Script Doctors | Series 1 | Paul Cornell
The writer of Father's Day, interviewed in mid-2004 as the first season of Doctor Who was progressing in production.
There was, perhaps, an air of inevitability about the announcement that Paul Cornell would be writing for the new TV version of Doctor Who; from his iconoclastic Timewyrm: Revelation back at the dawn of the Virgin New Adventure books back in 1991 on, he has stayed in regular, intimate contact with the franchise by writing books, short stories, comic strips, audios and most recently animated online dramas - and, of course, is the creator of Professor Bernice Summerfield. Perhaps only Marc Platt has maintained such a lengthy and respected association with the Doctor Who 'apocrypha' - but Platt has been nowhere near as prolific... So how come Paul Cornell has wangled his way onto the new TV series? Where does he see it taking him? And why does he still, after all these years and so many stories, feel the need to present us with his vision of Doctor Who?
I think it's because I've been a bit of a dilettante. I do things for fun, and I feed my family, but I've never had a big break, the 'League of Gentlemen' moment that gives you a defining thing people know you for. I grow increasingly concerned with that as I get older - I'd like especially to write a novel that would suddenly go big, because I think of myself as a novelist who does a bit of telly...
And would you even be writing at all, if it weren't for Doctor Who?
Absolutely not - fanzines provided my first audiences outside of school essays, and the people who got me into other branches of my professional career were all Doctor Who fans. I owe my career to this show, and it's always been my single ambition to write for the TV version. I don't think an association with Doctor Who has affected how I'm seen by professionals, because all professionals care about is the work - there isn't a fannish stigma attached to my head there, really. Apart from the fact that the current production team think I'm the one who's going to give away all the secrets to everybody - and I'm absolutely not! Amongst the Doctor Who fan community, I'm either 'Local boy makes good', or more often 'He's not a proper writer, is he? He's one of us...' I keep retiring, about eight times so far I think, and it usually happens when I think I've done enough of a particular medium. And someone then dangles something particularly interesting in front of me...
Getting the chance to write a script for the TV show is presumably the realisation of a life's ambition - but surely even Timewyrm:Revelation must have felt like a dream fulfilled at the time...
Absolutely - every stage has felt like 'the real thing'.
Was it difficult even with your second or third novels to summon up the same enthusiasm to keep writing Doctor Who novels...?
Maybe not second or third time, but I think that's why I keep stopping - I won't do it unless I really want to. But none of my stories have been written without enthusiasm, they were all because I was really excited by an idea.
How did you break out of the ghetto world of Doctor Who fiction?
It was through meeting Sandra Hastie and Steven Moffat I got to do my own Childrens ITV show [Wavelength] for two seasons, where I really learnt about the demands of original work, and how to work with an audience and how to be part of the team that is telly. From there, I've sort of gone from show to show making a living. Casualty was a bit of a breakthrough, and I'm very proud of some of my Casualty work. I've kind of run out of medical stories now - you have to bring medical stories to the table, and I used every medical story I could find in my six episodes.
It seems to me that there is quite a chasm between what you write to order for television and your novels - your TV work veers more toward the 'soapy'. You've even written for Coronation Street...
But apart from Corrie which is an unabashed soap, I've always written in a non-soapy way for shows that people sometimes see as soaps. And I was just terrible at Corrie, I didn't care very much, and I was trying to discipline myself to do something I wasn't enjoying. If I'd been braver I'd have said 'This just isn't my thing, sorry'.
So if you had a 'thing', the one show or book you were to be defined by - what do you think it might be?
That's very hard to say, and it's a very good question. I think it would be something of serious intent. Probably one of my usual hobby horses, I am one of those writers who writes the same thing over and over again in different ways. But I think it's possibly bad for a writer to identify and label his own shticks, because then you could start consciously doing them, and become a parody of yourself...
Or even, if you're too aware of them, to be unable to do them any more?
Absolutely, you feel embarrassed about going there again. But I've seen reviews which list my common tropes and thought, 'Absolutely, that's true...'
Last year you got the enviable chance to rework Doctor Who to your own template, for the webcast of BBCi's ninth Doctor adventure Scream of the Shalka, starring Richard E. Grant...
You wait ages for a new Doctor Who, and two come along at once...
In retrospect, of course, it does look like something of a false dawn, but at the time you must have been incredibly excited by the proposition.
Yes - at the time it looked like only dawn on offer! And we treated it like the real thing, and I'm very pleased that we did, that we didn't shrink back from that and put it in its own little bubble automatically. Obviously history has put it in a little bubble, and to fight against that would be silly. Russell rather neatly summed it up in his DWM column - mine isn't the real ninth Doctor because the public at large have never heard of him...
To some extent you could argue that the public at large isn't even all that aware of the eighth Doctor...
Even though that movie was shown at peak time to ten million people! With Shalka we beat BBC THREE with our ratings, and I was quite proud of that. For a while I was thinking of writing a little piece of fiction to bring an end to it, but I think it's nice to leave that Doctor out there for fan fiction. And if a book writer wants to use him ten years down the line, that would be fun.
I'm curious if you coming fresh from Shalka into a totally different new imagining of the show meant that there was any conflict of viewpoint...
Not really, because I'm very good at separating off different bits of my working life. I didn't have a Shalka thought in my head! There are some points where Shalka and the new TV show have made the same choices, and some where they've made absolutely opposing choices. Russell has very much created his Doctor Who in a vacuum to be exactly what he wants it to be, the exception to that being that he wants it to relate to the old TV show in a very direct way. And I believe in the chain of command - Russell's the show-runner, and I'm not about to enforce my point of view on the show. If he asks for suggestions, I've got them, but I'm not about to come in with preconceptions about what I will and won't do. I was pleased and slightly amazed to be invited on after Shalka - the guy who has first go doesn't expect to be given another go, and I'm really grateful to Russell for that.
And what was your first inkling that you would be invited on?
I got two phone calls from Russell. Firstly, he called me up and said 'Terrible news!'. And I said 'What?'. And he said, 'I've got Doctor Who, it's actually happening!' - and this is before anyone knew about it, and bless him, he really is the kindest man in the world, he started with 'Terrible news!' because he meant that Shalka would be over. And he'd had the kindness to think of what it might mean to me. Of course I leapt up and down the room with joy at the terrible news! And then he said 'We may well be calling upon you...' - and thus I was sent into weeks of utter fear...
...that he might not?
That he might not! When the news was announced, everybody was wondering who might be writing for it, and I thought Russell would think twice. A few months later I was putting some oven chips in, when he phoned. He asked me what I was up to, and I told him I was putting some oven chips in, so he did thirty seconds about how wonderful oven chips were, and then said 'This is the call you've been waiting for all your life, do you want to work on Doctor Who?' And me being a klutz, I went for the comedy and said 'Well, I dunno...' And he said 'Oh, well, listen, if you're doing something else...' 'NOOOOOOO!!!'
That would have been a great way to lose the gig...
It would, wouldn't it? And even now, I still think about how many shows I've been sacked from - because I've been sacked from many, many television shows. Thinking about just how far some of those have gone before I fell in the pit, I'm still fretting about not getting there, not doing it. But I think I'm going to be okay. Unless Mal Young hates my episode with a passion...
How do you actually know Russell in the first place?
Before Sandra Hastie and I did Wavelength, the first show we got involved in together was part of a contest to produce a teen soap for Channel 4, which was won by Phil Redmond and became Hollyoaks. It was another idea from Steven Moffat's dad Bill who had come up with Press Gang. I wrote three of the four scripts that we sent in, and Russell wrote the fourth one, as well as storylining the whole first season. At that time he'd only just started to do The Grand, and we were very much on the same level. We swapped favours - he got me onto Children's Ward, and I introduced him to Rebecca Levene so he could get to do Damaged Goods. At the time I didn't know how on earth I could write mainstream TV, and I learned some serious stuff about people and structure from doing it, it really improved me as a writer. The first thing Russell said to me about my Doctor Who script - and he'd picked a particular episode he wanted me to do - is that he wanted me to use the voice I use in the books; sentimental, romantic, attempting to move the reader - to write, in effect, my sort of New Adventure. I know those words will create all sorts of havoc... So that was welcome, that he wanted me to write in the style of the books, not necessarily in the style of my TV work.
Given that you're the only writer credited on the episode, how much of what's on screen will be yours and how much of it came from Russell's brief?
It's all me in one sense, in that they're all words I came up with - Russell hasn't been forced to rewrite anything. The plot is a take on his first idea - he wrote down what he wanted the episode to deliver emotionally, and that's exactly what I went for and that remains, although the mechanism by which we achieve that has changed a lot. It is a collaborative process - Doctor Who culture particularly enshrines writers to a degree which nobody else does, but actually writing television is a group effort. Russell is a show-runner in the American style, and is at every script meeting, where we're all wandering round the room tossing bits of plot back and forth are all working on that script. It's then my job to take those ideas away and make that work - but that's kind of normal in TV.
This might seem a slightly facile question - but how different is what you've delivered this time to what you might have done had you been asked to write for the TV series back at the start of your career, around the time of Timewyrm: Revelation?
That's interesting. I don't think they would have asked me for this particular focus, on the emotion and the personal, in any previous form of Doctor Who. We're doing some of those now, because TV has moved on, and post-Buffy and post-West Wing, viewers don't need their format spoon-fed to them, so we can break format and people will still recognise it as the same show. I think your general viewer isn't going to notice the difference between new Doctor Who, and the rest of episodic television in that respect - we're doing all the things which modern episodic television does, in terms of breaking format. Doctor Who fans might think we're trying all sorts of weird and different things, but we're not - we're just making it like modern telly.
You say you wouldn't have had the chance to do an emotional, personal Doctor Who story in any previous version of the TV show - but even in terms of your own Doctor Who work, you've changed the emphasis...
At the time of my first ones, I wrote the only kind of stories I could write - when I wrote Timewyrm: Revelation, I just wrote the only Doctor Who story I could. And that was very emotional, very direct, very honest, very straightforward. I wrote those for a while, and then got a bit bored with myself, so I wrote some comedy and some 'romp'. I don't refer to everything I do as 'romp', but sometimes I choose romp.
So has the whole development of styles been an exercise in stretching yourself?
Yes, trying different things. Into the sturm und drang which makes up much modern SF, I introduced Bernice to point out how silly everything is. And it's difficult for me to write something with her in it that's pompous, because she'll keep pointing to my pomposity as well. Which means that if I'm going to do drama, I have to up the ante so that it's not just soap-drama-conflict of the week, which she would take the piss out of, but it's actually something which means as much to me as to her, so her tendency to take the piss becomes a matter of pathos, of fighting against the odds. So she kind of spurs me on sometimes in that way. And when I say Bernice, I mean the 'Bernice figure' I have in everything I write.
Bearing all that in mind, how do you rate your previous Doctor Who work, looking back at it all now?
I like Love And War and Human Nature. Revelation kicks arse, but is painfully adolescent. No Future is a botch-job, shouldn't have happened, some good ideas but I should have used them elsewhere. I really like Seasons of Fear, I think we did quite well on that. Scourge is pretty cool, it's okay. Happy Endings I'm surprisingly pleased with, I think there's quite a cracking plot in there that doesn't really get seen very often, because it's under a lot of jelly and icing. Shalka I quite like, Shadows of Avalon, apart from the Brigadier and the TARDIS stuff at the end, I think it would have been better not to have written, and I rather hate it these days. Oh No It Isn't! has a nice central idea - I'd like to rework that, maybe as a mainstream novel in some way. I don't really think I pulled it off, I think Jac Rayner's audio adaptation cuts to the core of it much better than the book.
And working on Doctor Who the TV show must be the highest profile gig you've had. Do you think it might be a springboard upwards?
I hope so... although I've reached the point where I'm not hungry for TV any more. I'm hungry for novels, and to some extent for comics, but with telly I'm quite happy. I've done my big ambition! And I think that's a better attitude to have, because it means I don't get all freaked out if I don't get something. I certainly still want to do my own show, but I'm not career-minded television-wise. Doctor Who has definitely done me a lot of good, in terms of profile - with Casualty you get the big audiences, but even though there's a writer's credit at the front of the episode, the Radio Times letter-writers will still only ever refer to 'the scriptwriters'. And I'm happy to wait and see where Doctor Who takes me now...
