Script Doctors | Series 1 | Robert Shearman
The writer of Dalek, interviewed in early 2004 as the first season of Doctor Who was just entering production.
"I got into Doctor Who a bit late," admits Rob Shearman. "I was an easily scared kid, and I got into Doctor Who mainly through the Five Faces season of repeats being on, and realising it had a history, so the first Doctor Who I watched properly was Castrovalva, and I became a fan very quickly. And with the zeal of a convert, for the next few years I was very committed - I was assistant editor on a fanzine called Cloister Bell. I think like a lot of people who are deeply committed to something, I had no sense of humour about it at all. I saw Doctor Who as terribly serious, I was the sort of person who got very angry about people saying it was a kids show. 'It's produced by the drama department!!'. And I obviously loathed with a passion the comedic stuff of the late Tom Baker era. So I watched The King's Demons and wrote this awful review for Cloister Bell, which slammed it, and slammed it in particular by quoting some of the awful dialogue which I'd misheard because I didn't have a Dolby thing on my video. The chat between the Doctor and the Master, where the Master says '...and you can't approve!' and the Doctor says 'You know I can't!'. And I believed he'd said '...and you can't have proof!', which I thought was meaningless. Gary Russell was in charge of the DWM summer special that year, and in an article about fanzines he pointed out how fanzines could sometimes miss the point and be pointlessly rude about the production team, and there was a very good example in a fanzine called Cloister Bell, in a review of The King's Demons, where the reviewer based his entire review upon his mishearing of the lines - what an idiot! Years later when I went to university, about 1989 or so, I was auditioning for director Nick Pegg's production of Hamlet. I'd never met Nick before - didn't even know who he was - and I walked in, gave my name, and he just screamed 'Aaaaaah!! You can't have proof!!' And all these years later that's my claim to fame - I was the git who misheard The King's Demons. I'm so proud that that was my first taste of Doctor Who celebrity..." The first but hardly the last - Big Finish audio plays by Rob Shearman have won DWM's annual polls on three separate occasions, and he has now graduated to working on the TV show itself...
I lost my passion for the show around the time of the hiatus - which seems remarkably fickle - not because I didn't think the show was good because I like Colin's first season and still do, but when it wasn't on TV it stopped being something I could learn and discuss new information about. Part of the joy for me was that discussion, and by the time it came back in late 1986 I still cared about it but I wasn't going to video it and keep it. I'd always watch it, and it was fine. I never turned my back on the show - I didn't like all that went on in the last few years by any means, but I liked some of it and when it was cancelled I was sorry. But it wasn't the end of anything, I had my enthusiasm spiked briefly in 1993 when I thought it might come back, and even more briefly, to be honest, by the Paul McGann movie. What got me back into Doctor Who was simply the fact that one day I bought a modem. I spent the first week on the computer typing my own name into search engines. After a while I realised I could type other things into them, and typed in 'Doctor Who'. I discovered online fandom from that, and without any great interest began looking at it and found it a bit overwhelming, but I realised it was all still out there and thriving. I went out and bought the New Adventures, and at that stage you could get hold of them relatively inexpensively. This is 98-99. I mentioned to Nick Pegg who I'd kept in touch with, I was seeing one of his pantomimes at Harrogate. I said something about there being these audio plays on the go, and eventually I heard from Gary Russell, who said "you're a writer, you write drama, fancy doing a Doctor Who for us?". I didn't approach it with any great sense of fan excitement, as I wasn't really a fan at that point, I got back into it by doing it. When I got the commission for Holy Terror I thought I could fit it in, and wrote it and enjoyed writing it, but I thought that would be it. And I met other fans in the process of doing it and I thought it seemed like a nice happy community, so that by the time Holy Terror came out in November 2000 I was a bona fide part of fandom, and I found myself getting more and more caught up in it. And it's odd because Doctor Who is now such an enormous part of my life - every time I feel I should move on from it, I'll get offered something really nice like an online project or the new Tv series and I get drawn back into it.
You had been a professional writer for over a decade before the Holy Terror commission - had writing replaced Doctor Who as your all-consuming passion?
About the age of 16, 17 I began writing stage plays. I'd gone through a period in my teenage years where I couldn't speak, I had a really bad stammer and couldn't say anything to anybody pretty much. I would dribble and spit and nothing would come out! A way round that was to do theatre. I forced myself to take parts in school plays. I discovered I would never be a very good actor but I enjoyed the whole theatrical side of things, so that by the time I left school I was already writing somewhat professionally. And by the time I got my degree I was already Arts Council resident writer at the theatre in Exeter, and from that I move on to working with Alan Ayckbourn and so on. And where there had been an idea that I would probably move into academia, into teaching Shakespeare at university, I found that from the moment I stopped being a student I was already a writer and I've been a writer ever since, pretty much exclusively writing drama. It's been wonderful - for years I've been expecting someone to wake up and realise I shouldn't be doing this, that I shouldn't be getting commissioned, but it hasn't happened yet.
But you weren't just doing it, you were doing it very successfully - you were winning awards...
Yes - back in 1993 I won a Sunday Times playwriting award for one of my plays which is a very dark, nasty angry play called Easy Laughter which I wrote when I was quite ill. It's a fascist parable which has been toured universities - Oxford had it, people were doing dissertations on it and it still gets revived occasionally. Francis Ford Coppola produced it in the States a few years ago, which was quite weird. And that was one award of several. I won the world drama trust award the year before for a play called, ironically, Couplings. But the awards were mainly for things which were critically well received but not that popular with audiences - but there was a lot of work, and up until the mid-late 1990s, because of my youth I was getting a lot of attention in the press because I was writing reasonably good plays and "oh look, he's also so young!" I was also directing at the time and my then girlfriend, now wife, pointed out that I might get taken more seriously as a director if I grew a beard and stopped looking quite so young. And immediately I did that, the awards stopped - I got treated a bit more seriously in meetings, but I got away from that 'and he's terribly good for being so young' label which had been attached me.
I was writing almost exclusively for Ayckbourn at one stage and that was great, but I was perhaps starting to getting a little too much like Alan in my writing. His stuff is wonderful, far better than what I do, it's all very black and structurally-odd comedy. I was always very much in awe of Alan, Alan is a tremendous writer and director. But a part of you, as a writer, has to be not in thrall to anyone else, you have to have the arrogance to want to be better. And if you're working always with somebody who was one of the giants of theatre you're never really going to move out of that shadow, so I had to take stock a bit. And along came Doctor Who - a few years before I might have been quite snobbish about Doctor Who - 'I'm an award-winning theatre writer!!' - but by then I thought 'no, I'm going to write a play about a penguin'.
I began doing a lot more radio work - I do a fair amount now with Martin Jarvis but I was doing some before that, and it might have been because of the radio drama that Big Finish thought I'd be able to do audio Doctor Who, and I moved on to television after the Big Finish work. But I do still do theatre work as well.
So it was a pragmatic decision - to get yourself out of a rut?
I was very aware that the plays I was producing weren't as good as the ones I had done previously. I was getting a little bit tired and the interest was wearing off a bit. I had a couple of flops, and began to wonder that I needed to rethink things a bit. A different medium helped - when Big Finish asked me to do Doctor Who I was at one of my low ebbs, I didn't really know where I was going at that point. My now-wife was very supportive, but I was having to do temp work for the first time, going into offices and doing data entry. So I was delighted to do Holy Terror - I was writing another play at that time for Ayckbourn, and I was adapting a Jane Austen for Manchester, so Pride and Prejudice and The Holy Terror were written concurrently, so a lot of the same themes crop up in both. There's a very good reason why there's a lot of talk about failed marriages in The Holy Terror - it's because that's what the Austen's about!
But that's just one example of where Holy Terror actually pushed the boundaries a bit of what you could address in a Doctor Who story...
I'd written a lot of plays earlier which had got me into trouble - I'd done a play at the Northcot back in 93 called Breaking Bread Together, which has been revived in London since, which is a play about what happens when God comes to stay in an ordinary domestic house for a week. There were a lot of people in the Devon area who didn't like the idea that I was being blasphemous - but actually I'd been a very committed Christian back in my late teens, and had begun to preach a little bit, which I don't do now. I still have great respect for religion but we have parted company since because I just realised I was doing it for my own self-aggrandizement - I loved the idea of standing on street corners pretending that I understood what God wanted. Holy Terror was like a lifeline to me, in that because I wasn't sure what Doctor Who should be any more, so when I was commissioned I thought 'let's do a play which is the sort of play that I would like to do anyway'. It was based in part upon the fact that several years before, I'd suggested a stage play based upon similar themes to Holy Terror, all about the idea - which is an old medieval idea - that you could find the language of God if you could cut yourself away from all verbal language corruption. So if you took two babies at birth and cut them away from any other source of communication, the language they would develop as innocent babes would be pure, without the Tower of Babel. And I liked the idea of a stage play where at the end of Act One they open the door to release these two adults they have incarcerated as babies to try and find God. And every theatre I went to, they would lean forward and say 'and what happens next?' and I'd say "oh, I dunno, just a bunch of people die probably'. And they'd always say 'it's a bit Doctor Who-ish' and I'd say 'no, it's an interesting premise about the ways in which we rationalise religion...' and they'd go 'no, it's just a Doctor Who story, isn't it?.' So when I came to do a Doctor Who story, I went to a Big Finish party and Gary asked me to tell him what my story was about. By the time he'd got back from the bar I'd changed my mind about what the story was - I'd had an idea for a completely comic story, but then I thought 'no, let's go with that language of God story, that's probably better'. So I wrote up maybe a page saying basically what I thought it was, no real storyline to it, just a bunch of ideas. And it was at that point that Gary wanted to put three storylines Tom Baker's way, one being way out there which was Stones of Venice, one being trad which was Lanyon Moor, and one which was in between which was mine. Tom said no, so Gary got back to me and said 'nice idea, though, how about you put the penguin in it and write it for Colin?'
I don't think we need to go into too much detail about the Penguin all over again...
God no. The penguin's a bastard!
But once The Holy Terror was out there it went down really well...
And I was quite shocked by that. It's going back to what I was saying before about being a fan. The fan part of me would have loathed The Holy Terror. The thirteen year old who had written The King's Demons review would have despised how silly Holy Terror was, and I expected that - I wrote it and I thought that as my one stab at Doctor Who it's probably not what I would have chosen to do because it's not really how I saw Doctor Who. I mean, I'm proud of it, but I didn't think anyone else would really like it, and I was really quite astonished when people did. I've said since and I still believe that it's popular in part because of good timing. It came out at a time when there were a lot of very traditional stories out there, just when people wanted something a bit different, and maybe they leapt upon it with a little too much enthusiasm. It's a great production, but I was astonished by it. I'd just been commissioned by Big Finish to write a Paul McGann story at the time, and I was so taken aback by the response that I almost got writer's block, I just didn't know quite how to react to that. I was ever so pleased by it, but somewhat surprised, yeah.
And that Paul McGann story was The Chimes of Midnight, which has kind of become the Big Finish Caves of Androzani - no-one seems to have a bad word to say about it.
Sort of. I've heard a few! And I've got a few to say! Chimes I think is a really good production, it's something where the production just worked. I read the script back recently because it was going into a Big Finish book and I think it's quite a good script but I hated writing it. I wrote it under a great deal of pressure, very fast, around another stage play in fact, and at the time I didn't feel I had done it justice, I didn't feel that it made any sense. And now I think it does actually, and I'm prepared to argue with anyone who says that it doesn't. But I remember when I finished writing it, sending it off to Gary Russell and thinking 'what will I do if they we're not even going to pay you for this - how embarrassing will that be?' - and I really felt that there was a very good chance that would happen. But Gary wrote back saying 'we really like that, well done'. And they recorded it very soon afterwards, because the whole idea was that we had to record Paul's stories in the new year of 2001 even though it wasn't due out until February 2002. I heard it and thought it was a really good cast doing it really well and Paul enjoyed doing it, I think he liked the sense of black comedy to it, but I had no real expectations until I heard it the day it came out. I was at a convention in Barking signing copies and listened to it on the tube back, and thought 'actually this has really worked', and I was so proud of it suddenly. I want to go on record as far as it matters and say that I am very proud of Chimes, I just didn't enjoy working on it. It's not my favourite, but I'm very pleased with it.
It certainly cemented your reputation...
I was lucky that my first two went down so well - it meant I could do anything afterwards and it wouldn't matter so much!
And you've done four more subsequently - although each time I've heard you saying that you think it's your last...
It isn't meant to be some sort of arrogance, honestly - it's actually to do with the idea that I don't want people to get bored of me coming back, and I do feel that there are other writers out there who are better than I am doing it and I don't really want to take commissions away from them or from any new writers coming along. It isn't me throwing a hissy fit at all - I just feel that I've got a certain take on Doctor Who which I think people will see through the more I try to do it. If I'd stopped after Chimes which was a genuine temptation, then I'd have a much better reputation... I'm glad I did go on because I've liked the stories I've done subsequently rather more, but if it had just been Holy Terror and Chimes it would have been rather nice because people like those ones... which I'm really chuffed about.
But as you say those stories did liberate you - you have the freedom to get away with what you fancy doing.
I think so, so long as I can justify it to Big Finish. I'm sure if I submitted an idea they wouldn't just go ahead with it because I'm this all-important Rob Shearman git. Gary's very good at being both supportive and knowing that it actually helps a writer enormously to know that you have a certain freedom, but he wouldn't let me do any old rubbish. He lets me do the rubbish I've done instead...
Maltese Penguin was a bit of a strange one.
It was odd that one. Again, I've sort of dissed it a bit... it was an odd thing. Originally the idea was, I got a call from Jason just after Holy Terror won the DWM poll that year, saying 'how about a Frobisher one-off' - at that point without the Doctor in, which I thought was fine. And then Colin was available and could be in it which didn't fit the story any more, so I changed it so Colin played Frobisher, and it got a bit too clever. I should have scrapped it and gone back to basics - it kept on shifting what it was about. It should have been a bit funnier, probably - a few more gags and a few less attempts at being a clever parody of films, perhaps. It's the only one I wasn't at the recording for, and if I had been I might have suggested that the actors not worry so much about the pastiche and just go for the characters. But I might have been wrong in that - you listen to Alistair Lock being Peter Lorre and it's very funny, and the characters were obviously written to be that way, so it does mean there's nowhere else to go with it. Toby being Sydney Greenstreet was extraordinary. And my wife's in it, which was nice! Colin Baker, though, might have been helped if he hadn't had to do the American accent, and he worked so hard on that that the performance wasn't as freeing for him as he might have been. He does a great job on it, but I think I'd like to have heard Colin just do it as Colin - it's not his fault, though. I wrote it into the script. But I should have realised and not encumbered the actors with that, they should have been allowed to just act it.
It's unusual within your oeuvre - but people tend to feel that it's not a real story, so it kind of doesn't matter.
Yes I think I got away with that rather nicely! It's not really a Doctor Who story at all, it's a character piece where the Doctor has a cameo. It was nice to write something with so many word gags in it because most comedy I write tends not to be about people trying to be clever with linguistics, but actually doing a parody of different writing styles is quite a nice tricksy thing to do.
The next one is Jubilee which had a gestation period even more troubled than Chimes...
Jubilee's problem which is my fault entirely - it was originally commissioned back in 2001, before Maltese Penguin, as an online story which would have been six ten-minute episodes, in the slot that Death Comes To Time eventually filled instead. Gary, never one to waste an idea, said of this idea I'd come up with about a lone Dalek, 'how about doing this as a regular story?'. But it wasn't due out in 2003, and at that point I got very heavily involved in the TV show Born and Bred for six months, and I was at a screenwriting course at Carlton for about four months before that, so that for ten months I was doing solid television work. I worked on Crossroads briefly, although I wasn't part of the team. But that was very labour-intenstive, and I hadn't done television before so I hadn't realised just how absorbing it is. When you're on TV you can't really do anything else because you're doing rewrites and redrafts and going to meetings and they always need things, so you haven't got time to write a two-hour audio piece about Daleks. I eventually got a promise from Will Shindler, the script editor on Born and Bred and also a Doctor Who fan. He told me to go away on holiday and write Jubilee then. So I had to write it in, slotting in it around other things, the summer of 2002, well over a year in gestation, and I think it had got a bit too big in my head. The themes had developed and grown, and I think now that Jubilee probably needs to be half an hour shorter. It's one of my favourite scripts, I really like Jubilee and has some really good things, although a lot of my favourite bits got cut, because they weren't really helpful to the story. And it's all about storytelling. I think I dropped the ball occasionally on Jubilee, and there was probably a leaner, cleaner version trying to get out.
If you'd just done it six months earlier?
Yes - writing's a bout timing, there is a right time to do certain scripts and if you miss that you've got to get it back later. Ayckbourn always told me that knowing when to start writing, which day you actually start putting the words down, is actually very important, and the entire play can change if you don't get that right. Jubilee is, of the six Doctor Whos I've done, the only one I wrote at just the wrong time. I will defend Jubilee because a lot of it's very good, the cast and Nick's production of it are very good indeed. But I would probably have rethought it a bit if I'd done it a bit earlier, and it might have been tighter.
Although it still went down well, and I certainly think it's by miles the best thing Big Finish have ever released, it wasn't as widely acclaimed as the others, perhaps because it wasn't as crowd-pleasing.
Because it's a more serious story. It's an angrier piece - I was getting quite cross about the way in which modern society does cheapen what's important. I'm very keen on history. In some ways Jubilee is more like my stage plays, it's not far away from Easy Laughter, and it was just wanting to say 'if you take something which is powerful and important, like what the Daleks represented, and you cheapen and mass-commercialise it in the way we have with the Nazis in franchises like Indiana Jones - which I do love, by the way - there is a danger that you start to believe that what the Dalek represents is something quite fun. When I was asked to do a Dalek story for the online thing I thought, well, what do Daleks mean now? And at the time there was a Kit-Kat ad with Daleks in. These creatures were meant to represent, in 1963, only 18 years after the second world war ended, Terry Nation's take on fascism. And 40 years later they had become jokes. And I wanted to look at that, at the way in which we can so easily trivialise and belittle lessons from the past which we ought to be taking on board. And if we don't take note of that then it happens again. The thing I found about Jubilee, which puzzled me that I didn't get more attacked for, is that the treatment of women is disgusting, because I was trying to say that since the Dalek thing is always based on subjugation of what appears to be a weaker species, that if you follow those rules through then you pick upon minority groups and upon the 'weaker' gender. So the idea of a woman who wants to overthrow he husband because he doesn't hit her quite hard enough, I thought was a really sick idea but I wanted to have that as this sick, poisonous legacy of the Daleks, that we had these pathetic, disgusting humans who were worse than the Daleks, because they had taken this poisonous seed of the Dalek philosophy. I based that in part upon historical stuff about the way the royal families of a hundred years ago were all so inbred that there was a king of Prussia about a hundred years ago who used to collect giants. They were all actually mad because they were inbred - the way in which all the other ruling houses or Europe would keep him calm was to have press gangs on the street roaming the streets for giants to send off to him so that he could dress them up and parade them to death. So I used the same idea only with dwarves so that they could fit inside the Daleks. An idea that was originally in Jubilee which I cut because it was getting too long was that only people who had originally fought alongside the Doctor a hundred years ago were part of a new elite. And actually Miriam and Nigel were brother and sister as well as man and wife, which is why there was such a polluted, mad streak in the family... but I cut the incest stuff, perhaps wisely - although perhaps it makes less sense. One thing people have said about Jubilee is that the people are so mad that it was nonsensical, but that was the idea, that these were almost comical thugs which is why the Dalek, for all its evil and its brutality, at least it's pure and it knows what it wants, whereas the humans around it are pathetic little warped versions of the Dalek. I wanted the Dalek to have some sympathy just because it was better than the humans that imprisoned it. That was the core of Jubilee in a way.
Given that Jubilee is quite an extreme story...
It is a bit extreme...
...do you think you needed the momentum to have done two or three Doctor Who stories beforehand, in order to have the confidence to attack something like that within the medium of Doctor Who?
Yeah, probably. Although again maybe my own arrogance let it down. Maybe if I'd written Jubilee as my first one I probably wouldn't have tried to be quite so clever, and I think Jubilee's problem is that it's trying to do so much that the impact of what it's trying to say is diluted. A lot of people out there really like Jubilee and I'm so grateful that they understood what I was trying to do, but also a lot of people hate it and don't understand what I was trying to do at all, and that's not their fault, it's my fault. I didn't make it clear enough, and because I was a bit too complacent.
How do you think your thirteen year old fanboy self would have responded to Jubilee?
I think he'd have liked the Dalek! Jubilee was also my attempt also to do a black comedy like I, Claudius. I think I'd have liked Jubilee, but I wouldn't necessarily have understood why, and I think I'd have hated things like the singing Daleks and the ads, which got cut anyway. I was very grateful to Big Finish for letting me do Jubilee and I'm very proud of it even though I don't think it's necessarily very consistent. But the fact that they allowed me to write Jubilee and even co-direct it with Nick Briggs.
You have directed in the theatre, how come you got involved in co-directing one almost by the back door, and that's been your only such involvement.
I really enjoy directing, but the joy or directing in theatre is that you tend to get a three week rehearsal period, and you work with the cast and build up a sense of trust and rapport with the actors and the production team, and I love the way in which you can discover what a play is about through other people working with you in that way. What always alarmed me about radio, before even Big Finish, is that it's done very very fast, and I have tremendous admiration for the directors at Big Finish, but I always feared that if I tried to direct one of my own Doctor Whos, I would want to take a week on it, not two days, and I would want to ask the actors to find different ways around doing the lines, when essentially you have to just get on with it. The reason I ended up doing Jubilee isn't that Jubilee was special or anything like that, it was that Nick Briggs, who directed it wonderfully I thought, was also having to play more than the average Dalek part in Jubilee, it was a very emotional and difficult performance, and he correctly decided that he couldn't do it in post-production, he had to act alongside Maggie Stables and Martin Jarvis at the time. So he said to me "I'm going to have to be acting a lot, could you therefore direct me in those bits, and also therefore be with me for the other scenes, and we can both direct the action together?" What that actually meant was that Nick directed it and I would not. You can really only have one chief and that was Nick, and I was able to give him active ongoing notes as well. I think Nick has always said he rather likes the idea of not having the writer there, but Nick and I get on very well and have become extremely good friends via Big Finish and have a lot of mutual trust, and it was good to work like that.
Last year, for all you had been tempted not to do any more, you ended up doing three...
I know! In some ways I just couldn't resist, in the anniversary year, celebrating as much as I could anyway. It was sort of two-and-a-half anyway - I don't think that Deadline is actually a Doctor Who story anyway. It's what I was asked for. The original idea of the Unbound series, we went for a big meeting and they wanted to find different ways of telling new stories, and I thought, well, telling a story about Doctor Who might be quite fun, and telling a story about my own love for it which is what it's really about. It's using a 'What if' where 'What if the show was dead?' - and at the time it was - and it was so powerful and important an idea that it actually fought its way back into imagination. I thought that was quite fun. Having now worked in TV for a few years and seeing how easily things can just fall apart, and how easy it would have been for Doctor Who not to be commissioned - if Sydney Newman had moved away from the BBC at that point Doctor Who wouldn't have got made and we'd all be much the poorer for it. And writing a story about a writer whose cornerstone was doing that, and he never got to do it, I thought was a fun thing to try and do, it would be a different sort of story. It was actually very therapeutic in a way...
There is an element of autobiography in it, what with the names of your own plays...
There is an element of it. I'm not remotely Martin Bannister, but I could have been. I was in a position in my early twenties when I was feted as the new Edward Bond or the new Joe Orton or the new Alan Ayckbourn, and that never really lasts, and you go get concerned that maybe your career took the wrong turning somewhere. And after a lot of instant acclaim it's very easy to get bitter. And I think a few years ago I could have seen myself giving up writing at one point, and looking back on it as an old man and being quite annoyed that I didn't live up to my full potential. Martin Bannister is a writer who just never quite was good enough. It was based in part also on one of my heroes, Robert Holmes, and stories I'd heard about how when he was asked to write a Play For Today he backed away from it because he didn't feel comfortable doing something quite as renowned as that. He was more comfortable doing a show which he could hide behind, which was 'only' Doctor Who. And he was such a good writer. And there was the shock of turning on Juliet Bravo - and this is why I reference Juliet Bravo in the script so much - when I was about thirteen years old and seeing that it was by Robert Holmes and being flabbergasted to realise that the writer heroes I had from Doctor Who actually wrote other things as well, they were writers in their own right. I wanted to write about that.
But might there have been a further element of autobiography - Dave Owen I think referred to this in his review in DWM - in terms of you having done a few of these plays now and you have moved into that sphere of hiding behind Doctor Who...
I think Doctor Who is very difficult to write for, I think it would be a tremendously incorrect thing to suggest that having done Doctor Who, I now wanted to leave it all behind and run away from it and dismiss it. It's more that I think it is so difficult that you begin to wonder whether you can live up to it time after time after time. I think Deadline is in some ways inspired by the idea that he gets tracked down by, essentially, Ben Cook. Not called Ben Cook in the play of course - but it was actually based on DWM's Christopher Bailey interview. Here was a writer who hadn't been interviewed for many years, and was obviously, not bitter about it but had it in his own perspective of what he wanted to say and do. And it was just Doctor Who and it was twenty years ago anyway. And I liked the idea of him having been tracked down and he's written these fourteen stories, all of which are really hated by the fans anyway.
It's pathetic, in the strictest sense of the word.
Yes, which Robert Holmes wasn't at all. I remember thinking how awful it would be if you're only remembered for something you didn't do that well. The Pip and Jane Baker syndrome, really, where they will be remembered by fans well after their deaths - this sounds horrible, doesn't it? I'm not in any way advocating that Pip and Jane Baker should die, what I'm saying is... Peter R. Newman wrote The Sensorites forty years ago, and we know nothing at all about him. We don't know where he went after Doctor Who, all we know is that he died, and yet he will be mentioned in every single programme guide to the series for years after his death. We don't know what he stands for, what he thought, what he did, whether he was like Martin Bannister or not. But he has that connection to the programme and we would never let him forget it, even though none of us actually like The Sensorites anyway. And that was the idea, of somebody who had brushed against something. If Martin had written Doctor Who he'd have been Anthony Coburn, he'd have written one story and moved on, and yet because of that his life changed. And Deadline is to some extent about how art can affect you in that way.
With Jubilee and Deadline, particularly Deadline, you were hitting the stage of not getting the same acclaim, because you were presenting a much more difficult piece of work - no longer was it 'something a bit spooky and a bit like Sapphire and Steel', there were much more layers and complexity to the work.
Quite. Deadline is the one that I think has produced the most negative reaction overall. It's the one I'm proudest of, I'm so proud of Derek Jacobi and Nick's direction, I think the cast get it right on the nose, and quite honestly I think that the writing works and I know what I'm doing scene by scene - all the scenes become part of the puzzle of what's real and what isn't. Deadline is, of all the Big Finish stories I've done, the one which is most similar to my writing outside the series, it's a rather sad comedy about mediocrity and failure, I think it's very good.
And it's one of the best uses of audio as well, the little hints of the theme tune, tiny touches like that really work.
It was sort of my attempt to do a Radio 4 play for Big Finish. Because no-one really had before - with all due respect to Big Finish, what they make is usually either a book on audio or a TV story on audio, no-one had really done a Radio 4 type play for Big Finish. And I was doing a lot of those at the time.
How would you define that type of play?
I would say that a Radio 4 play is a more character-driven piece, more theme-heavy, more concept-heavy, and is really about people discussing ideas. And Deadline is really an idea play, there is no answer to what Deadline is doing or saying, it's not about action, it's about always asking the audience questions. I personally believe Deadline only has one real scene in it, which is the second scene, where Martin is visited by his son and told that his wife is dead and they had the funeral without him. After that, everything is fantasy. I find it incredibly unlikely, the scene where the son comes back and wants reconciliation and the wife wasn't dead at all and the ashes were this guinea pig. There are little clues all the way through about that, like when Martin asks his son how he got enough to heat the burn the corpse. And actually the reason is that it would unpick the story - Deadline is a story within a story and I didn't want to be clear where the story ended. The fact that he has a nurse called Barbara Wright and she hates Ian Chesterton and he dumped her suggests that maybe in another reality he got picked up in the TARDIS and she didn't. And I was having fun with the ideas and playing fast and loose with what was real and what wasn't.
Isn't there a risk, though, that if things aren't 'real' you're reducing the impact and intensity? Particularly the reconciliation...
No, I disagree, because I feel that what's moving about that is that he wants the reconciliation so badly that he might even be inventing it and believing it in that way. Since it's a play about Martin and no-one else, other people may not even be real. Even though he's a bitter, angry, fairly unpleasant man, he desperately wants to have that purity of relationship with his grandson, he wants to do good, to be a good man. If there's a single theme in all of the Big Finishes that I've done, it's that. Like with Martin Jarvis's character in Jubilee, he isn't a good person but would like to be. It's what Pepin is like in The Holy Terror, it's about people who want to be better than they are. Martin Bannister is not a very good person but he'd like to be able to try to be and he wants it so much that he'll even invent it. I find that quite sad and quite moving, and I think Derek captured that wonderfully as well.
And the most recent of your Big Finishes, the last of your three of 2003, is Scherzo.
Ah yes, Scherzo. Er...
You're not particularly happy with it?
I'm not unhappy with it. It's a lovely production, but it's an odd mixture of things really. Scherzo is the script that I find the least 'me' of all my Big Finish scripts. Deadline was written afterwards and in some way as a response to it, Deadline was written months after Scherzo. Scherzo was the result of Gary Russell telling me what was going to happen after Zagreus and asking me to be a part of it, to take us on from Zagreus, to go into a new universe where we lose the TARDIS and it's all quite weird and alien, and I said 'okay'. He wanted a two-hander, originally as a two-episode story and not a four, and the season would be book-ended by two two-part stories. It then seemed easier to do it as a series of four parters rather than, as was originally planned, a big twelve parter written by different writers. And when Gary told me that, he said 'if you want to lose the two-hander idea, then do so', but actually the thing I like about it was the two-hander aspect. But I think that Scherzo was in some ways my wanting to underline that this new universe was extremely alien and unsettling and very very odd. And in some ways that was inevitably compromised by the fact that we really meant this to be a big new step, something which is genuinely alien and unsettling, and just before it all came out, we found out that the TV series was coming back. And that meant that all those lines in Scherzo to the effect that 'we will die in this universe, we will not escape' - which I meant to be absolutely literally true - are compromised. Because now you think, 'Yes they will escape! Because there's a new Doctor coming along!' And I sort of feel that's a great shame, that we couldn't foresee that just as we were about to do this that there would be this announcement which would change the importance of what we would do.
Scherzo was a filler story really, a story focussing on the Doctor and Charley, to emphasise how odd things in the series would be, and then let the other writers run with it. I wrote a hopefully scary little tale about music and love - I'd just got married, I wrote a lot of it on my honeymoon. And also I wanted to offer it as a sort of thank-you to the guys at ERS, because I'd been so impressed by the sound design on The Chimes of Midnight, which I think did a tremendous amount to make that story so scary. So I thought I'd write a story for Andy Hardwick and Russell Stone to have some fun with, almost like an ambient music album where there are words, but it's more about the soundscape that the words create, I thought we'd never really done that. And I thought they did a fantastic job rising to that, and I feel I'm the least involved in Scherzo of all the things I've done, it's more of a concept album. I love it for that, but it's not necessarily very 'me'.
Of all your stuff, much as I love listening to it, it's the one I find most difficult to get 'inside' - I always feel I'm missing something...
You're probably not, actually! I was aware that Jubilee had been conceptually maybe a bit too big, and I wanted to be as minimalist as possible, to write a minimalist Doctor Who story, where we had one scene of maybe 20 minutes making up each episode. To see if I could do it, and I'm not sure if I could do it or not, I'm not sure I did it very well. I think a lot of it works quite nicely, but I think that the wrong turning in Scherzo came about that I realised - having written it and waiting for it to come out - that Doctor Who is about adventures and storytelling, and Scherzo is so adamantly not about that. Other writers might have done a better job than I did. For all that people might occasionally think that I'm a bit 'out there', I'm actually quite a traditionalist Doctor Who writer, my stories are very traditional. And the thirteen year old me who would have not liked The Holy Terror would have hated Scherzo, and perhaps with good reason. I'm glad it exists, and I'm not remotely ashamed of it, and if you're going to produce this many audios a year, if you haven't got the room for something like Scherzo in that mix then something is wrong. And I think Scherzo is the best stab I personally could have made, at something which is quite a limited concept. The sound design is gorgeous, India Fisher in particular worked her socks off, but nevertheless it isn't Doctor Who I would particularly turn to, but I'm glad it exists. In the same way I imagine have with some of their novels, I can see that they over-extend themselved and then pull back a bit, Scherzo was me going as far as I could in a certain direction, and actually it wasn't that helpful to go down that route. If someone said 'Scherzo or Chimes?' I'd pick Chimes, because it's entertaining, and Doctor Who has to be entertaining, and Scherzo isn't, and I think I failed in that.
I'm surprised because I think Chimes is the weakest of the five - it's very good, but I don't quite see what the fuss is.
Chimes is the most shallow, it's about the least. The thing about Chimes is that it's based purely upon shock moments, and upon comical bits of spookiness, and yeah, fine - it's not that it's a bad script, but it's definitely saved by the production. Holy Terror is as well. In some strange way Jubilee and Deadline would have maintained their integrity whoever made them, where something like Holy Terror would have been awful if it hadn't been done well. If someone other than Sam Kelly had played that part...
You've been pretty well served for actors, really...
Yes, I think I've probably done best out of all the writers at Big Finish, I've never had a genuinely bad production or bad performance scuppering stuff, which can happen from time to time. Sometimes I don't like the performance, but that's not at all the same thing...
We were just talking about the new series to some extent scuppering Scherzo - you can't have been too disappointed, since you've ended up getting a job on it!
It's interesting seeing how people have responded to the announcement. I was surprised - when the new series was announced back in September, a lot of people said to me "Are you going to be working on it?" and I said "There's not a chance in hell - they'll get people who aren't remotely connected with it, who aren't fans". It's typical of that usual fan discomfort with being a fan, the old Groucho Marx joke that you wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have you as a member. It's not that fans have a problem with themselves particularly, but they don't want to be able to feel that the people who are amongst them necessarily can be doing it. There's an awful lot more actual respect, it would seem to me, looking back to things like The New Adventures, of writers who were genuine hack writers doing all TV that they possibly could in the sixties or seventies, just because they were Doctor Who writers who weren't fans, than the like of Lance Parkin and Kate Orman and Paul Cornell who were writing some really fantastic work but also happened to be fans, and that seemed to make them somehow lesser writers. I think it's interesting that the BBC have come round to that as well, that their first impulse was to ask who loves and cares about the show as much as these people? We're having to reinvent the show after fifteen years not on the air. It's not going to be the easiest job in the world but the people who'll be most likely to do it with the enthusiasm which it demands are those writers who they already have respect for but who also have a deep genuine love for what they are doing.
Isn't there, though, the possibility of a danger that fan writers would bring too much 'baggage' to be able to contribute to a complete reinvention?
Absolutely - that was my worry, actually. What you want to do is go into every meeting and for people to ask you questions which are justified dramatically, amd you don't want to be saying "that doesn't fit in with what my vision of the show is". I think, though that we're all quite wary of that. We're all very grateful and happy to be on the show, we don't want to come to the party and start making a fuss about things which are irrelevant, we want to demonstrate that we have the professional distance from the show as well as a love for it. In fact, amongst all of us Russell is the one who keeps saying "hang on, wouldn't it be fun if we used this element from the TV series?" - yeah, sure, if that's what you want! I always imagined that if the BBC brought back Doctor Who they would have had a complete slate-cleaning, and would say Doctor Who - does he have to be an alien? Can't he be a man who's made this police box in his back garden? Does he have to travel in time and space, can't he be a medical Doctor? They're so prone to reinvent that I think we all approached that with the idea that we had to be reasonably free. But Russell adores Doctor Who and doesn't see the point in bringing it back if it isn't Doctor Who and he's quite right, and we have to have the courage of our convictions on that. The reason Doctor Who is such a phenomenal success, to the BBC's astonishment it's as popular as ever after fifteen years off-air, and you have to take that into account - there's no point mucking about with something which already works.
To what extent do you think the reaction to it coming back might have been coloured by other things which have come back - Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Liver Birds, The Generation Game?
I get suspicious - and I would be now if I weren't on the show - I'd be heartily suspicious of a revival, because I distrust the idea of retro-worship. But that's simply not what we're doing here - the Doctor Who that we're bringing back is going to be exciting and I think for the first time, possibly, it's a show that the BBC won't feel remotely ashamed of, Before even when it was doing really well there was a slight sense of the BBC being embarrassed by it. With this, though, they're so excited by how it's developing, by Russell's ideas and the obvious enthusiasm shown by the production team, that the BBC are now excited by it as well and they're now genuinely proud of it. Whereas The Two Ronnies might now look, given that they've come back, a bit like two findly remembered comedians somewhat past their best, Doctor Who will look very fresh and very relevant in a way that it maybe didn't in its last few years on television anyway.
It's certainly odd that the whole Tom Baker era didn't get a single Radio Times cover...
Yes - we all look back at that time when Tom Baker was adored, but the BBC themselves - you'll hear the stories now, mainly in DWM interviews, and be appalled by the way it was quite clear that all these people who went on to win Oscars for designing or directing or whatever who worked on Doctor Who, were made to feel at the time that it was a bit of a poisoned chalice, that Doctor Who wasn't really taken seriously, it wasvery popular but no-one really understood why. But I think this time round it will get its Radio Times covers. It will get the amount of internal popular support that it ought to get - because it's going to be good! And the BBC are recognising, I think increasingly, that a lot of its shows are quite generic now, and they don't want to be generic with this - they want this to be a far-reaching as possible which is why the budget is so back because they don't want it to be held back, they want a series which can go anywhere and do anything as we always claimed it could.
I'd like to think that in some ways Doctor Who is now a trailblazer. A lot of drama on TV in the last ten years has become about the emergency services, police or hospitals or whatever -and you can get different takes on that and there's a place for series like that and you can do some very interesting series about that, but I think the BBC themselves have kind of tired of that. Which is why it's so good Doctor Who is coming back now, as I think they want to perhaps cut loose and be a bit more imaginative.
I don't think there was anything inevitable about Doctor Who coming back - if you'd told me a year ago Doctor Who was getting a revival of any sort, even a webcast animation, I'd have found it very unlikely. I think it's incredible that we are now sitting here talking about Doctor Who as a major BBC ONE program, prime time, when it seemed to me that it was as dead as a dodo. It's wonderful and astonishing given that ever since 1989 Doctor Who was ours, essentially we've been making it, and I think very very well, and I'm delighted we've had a chance to open the floodgates and let everyone else come and play as well.
My own series is a very black comedy show, the idea is that BBC Wales are doing it via Hartswood, and it's a six-hour black comedy about a group of people who aren't friends and all they have in common is that they do battle re-enactments, and it's about how their lives intermingle, and the very dark places they go to. It's kind of fun and yes, it does have necrophilia in it. But only in fun... it's actually an attempt by me, after a lot of encouragement from Hartswood who've been very supportive of me over the last two years since Steven Moffat heard The Holy Terror. They read a lot of my plays, a lot of the dark comedy I was doing alongside the Ayckbourn plays, and said "bring this to television". To some extent it's a greatest hits of my theatre work, taking my stage plays and give them a new life for a different audience.
So how did you get from stage, radio and Big Finish to actually working on the new TV show? How did your involvement actually happen?
Well, I was on a bus! It was in November and I got a phone call from my agent. I'd recently had a meeting with my agent, having just changed agents, and I'd said that regarding TV I would now only do my own series - which I'm working on now for the BBC - and I didn't want offers from things like The Bill or Born and Bred, just things that I was actually in control of. So she agreed, and then I got a phone call from her saying "Please don't say no automatically, because I think this is actually going to be a good job - they want you to be on the new Doctor Who series"... and I sort of casually said "Yeah, alright". I was on a bus so I couldn't scream out loud, I couldn't jump up and down or run up and down the aisle, but I was very excited. And I'd assumed from the word go that I wouldn't have a chance on a new series because I'm still a TV baby, really. Everyone else on the series, Mark and Steven and Paul have done so many hours of TV between them, and that's not even counting Russell who's a TV god, frankly. And at this point I'd written one hour of broadcast television, and it was ridiculous to think I'd get on it - maybe if I was lucky, because I was now writing my own series, I might have been in a position to do series three a few years down the road, but not series one! So I asked my agent if they just wanted to have a meeting, and she said "No, no, you're on board! You're doing episode six!"
I was also the only writer on the show who had never met any of the production team - I hadn't met Russell, or Phil Collinson, or Julie who had worked with Paul... the only people I knew on the show were the other hired writers, and it was very exciting. Of course we couldn't say a word to anybody about it, so I spent a few months knowing I was doing this series while being too busy to actually join it yet because I was still doing my own pilot at that point, and I couldn't join the series officially until February. By which point I'd received the series bible, just before Christmas, and the pilot script once Russell had written it - and it was superb, very exciting, it's a great script. And by the time of my first meeting in February, when I sat in the room with them all, I didn't know much beyond that. The rough shape of the season had been outlined, and with episode six they'd given me maybe a paragraph about what they wanted. It was clearly the right episode for me to do - it's the one I wanted to do, and I think we all probably thought that. I was slightly envious of episode eight which is Paul's one, but I think Paul will do that better than I would. And my first meeting was fantastic - they all sat around telling me how much they liked my Big Finish work, they were sat around quoting bits of Deadline and Chimes at me.
So it was actually the Big Finish stuff that got you the gig?
Yes, and that's one of the things I'm proud of. I know full well that I'm only there because of Big Finish, and I'm so grateful to Big Finish for having put me in a position where I'd effectively had six auditions for the new series. No-one else on the series is in that position, although they're all fans, Mark is not there because he wrote Nightshade, Steven is not there because he wrote Fatal Death for Comic Relief, Paul is not there because of the New Adventures, Paul has a huge body of work that Mal Young is very supportive of. But they didn't even know me, and I'm only there because they liked Holy Terror and the others. And I think it's wonderful that they showed such faith in getting me involved on the strength of that, without even a meeting. I'm chuffed, really - it's great!
And given that this is essentially a job you must have craved for much of your career and your childhood before that, how do you differentiate the two halves of yourself? Are you still excited about just being on Doctor Who, or has it just turned into a job yet?
I try not to think of it as Doctor Who at all. I think it's safer - as we were saying earlier on about the whole 'fans writing it' thing. You need to divorce yourself from the expectations that you would have of it as a fan, because if you have a scene which you think is the best Doctor Who scene ever, something you've always wanted to see on screen, but it's not what the producers want you to do, or not how they see the Doctor, then you can get resentful about it for reasons which are not the right reasons. If you want to defend something they don't like, it has to be because you're arguing about its dramatic worth, not because you love Doctor Who. I try very hard not to see the new series as being the old series even though it is - even though there's nothing coming out of the meetings which is in any way contradictory of the old series either in tone or in fact. As it is, here I am working on a series which has become a BBC ONE flagship programme, which they're hoping will run for many years, with Christopher Eccleston as the star and Russell T. Davies writing most of it - it's a huge gig. If I tried to think about it being Doctor Who as well, I'd probably never pick up my pen. I try to look at is as a learning experience - I'm working with some amazing people. Every single one of the production team are actually genuinely inspiring. I actually enjoy meetings - although they're quite hard and they ask you to make big leaps, it's because they want this to be the best thing ever, so they're not going to be easy on you. I learn so much just from the process of it. I've got a meeting on Tuesday which is scary but I'm looking forward to it, because I know that the only thing we all have in common is that they want it to be the best 45 minutes of television we can possibly produce, and so do I. And if Russell - the guy who wrote Second Coming and Queer As Folk - says to me "this is better dramatically if we do this" I'll react the same way I did ten years ago when Alan Ayckbourn said it to me about theatre. Because he knows what he's talking about. Julie Gardner is sensational - she is the most supportive exective producer you could possibly hope for, and she understands scripts so well, which is wonderful. Phil is an old fan himself, loves the show, and is constantly almost hugging himself with delight because he's enjoying it so much. And the two editors, Helen and Elwyn are the loveliest people, who want all of us writers to feel comfortable and supported and give us as much space as possible.I know this sounds like a load of old rubbish, but it's a really great team.
And Russell is just a nice guy - he's frighteningly good. And I wouldn't want to cross him because he'd win. If I went up against Russell and said "I think it's important that the Doctor does this," and Russell doesn't, Russell's going to win that argument, and not because he'll use his authority. He's actually written to me a couple of times and said "I'm actually writing to you here as a fellow writer, not as an exec," and I take that, that he's writing to me off the record as a friend to see how things are going, and I love that. He's responding as a workmate, and because there isn't any real sense on this show of a hierarchy, we're all trying to do our best, and it is going to be good. When Russell first wrote to me, he sent me a lovely email - I still hadn't met him at this point, although I'd emailed him a couple of times after getting the job - he said "We'll have a great time! We'll really enjoy ourselves! And I ask you to remind me of this when we're standing in some field in Cardiff at 4am trying to film the Taran wood beast...". And the thing I love about it is that it's very easy in television to forget that it's mean to be fun. And I'm having a ball. It's not easy, it can be frustrating - but because the BBC are now taking Doctor Who so seriously, and everyone wants to be a part of it, and the revival obviously means so much to them, that means nothing will get through without it being argued and discussed to death, which means everything is a slow process - but it's an enjoyable process. And I'm genuinely thrilled that historically, I can look back one day and say "when they revived Doctor Who, I was one of the writers on that first series". And that's a great place to be...
