "That is money for old rope – you don't need a set, or rehearsals…"
It's after-dinner speaking, as much as than anything else…
Exactly that! So he thought we had to get into this, and we looked around. We went to see Tommy Docherty do his after-dinner, stand-up thing in somewhere like Camberley. And it wasn't a big venue, 300 seater, but he sold it out and held the audience rapt. So we got him and Malcolm Allison and put them together and did that show. David was going to chair it, and it was a show you could do out of the back of a Mini, essentially – the theatre would provide chairs, you'd need a couple of microphones, and in the second half they'd answer questions from the audience. And then on the day of the first show, which was at St. David's Hall in Cardiff, weirdly, my boss said to me "I can't do the show tonight – will you go and chair it?". But, but… I'm going out tonight! So I went and did that, I did fifteen dates with them around the country, including a sold-out gig at Leeds City Varieties where they used to do The Good Old Days, a beautiful old music hall theatre. So I have played Leeds City Varieties, alongside Tommy Docherty and Malcolm Allison, to a sold-out audience. Find me another Doctor Who writer who can say that! Or any other person in the whole world, come to that. So I spent a lot of time with them and they were amazing company, extraordinary characters – and I couldn't get their voices out of my head. So to exorcise that, I wrote a monologue about an old-time football manager who is struggling with the modern game – struggling, essentially, with what Sky had brought into the game. And the big moment at the end of the first half is that they've had a big FA cup run, and he's kissed by the young striker – this young Michael Owen, Wayne Rooney type. So the whole second half was about that, about 'Is he gay?', in the homophobic world of football. And it was all done by one actor who played all the parts - it was quite theatrical, and one of the pieces I'm most proud of. It was revived in 2004, and I rewrote it slightly, and it got an amazing response then – I think the time was really right for it in 2004 for some reason, I think because people were starting to talk about gay footballers, so coincidentally it hit a nerve then.
How did that revival come about?
A director, Gareth Machin who was director of Southwark Playhouse, read it. We'd worked together, I'd done a one-act play at Bristol Old Vic. He'd done a lunchtime spot for new writing when he was an associate director there – and he read Gaffer a year or two after I'd written it and said he'd really love to do it one day, and when he became artistic director of Southwark Playhouse he said let's do it – and it really did well then. And it's a big hit in Germany now – it was staged in Berlin during the World Cup. The guy who translated Trainspotting does my plays in German. The play I had on at Soho Theatre in 2001, he translated that and it's gone all round the world. Incredibly and for no discernible reason!
Presumably by the time of that revival you were already on television – how did it come about?
Through writing Gaffer I got an agent, who asked what I wanted to do and where I saw myself, and I said I'd really like to have a crack at TV. I've only remembered this just now talking to you, but even at that first rehearsal at Contact Theatre in 1988, the director looked at my script and said "Yeah, it's quite televisual, this" – so it's interesting how that can inform the way you write, with fast cutting and so on. So I started getting meetings with TV people, and it sort of escalated from there, really. I did an episode of Crossroads, of the revival – before it went mad. There were two revised Crossroads: the revamp, and then they took it off and revamped the revamp, when it went really mad…
They were trying to 'gay' it up, really…
Yes, they were. The first revamp, I thought, was pretty good and it had a sense of itself, and the stories were quite interesting – but it struggled in its slot, to be honest. But, yes, I did episode 25 or something of that, and that was my first credit that went out. And off Gaffer, I got the chance to do a monologue for Carlton, a monologue about a tube driver called Stormin' Norman. Actually what had happened was, Carlton used to run a screenwriting course for up and coming writers. They'd take ten writers every year – Rob Shearman did this course a couple of years after me. It was terrific actually, and nobody does anything like that any more. John Yorke does something a little similar at the BBC. So I did that course, and off the back of that and Gaffer, they approached me to do one of this series of four monologues. It was about a tube driver on his last day at work. And I got to go and ride on a tube train, and drive it for one stop, as research. And working with James Bolam was great – he was magnificent and really generous to me, and very supportive. So it was a pretty extraordinary experience – I think that was before Crossroads, although it went out a bit later. So it was a really idyllic first TV experience – it was done very cheaply and only went out in London, but it was amazing, a very positive experience - because TV can be bruising, for a writer.
So how did you get from there to devising Born and Bred? It seems to have happened very quickly that you got a show of your own.
Yes – madness, really! What tends to happen in TV is that once you start working with somebody, everybody else crowds round you and you tend you get a little bit more work out of it. And I'd just started working with Diederick Santer, who's now executive producer on EastEnders, a big cheese at the BBC. He's very nice and gets younger looking every year! To the extent that last time I was in the BBC I mistook him for a runner, which may have damaged my career prospects… He'd read a short play of mine when he was working at Granada with Sue Hogg and Simon Lewis, and he said he'd really like to work with me on something, and that they had this idea on the shelf from a guy called Nigel McCrary. It was like, a page of A4. Nigel is an ex-copper and now he comes up with ideas for shows - he'd been behind Silent Witness, and New Tricks is one of his too. And he'd had this idea for an ITV Sunday night show – it needed an overhaul and proper working out, but it 'had something'. So I had a look at it, and I think a bit of nostalgia crept in – I was thinking that I'd really love to do an All Creatures Great And Small type show. I felt Sunday night shows had become quite po-faced by that stage. They'd lost a bit of their sense of joy and fun. Heartbeat was on, Down to Earth was just starting and so was Monarch of the Glen, and those shows were a bit more upbeat, but there had been series like Badger and Harbour Lights, which had been slightly humourless, and didn't have a real sense of joy at their own existence, or that sense of energy and fun that All Creatures Great And Small had. I think All Creatures is a classic of the genre of rural, feel-good drama. 'Feel-good' is a bit of a dodgy phrase, but… something which is entertaining which deals with light and shade. So we worked up something and pitched to ITV, who turned it down, and then Sue and Simon were poached by Greg Dyke at the BBC, and went over and formed their own little unit within the BBC, and took this show with them. And the BBC, after a bit of umm-ing and aah-ing, and reworked, eventually green-lit this show as Born and Bred. And nobody was more surprised than me, to suddenly have a Sunday night 8 o'clock show that I was writing and had co-created. It was a shock – particularly so coming from theatre. Because I finished episode 1, and thought "Oh my God – there are six episodes! What do I do in episode two?". Because I'd never returned to anything like that, you don't in theatre… but there it was. I never really got that moment, though, of 'Wow!', because everything is always such a drawn-out process, by the time they've green-lit it, you're just thinking "Thank God we've got an answer… oh hang on, that's really great!". You never have that filmic moment of opening the champagne. So that was me in at the deep end, to be honest – in the best possible way. It was a mixture of very light, quite broad comedy with, at the centre of every episode, a proper dramatic, serious story, which was the reason there was a cottage hospital at the centre of the show, because you want those big serious stories coming in with relative ease each week. It was very much constructed for the slot, Sunday night at 8. And we got the most incredible cast - Phil Collinson set up the show and put this brilliant cast together, who I still speak to. It was an extraordinary ensemble, actually – James Bolam and Michael French really complemented each other as father and son, and then you had people like Clive Swift as the vicar, a wonderful actor, and John Henshaw, and Maggie Steed. I'm so proud of that show for a number of reasons, one of which is that I think it's very hard to create those shows – it goes back to the mainstream thing, actually. It has to be mainstream and it has to be enjoyable, and sometimes you can write shows forgetting to be enjoyable, and I think that's what's beautiful about the work that Russell does, is that it's hugely entertaining as well as having lots to say and being very bold. And my job with Born and Bred was to do this big, all-singing, all-dancing Sunday night show – sixty minutes. What Born and Bred taught me was pace of storytelling - I wanted it to be very fast. And it was hard work, you know? All TV is hard work, and I think the thing I learned, especially on the first year, was that it's a miracle that any television gets to the screen. Because there are so many things that can go wrong, or just be one per cent off. That one costume, that one hat on that one person can ruin that scene, or the wrong person in the background in that scene, or the pacing of the edit, or the score, or three wrong lines of dialogue at the start of the episode… before you even think about rain on location or not having enough outside shots or not enough time to do the interiors or… there are so many things that can go wrong. And when you get on to Doctor Who and Torchwood, you can add in special effects and prosthetics as well! And it was a big hit – the first year we ended up with 9 million viewers by the end of the series, and it built – it never lost audience across an episode, and never lost audience across a series for the first three years.
Which means it was getting good 'word of mouth'?
And also, if you looked at the figures, in the first year we beat Where The Heart Is, which was the established big show on ITV, so the next year they moved Heartbeat against us, which was 'like for like'. And you would see from the quarter-hour figures that people would turn over during the commercials to catch a bit of Born and Bred… and they would stay with it. Our figures would go up across the hour and theirs would go down – we'd gain something like 700,000, maybe a million. And I was very proud of that. We worked very hard on the pace of storytelling and the mix of light and shade. And we had some great guest actors in as well – my favourite episode is one with Bill Patterson in playing Maggie Steed's errant husband, and that was a brilliant masterclass in acting…
As well as writing, you were head writer in charge of other writers contributing scripts. Was that the first time you'd been in charge of other writers like that? And what did you learn from that?
Oh God – how long have you got? [laughs] You learn how other writers work, you learn how to tell stories across multiple episodes, you learn how to try and seed stories in other peoples' episodes… it's easier to say what you don't do. I think it's really about how you communicate a vision of a show, and how you bring everybody onboard, and how you get everybody writing the same thing. With something like Born and Bred it was tricky, because the differences between that show and other shows of the same genre, of that rural Sunday night drama, weren't enormous, but they were significant, because tonally we were really different. We did some very surreal comedy, some very odd stories – but you also wanted a really emotional story at the centre. And it was quite difficult, particularly in the first year, to communicate that to people who had worked on or seen those other shows in the same genre. We wanted to be a bit sillier and a bit more fun and a bit more odd – but to have a moving story at the centre. So within that genre we were doing a very specific thing. Whether anyone picked up on that is a different story – but the idea was that within the parameters you wriggle about a bit and have a bit of fun. The thing about leading other writers is that it's about being supportive and encouraging – just about being there, really. To talk about how to execute ideas, hopefully to become a team. It's a tricky thing.
One of the things you moved on to do after that was a couple of episodes of everyone's second favourite show, Life On Mars, which was very much the 'word of mouth' hit of 2006… how did you cope with moving from this cosy mainstream show, very 'older viewer' friendly, to this young, energetic piece in a totally different genre?
I think as a writer, you can get typecast as easily as an actor, and I was very conscious of that. With four series of Born and Bred, I did three years and was very lightly involved in the last year, I rewrote two scripts but I'd gone off to work on other stuff by then, some development projects. I'd just started working with Kudos Productions on a development project, I'd had a couple of meetings with them starting to talk about an idea. And then Kudos rang me and said "We've got this show that's been green-lit, it's a bit odd – would you like to do an episode?". In the meantime, what I'd been doing was turning down work on a lot of rural, 'feel-good' family dramas – because I didn't really want to be doing that forever. And anyway, I did seventeen episodes of Born and Bred in three years, and there's only so much you can say in that genre. So with Life On Mars they literally just rang me up while I was busy doing a couple of other things – but they said "read this script", which was episode one that Matthew [Graham] had written. And I thought it was the most incredible script. I'd been reading a lot of America scripts for pilot episodes – this is two years ago, really, and everybody was bemoaning that America TV was much bolder. And I thought, if this had been an America script I'd have been screaming "Why don't we do this stuff over here?!". It was so beautifully worked through, it was so bold and confident and funny, everything you'd ever want. So I thought, "I can't not write this" – but it was very difficult to sort the schedule out. I spoke to Claire Parker, the producer, and said I didn't think I could make it work out in terms of timescale. And her response was "I have to tell you – the lead actor is John Simm.". Okay. I'll do it! However, whatever - I'll make it work out! And that took it to another level, because you just thought that was going to make it so special and then she mentioned Philip Glenister. It was 'un-turn-downable', really! Kudos are a delight to work with, they're a brilliant, supportive creative team.
Actually, your first script, which was the penultimate one of the first series, was quite a pivotal one, wasn't it? That's quite surprising, given that you were the 'hired hand' writer on the series – the only one not involved in the show's creation.
Yes, and they gave me completely free reign – they said go for it, and we'll pull you back if necessary. And after the readthrough of my script, in his fantastic way, Matthew said "Who would have thought the creator of Born and Bred would be our greatest tragedian?". There aren't many laughs in that script! But they said, it's episode 7, push it as far as you want. It's kind of a chamber piece.
Is that because by week seven the tone will be well-established enough to allow a bit more pushing of the envelope?
Possibly, although you never think like that while you're working on it – retrospectively, analytically, yes! It sits there comfortably because you're confident in the show at that point. But no, they were just bold. They had a belief in what they were doing, and they were going to push it as far as they could. They weren't going to fail through being cautious! And you always want to work with those people - it's the same as working with Russell, and Julie Gardner. You go as far as you can with it and you don't hold back, you don't not commit yourself for fear that you might get it slightly wrong. And I think that's an ethos that spreads across Life On Mars, Doctor Who, Torchwood… you go for broke, and that makes it very exciting TV. So I did an episode for series 2 of Life On Mars as well.
What with Torchwood and all, how did you ever find the time?
2006 was my year of pain! One Life On Mars, four Torchwoods and one Doctor Who, plus a script for Kudos on a different project, which is awaiting a second draft. And we moved house and had our second baby. It was a busy year!
Speaking of Torchwood, how did your involvement in that come about?
I don't know! [Guffaws]. I really don't know…
It could be seen as surprising that you came straight in on Torchwood without doing a Doctor Who first, and given quite a substantial chunk of responsibility on it… or is that must me being parochial?
I do have a body of work that's perhaps not on the radar of Doctor Who fans – four years of Born and Bred, 26 episodes of mainstream drama, running it and being involved in edits and casting and overseeing other peoples' scripts. I'd worked with Julie, obviously, she was the executive producer on Life On Mars. We'd done a development project together years and years back when she was a producer under Mal Young, and got on very well and kept in touch. But she just phoned me up while we were doing Life On Mars, she said "I've got something here you might like – email me in a couple of months". And we met up in August 2005, sitting in the corner of this bar, and she told me it was this post-watershed spin-off of Doctor Who with Captain Jack. Did I want to do it? Yeahhhh! But I wasn't available. But she said not to worry about that. Classic Julie! At that stage it was just an offer to do one episode, but knowing it was a series of thirteen, I said if they needed me to do more, whatever I could do to help, use me as much as they needed to. And so a couple of months later she rang up and said "Well, actually… do you want to be the lead writer, and do four episodes?". And I said yes – I'd really like to do what I did on Born and Bred and be across production as much as possible. To be out there at tone meetings and talking to directors…
Sort of fulfilling Russell's Doctor Who role…
There's a team of people who make the show and we all work very closely together. We all have opinions and things that we'll throw in, we all work very hard to make the show, really. And I'm across all thirteen episodes and give notes on edits and rushes and things…
How much of the format of Torchwood had been established before you came on to it? Was it just Captain Jack?
The 'format' I saw at the time was a page and a half of Russell's pitch, and they weren't even called Torchwood in that, actually. So we set off from that, and the point where we knew what it was, was when Russell's first script came in. And then we all had a mad dash! What appealed to me was that sheer 'un-knowability' of it, that it wasn't like anything else that was on TV, I couldn't really place where it would fit. And that's the sort of show you want to be on board. Exactly like Life On Mars – you don't know how it's going to go, it's scary, and scary is exciting, scary is the place you want to be, so you're not getting complacent. We talked at the very first story meeting about whether it would be more serialised than Doctor Who or whether there would be a 'case' every week - if it were serialised it would be cheaper and slightly easier to do, whereas if it was standalone 'case of the week' with a new alien or alien device that was going to be much harder. And everybody went "Story of the week!". You've got to go for the big targets, the big unachievable things. So the format of the show was pretty clear- the reason it's a brilliant format is that you can tell so many different stories. It's almost as broad as Doctor Who, because you've got 'the rift' which can bring anything to you. So the challenge was in the choice of stories to tell each week. Although tonally it's very different to Doctor Who, it's covering similar story ground – there's always a science fiction element to it.
Was there ever thought that it might be more 'grounded' or everyday than that, given that it was more or less set in one time and place?
We rarely reference Doctor Who in our discussions – the key thing from the start was that this had to be its own thing. It was very clear from the start what the parameters and objectives for Torchwood were: that it was post-watershed, BBC Three – because there was no confirmation at that stage of any terrestrial broadcast. There were words in Russell's original pitch document like 'wild' and 'dark' and 'sexy', and it's all those things. So we were all conscious of finding an identity for the show which wasn't in relation to Doctor Who. Because the really great spin-off shows don't necessarily share aspects. Look at Frasier and Cheers. As shows they're very, very different - Frasier's much loftier, intellectual farce – but they're equally brilliant shows. I was thinking on the drive down here today, actually – how on earth do you get to Mork and Mindy from Happy Days? How did that happen?! So you're not necessarily going for the same audience at all…
And presumably that just comes about from people following their instincts down interesting avenues…
Yes. Perhaps as a fan you analyse things too much, and I can understand that, I've done it myself - "They must have done Y because of X, they must have done that because of this" – but actually, all you do as a writer or producer is follow the things that interest you. And sometimes you're in a cul-de-sac, and sometimes it's a huge big open road that you think you could drive down forever. You follow the passions, the things that seem dramatically and emotionally interesting. You discover things by doing them, there's very little sitting around theorising about it. Get out there and try it! Might work, might not, we'll have a look afterward – but go and get your hands dirty and do it!
And how are you developing Torchwood for its second year? Any changes in format and tone because it's going straight to terrestrial TV?
No, it's the same show. We had the audience research in the other week, and the response we had from the mainstream audience was phenomenal. So when the questions about "What do you want in the second series?" were raised, it's all the same things that were at the centre of the first series. Obviously there are some things we can do better, some things we've learned – but that's what happens between first and second series. And also we know what the show is this year. The first year on Torchwood was phenomenal – Russell delivered his first script in January, and we were on air in October with a run of thirteen episodes. It's the fastest turnaround I've ever known. I wrote my episode of Life On Mars series 2 before I started on Torchwood, and that was broadcast in February this year, months after the whole of Torchwood had been broadcast! So there was a fantastic energy to the first series of Torchwood. Russell and Julie do get things done, and I think also the channel really wanted it for that slot. People were desperate for it, and now people are desperate for series 2! There was a three-way fight between channels as to who was going to get it… it's been a huge hit. I'm aware it's a controversial show in some ways, but I like that, I think it's good. And on any objective level, it's a very important show to the BBC and its audience loves it. The consolidated viewing figures are extraordinary. The total figure for the first episode across all screenings and all channels was 6.5 million, and they weren't expecting those figures. I remember talking to Jane Tranter at the launch, and she said that if the first episode got a million she'd be happy! But that was the figure we were getting by episode ten for the first transmission when we were up against Lost. The total figure across all screenings settled around 4 million, the Appreciation Index figures remained strong throughout. It will be interesting to see how it goes on BBC Two. BBC Three was a lovely place to be – we were looked after, they scheduled it brilliantly and promoted it brilliantly. I think it will be a tougher fight on BBC Two, but we're all aware of that and I quite like that.
So, to move sideways – much as you've done yourself – you've ended up contributing to series 3 of Doctor Who… how does it compare to the, er, 'side-project'?
Side project!? Side project!? Yes, to be fair, Doctor Who is the 'parent show'-
Er, yeah - that's the expression I was looking for!
Yes. I'm toying with you…
…so what happened last year that four episodes of Torchwood, plus supervisory duties, wasn't enough for you to contend with?
I got asked! When I first started on Torchwood, and first met Julie and Russell – I'd never met Russell before at all – Julie said "Yeah, maybe you'd like to come and do an episode of series 4 of Doctor Who, if you like". Yeah, wait and see how it all goes. But then, in July last year, about a week after my new baby was born, during the filming of Cyber Woman – which I'd been writing literally the morning my wife went into labour – having said I was going to need a couple of weeks of paternity leave, during that 'paternity leave', I got a text from Julie saying "Can you give me a call? It's nothing bad…". So I rang her up, and she asked if I wanted to do a Doctor Who this year. And I think I quite surprised her by saying "Can I think about it?" – because it was rapidly becoming clear what a tough schedule Torchwood was on. To get all the scripts in and get everybody in line, and in production terms it was such an ambitious show for its budget and its schedule. It's hard, just as Doctor Who is, they're both the same in those terms. So I was right in the middle of that, and off looking after my wife and children. So I took a day or two, but I did think "I can't! There's no time!". I knew my writing schedule on Torchwood would take longer than it was supposed to… As I said, you never get the 'champagne moment'. But also, at the back of your mind, you're thinking that you can't not do Doctor Who – it's a brilliant show. I was at a tone meeting for another block of Torchwood, and across the room Julie mimed typing at me and mouthed the words 'Doctor Who'. And I said "Yeah, alright!". So Julie, Russell and I had a meeting in the car park, and I said I didn't know how I was going to be able to do it, what with my schedule. Julie said "Oh, you'll be fine". And as Russell has said, Julie could sell snow to eskimos!
Was there an element of thinking you couldn't turn it down because it's the biggest show on TV – and if you'd said you couldn't, you might not have been asked again…
Yeah, there's an element of that, but I think you just want to do good work, and work with the best people. And I really think that Russell and Julie, and the Kudos people, are producing the best shows on television at the moment. There's lots of great stuff out there, it's a great time to be working in TV drama – and they're right at the pinnacle, and a joy to work with as well. They're enthusiastic, positive, creative, collaborative… it doesn't get any better. And also, I think a big thing for me was that I wanted to write for David Tennant. Because he's the best Doctor in the world, for me. He's brilliant, and I couldn't turn down the opportunity to write for him, I think he's magnificent. So it's all those things combined. The first feeling you get is fear! Fear and terror. Never mind that there are thirty-whatever years of the original show – on this series alone, the benchmark is high, you've got to be up to the standards, and that's terrifying. So terror, really, was the main thing! You hope you can do something that's exciting. But n my case it all happened very fast, so the pressure was always on.
A lot of the writers have a background as an active fan of the show, who've gained some of their early experience in writing by working on Doctor Who spin-offs – novels, audios and so on. Even Moffat wrote a short story or two! But you seem to have come by a totally different route to end up in the same position – not a word of Doctor Who writing until your script this year.
I was just an audience member on the first series. A very happy audience member!
But I guess watching Rose must have been the first time you'd thought about Doctor Who in quite a long time. How did you react to Chris and Billie, given that you'd once been so close to the original show?
I was just blown away by the skilful creation of a new version that kept all the things I loved about the show, about the classic series, with a modern sensibility and an emotional core. It's tricky going back and watching old episodes now, because I think emotionally there's very little there. There's some terrific, amazing stuff in there, but it's a very different beast. But what they managed to do on the new show is extrapolate all the good bits, and lose all the bits that – as a fan – you tried to forget about anyway! Russell knew which bits to love, and which bits weren't necessary or useful for a mainstream audience. What I thought at the time was, how can this show not have been on air for however long it's been? It felt so right so quickly that by the time you got to something like episode 3, you thought, how has this show ever not been there? And now it's even what you do at Christmas – Christmas Day, 7 o'clock, you watch Doctor Who. And that's insane – four years ago, it was nowhere! So I just watched it as a delighted viewer. And I can watch it with my wife now. I can watch Doctor Who with a girl! Hooray!
It really wasn't happening in 1986, was it?
I thought Gareth Roberts said something quite interesting, which is that even when Tom Baker was as his height, it wasn't the huge popular cultural success that it is now. It was a great show that everybody loved, but now it has an impact beyond being a TV show. It's like everybody adores it, everybody loves David Tennant, the toys are selling millions, there are two spin-off shows… it had something like five Radio Times covers last year. It's very easy to take that for granted. You talk about what it was like in 1986 – actually you were watching a show that really had no place in public affection whatsoever, it was regarded with derision. Whatever your opinions of that season, and I think there were great things about that season, don't get me wrong – I love every season of Doctor Who! – but you could not admit to being a Doctor Who fan in 1986. Which is really why it was doubly idiotic to go on television as a Doctor Who fan, I must say! At the age of 16 you shouldn't be in a television studio talking about Doctor Who – you should be out getting drunk and getting laid! Thank God for college, that's all I can say…
It did seem that the 1985 postponement crippled the original show – no matter what happened thereafter, it was struggling…
Well, when your channel actually publicly says "We don't really want this show"… I thought it was really telling that in [script editor, 1987-89] Andrew Cartmel's book where he talks about his interview with Jonathan Powell, and Powell said "Who's Doctor Who for?", and Cartmel said "Doctor Who is for everyone", and Powell said "No – Doctor Who is for kids."
So now that you have actually written an episode of Doctor Who, were the mechanics of that process any different to those of Torchwood or any other show? Because you're being led by a distinctive lead writer who's also an exec, did that mean the writing process was different?
No, not really, because I was used to working with Russell and Julie anyway, so I knew they were going to be supportive. But no, it was like doing an episode of Life On Mars or something, you really want to do it, and you know there are certain guidelines and parameters within which you have to fit. On my episode, Russell came in and said "These are the things you need" – I think Helen Raynor called it a shopping list – "Set it here, I want a bit of this, that and this". And then it's your job to go away and put it together with a coherent shape. Which is the hard bit! Your job is to make sense of that shopping list, and that's hard.
I can see a parallel with that musical you wrote all those years ago – a shopping list of songs, which you have to turn into something.
Yes, that's true. I think it's very often your job on series television, and we do it to other people on Torchwood. And some episodes, like episode 13 of Torchwood, I knew that it was pulling together a lot of strands from the series up to that point, and the series theme of temptation - of the most dangerous thing about Torchwood being Torchwood itself – are all there in that final episode. So even on Torchwood as a lead writer, I have a responsibility to do a lot of the 'heavy lifting' – the beats for the regulars, the movement of their journey across the series. Cyber Woman and Countrycide in particular are very relationship-driven, putting things in place that we needed for the end of the series. So whatever position you're in as a writer on a show, there are things you have to do, and whether you give yourself those shopping lists or whether someone else hands them to do, it's still your job and it's still the thing that will have you crying at 1am, sobbing "I can't do this". Crying at 1am is part of the job, it really is! Staring at the computer, and thinking it's impossible to put all these things together, is absolutely part of the job. Possibly more so on Doctor Who and Torchwood, because they are twice as difficult as other shows – you've got to have a creative, big concept sci-fi story, then add action, then you've got to find some emotional core to it. You don't get away with anything on these shows, they're very exposing, and I absolutely hold my hand up – some of the episodes of Torchwood I think I was still learning. These shows are really, really hard, that's what unifies them, and the standards are really high, the quality of writing is very strong. Look at something like Out of Time, episode 10 of Torchwood, and think that no other show would do something like that, it's beautiful – the quality of writing on that episode is amazing.
Tonally that episode was something of a departure for Torchwood as well – it barely felt like the same show as the preceding weeks. Much slower and more romantic…
What we very deliberately set out to do was try out lots of different tones, lots of different stories, and see what worked. Because you can do that across thirteen episodes, and that's actually what the best series have. If you want longevity, you need to encompass a different set of things. You don't want to be ploughing the same furrow – so very deliberately there are horror movies, big sci-fi concepts, a big romantic movie in there, lots of different things, and that's very deliberate. Also, I think it means your audience doesn't take you for granted – so we're allowed to wrong-foot the audience as well. Think you know what the show is? Well, it's not just that, it's also this. We really wanted Torchwood to be a multitude of things, and I think it did that – right from the start people were saying "It's not what I thought it was going to be", as if that's a bad thing. I think that's a great thing, even if it means it takes people longer to get used to you. Also, with thirteen episodes you've got to keep it fresh – it's a very, very long run. Life On Mars, in total, will be sixteen episodes – that's the show finished, which is a really good decision. Torchwood's run will be at least 26, so we've got to keep those things ticking, we've got to surprise people.
Yes, you did mention longevity there – do you mean longevity in terms of a long run of episodes, or longevity in the minds of the viewers?
Well, both, actually – but it's designed to run, although you can never take that for granted. You can clearly see with the format of Torchwood that it could run and run, if that's what we all creatively decide and it's what the channels want. The fact that they're commissioning it for thirteen episode runs… very few series get that. So it's already a long runner by getting to series two, frankly!
Yes, I recall that when Doctor Who came back we were all surprised it got as many as thirteen. And assuming series four happens, that's at least 54 by the end of next year… anyway – what was on your shopping list, that you'd be able to talk to me about?
Well, what do you know?
Nothing. I didn't even know what it was called until a few days ago! And now I know two more digits than I did…
Actually, I kind of like the fact that nobody knows anything at the moment! I really liked it with Fear Her last year, that nobody really knew what it was going to be about until it happened. So I'm slightly reluctant to say…
Well, let's examine what I know – it's called 42, it's episode seven, exactly halfway through the run, and people have already started discussing two possibilities – one is that it's an homage to Douglas Adams, and the other is that it's an homage to 24, and takes place in real time. Any validity to either of those notions?
Yes! The joke of the title is that, really, obviously – 'is it something to do with the meaning of life?'. It's a playful title. It's very different to the stories either side of it.
Was the 'real-time' aspect of it part of your 'shopping list'?
No, it actually happened during script discussions, it was an idea that we thought would give the episode a lot of energy and pace. It was Russell's idea - we were talking about doing something different with Doctor Who that hadn't been done before, and I do kind of like those episodes that have real energy and momentum to them. You have to work very hard on 'pace' on Doctor Who, so it was Russell's really rather brilliant idea to do it in real time. And because it's in an enclosed atmosphere anyway, the story was really designed to increase atmosphere and tension, at the same time as being a great laugh. I suspect we're going to have on-screen graphics and things like that – at one stage we were talking about having a clock in the corner of the screen, but I think we decided that was taking it one step too far. But part of the joke obviously is that an episode of Doctor Who is forty-two minutes long… so God bless all those 'detective' fans! But the idea suits the pace of the story and it suits the show. It's very different to either of the stories either side of it, and it gives the episode a nice big hook – because it's not really the centre of the episode, there are more thing I think in his column Russell has pointed out that it's not set on Earth, so it's not an Earth-based story. Although two of the words Russell mentioned in Production Notes that are supposedly in my script have actually been cut from subsequent drafts! At the very first conversation, Russell had suggested a different story idea, and then there was a gap after that conversation where I had to go away and write episode 13 of Torchwood, and when I came back it had turned into a different episode. I think the first one would have been twice as expensive – although I'm sure they'll do it in series 4… Visually, the episode is set in the same universe as The Satan Pit – if you swivel the camera round from the rock those episodes are set on and you look halfway across the galaxy… that's sort of where mine is set. Very industrial, grimy, sweaty, people working hard for a living.
And how did you find dealing with the new companion, Martha? What have you brought to her development? Were you involved in discussions, or given a set of scripts and told to get on with it?
Again, you just tend to work off what's already there. I think fans do have this vision that people sit around and discuss aspects like that, you know, "We're going to discuss Martha and I'm going to give you seventeen bullet points about her personality" – but I can't stress enough that you get on and do it, and then you see if you've got it right. So I read all the scripts that were already in existence – and just like if you read series 1 episode 1, you know who Rose is, the same is true of Martha in Smith and Jones this time. You can see the differences between her and Rose, and the similarities, and what role she performs in the show. And as ever, when you're writing, you want to give her something juicy to get her teeth into. Part of the brief was to give Martha a big story, to give her a lot to do - she's a strong companion. Inevitably she'll be front and centre, because she's a vital character. You want to keep the companion active, you want to give her something to do, but she's there and she does have a dramatic life of her own, not just in relation to the Doctor – although the relationship between the two of them is interesting as well. Again, as a writer on any show, rule one is 'use your leading actors as much as you can', and when you've got David and Freema, that's easy. And particularly when you've got David, you've got an actor who can do anything, he's just magnificent. So that's the exciting part of the shopping list!
And what stage is your episode at, as we speak? Did you attend the readthrough or any of the recordings? And has David, for instance, brought anything unexpected to it?
It's finished filming now, I think they're filming Utopia at the moment. I was at the readthrough and the tone meeting and things like that, you're continually tweaking things, even as they're filming… David brings energy and integrity and warmth and dynamism and charisma… and surprise, actually. Just from the limited amount I've seen! You can see it on the rushes, he gives the director and the producers 'choices'. But overall, what he brings is brilliance, and I don't mean that flippantly, I mean it absolutely genuinely. He brings brilliance to the show and to every script he works on. You know you're in the presence of a truly special actor, and it's just a joy to write for him. I only went down to the set for about half a day, on my way to a Torchwood meeting, and that was the 'Oh my God, I've written Doctor Who' moment. Because at the readthrough you're still working, you're thinking about whether the script's working, what amendments you're going to have to make, so you don't get that moment. It's only once you're filming it and you're on set – and, as a writer, you're fantastically useless on set, so it's great for half a day and then you go. Your work should be done by the time they're filming… so that was exciting. Seeing them running along a corridor in a huge old paper mill, and Graeme Harper shouting "Energy!" at them! That was exciting. Being filmed by David for his 'video diary' was plain weird. That was when I got a bit freaked out!
And has it been a rewarding enough experience that if Julie phones up tomorrow and says "It's nothing bad, but… can you give us another one?"
Yes, I loved it. It's very doubtful that the schedules would work out, that just gets crazier and crazier. These are rare times to be involved in shows that are so exciting and so at the centre of everybody's discussion of television – these are the shows on everybody's lips, Torchwood and Doctor Who and Life On Mars are the shows everyone wants to be working on. So it's a privilege, actually… so yeah, I'd do it again, but I don't think the schedules will work out that way again. We all broke our backs this year, I got tonsillitis from exhaustion at one stage while I was writing. It's hard to fit it all in!
First published in Doctor Who Magazine 381 and reproduced by permission of Panini UK.