Script Doctors | Series 2 | Toby Whithouse
Meanwhile, in another part of London… I've just emerged from an intensive discussion with Tom MacRae when Toby Whithouse calls to finalise the details of our meeting, in a central London hotel. The hotel bar turns out to be noisy and crowded, so we hit the streets in search of somewhere peaceful. "Do you know the significance of today?" I ask Toby as we amble along. "No, not at all – what?". "It's Doctor Who's 42nd anniversary. And that pub there," I continue, gesturing towards the legendary Fitzroy Tavern, "will be crammed full of Doctor Who fans within two hours."
"Oh, well," Toby grins evilly, crossing the road and heading for the entrance, "let's go in there then…"
You've been an actor, and you're now primarily a writer. So which came first, and how come you've managed to do both?
The acting, I have no idea! I originally started training to be an illustrator, and my dream back then was to be a comic book artist. Comic books were the sort of science fiction I grew up with, particularly British stuff like Alan Moore. I started going to an art college in Southend, where I grew up. In the meantime, I was a member of various amateur dramatic groups, and caught the acting bug from that. And I thought, why would I want a perfectly good, safe living as an artist when I could be starving…? So I quit that, and started training as an actor. I was an actor for about seven or eight years, and was fairly successful. I was a regular in a TV series for a long time, I did a play in the West End, so I was a good jobbing actor - but I wasn't getting the type of work I wanted to do. I was being sent a lot of scripts, and I'd read these and think 'This is absolute rubbish! Who wrote this? It's terrible!'. And I was going for these jobs and not getting them anyway. So it was a two-fold thing – I thought, 'Maybe I could write something, that then I could be in'. The idea was that I would write a little play and put it on in a pub theatre somewhere, with just my mates. The worst thing about being an unemployed actor is that you have so much time on your hands, and you need something to occupy your brain. I thought this could be a little project just to keep myself sane, even if nothing ever came of it. So I started writing this play – it started out as an idea for a joke, which I wrote down. And then I thought, 'If you have that line, you need this line that leads in to it, and you need the reply afterwards' – and it expanded in both directions until the two people talking suddenly became brothers, then suddenly they were sitting in a café, then suddenly that café belonged to their family, and so on… and ultimately, I had written a scene. And then I started writing the next scene and so on and so on until, eventually, I had written a play. I didn't quite know what to do with it – I was filming something at the time and I said to the producer, 'I've written this script, what do I do next?'. And she gave me a list of literary agents, I sent it off to them, and eventually was taken on by one, who sent the play out to a load of theatres and TV companies. One theatre picked up the play and entered it for a competition, which it won, and the first prize was that they would mount a production of it when they opened the theatre, and that was the Soho Theatre in Dean Street. So it was this sequence of consequences where the next one was never planned! And in the meantime I'd started being offered writing work for television, at about the same time as acting work was becoming sporadic – my wife was pregnant with our first kid, so I kind of found myself writing TV scripts, and thinking 'How did this happen!? This was so not planned…'. I thought I was going to be playing Hamlet at the National, and instead I'm writing an episode of Where The Heart Is… As time went on, I began to enjoy the writing. As an actor you have no power whatsoever over your career, you're constantly waiting for somebody else to give you the nod, but as a writer you can just write, you're not waiting for somebody else. And the writing work for television never stopped, so there was never a choice to be made: I was really enjoying it, I was master of my own time… and so consequently, many years later, I find myself writing Doctor Who!
From looking at your TV writing credits, Where The Heart Is seems to be rather in isolation – it's much earlier than the other stuff, and your other work doesn't appear to be in the same middle-of-the-road, mainstream house style…
Absolutely, yeah. Ironically, I think, what was so useful about doing that job was… as an actor, as with all jobbing actors, I had a very eclectic career. You do a play and then a tiny part in a film and then a couple of episodes of TV. As a writer I've always wanted the same type of career. I've written two theatre plays, and now on television I'm diversifying. Where The Heart Is was a try-out, really, to see whether I could write for television. It was the first TV script I'd ever written, and it was a steep learning curve and invaluable experience – but when they asked me to go back to do another one, I thought, er, well, you know…
…you can only learn so much from it?
Exactly! [Laughs] To do one was nice… to do more than that wouldn't be great.
The thing you're best known for would probably be No Angels, which you devised yourself. How did you so quickly get in a position that you got your own show green-lit?
The company that I devised No Angels for, World Productions, I had been one of the writing team on a TV show called Attachments for them, which was really well-written, well-produced… nobody saw it, but I was very proud of it. And while I was doing that, Channel 4 had put out a tender to all of the independent TV companies, saying they wanted ideas for new drama series. So World, while I was in the office, approached me saying 'We've got an idea for a drama series about four nurses in a northern city', and I said '…yeah…and?', and they said, 'That is, literally, as far as we've got!'. So I devised the four characters and developed ideas for the first episodes and the first series. It went through an incredibly long development process, about eighteen months, before finally Channel 4 commissioned it. I don't know that I would, independently, have come up with an idea for another 'medical' show, I was basically hired to create it.
But it's not really a medical show per se, is it?
We were very anxious not to do the Holby thing. And we were rigorous at putting in rules about the type of stories we would tell and how we would tell them. On things like Holby and Casualty, the 'guest' storylines are incredibly important – you'll have whole sequences of scenes just about the guests. We thought that was the opposite of what we wanted to do, so we imposed this rule where you never venture out of the POV of the four girls. And if you have a medical story, if you have somebody crashing through the doors on a trolley – the first scene deals with that, and then you never see that character again, they will just kick off a story about the four girls.
And how do you get from something like that to being offered a job on Doctor Who?
I'm a friend of Julie Gardner, and over the years we'd say 'Wouldn't it be nice to do something together?', 'Yes, wouldn't it?', 'But I'm kind of booked up for about another year…'. And then she was made head of drama at BBC Wales, and then of course Doctor Who happened. And she rang me and said 'Would you like to do an episode?'. Well, yes! When do I start? The thing is, it certainly seems to me that the choice of writers was very eclectic. Steven Moffat, for instance, is principally known as a comedy writer… I think it depends on whether you classify Doctor Who as purely as science fiction show - which I'm not saying you do - there's always an element of humour in it, and very strong, driven stories. And Steven, in that sense, is the perfect choice because he's such a funny writer, and such a high-tempo writer, that he would have the comedic sensibilities to do it brilliantly.
So you didn't have any prior connection with Russell?
None at all – the first time I met Russell was my first meeting to talk about Doctor Who. Luckily for me he was a big fan of No Angels and The House of Eliott, which was the show I'd been in as an actor.
Er… I can only remember the French and Saunders sketch…
I know! [Laughs] That's all anyone can remember! I was looking for something on the internet recently, and looking at 80s and 90s TV shows, and there was a clip of The House of Eliott – not a clip I was in – and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. You watch episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs - which was by the same creative team as The House of Eliott, Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh – and that hasn't aged at all, you're still completely involved with it. But The House of Eliott just looks farcical, it's absolutely absurd. People keep saying to me 'They're showing it on UKTV Gold – and it's nonsense!'. But I was very fond of it…
So what previous experience did you have of Doctor Who? Had you seen it before?
As a kid, yes – I was a child of the Tom Baker era. It's funny, but I thought I'd been a big fan of it and had a fairly good working knowledge of it. And then I met Russell and Steven and Tom MacRae… and I realised I was just paddling in the shallow end! When we got the train back from the readthrough of the first couple of episodes in Cardiff, we had a big Doctor Who conversation, and I was completely out of my depth. I was made to realise that, actually, I didn't know anything!
And was it a free commission to devise any story you liked, or were you given a brief?
I think it was, 'Do what you want, within certain limits'. I already knew that my episode would bring back Sarah Jane Smith and K9, so it had to be a modern-day episode… but within that, I could do basically what I wanted. It took about a month of submitting various storylines, then doing treatments of those, then the guys in Cardiff saying 'No, but why don't we take that element and put it in this new setting, blah blah…'. So it took about a month of quite intensive work to get to a point where I was ready to start the script. And over that period we covered a hundred different stories and a hundred different settings…
How does the back-and-forth consultation process of writing on Doctor Who compare to your other work?
It's the same as every drama series I've written, in that you deliver the first draft and go through a fairly exacting process of drafts, and then X number of drafts later it finishes. I was quite lucky, in that I've written more drafts of other things, Doctor Who went fairly smoothly and fairly quickly. And itdoesn't differ enormously from the first draft, it was just a question of moulding it into shape. There are some shows where you'll write the first draft and everyone reads it and says 'Jesus, we are in a mess, we're going to have to start again…' – and Doctor Who wasn't like that. In a way the more roundabout process was before I started the first draft. My story is set in a school, which was Russell's idea. Originally it was a completely different thing set in an army base that's next to a remote village where something strange is happening to the villagers, and the Doctor arrives and Sarah Jane's there and they trace it all back to the army base… I got quite far down the line on a treatment of that. And Russell read it and said 'Yeah, it's great. Let's set it in a school!' Er… right, okay… so, essentially, start again!? But I think, to be honest, even though it was quite a shock at the time, dramatically, his instinct was absolutely right. What we've ended up with is far better than what we would have ended up with had we followed the original idea.
…which presumably wasn't called School Reunion?
No - it was going to be called Black Ops at that time.
As a child of the Tom Baker era, Sarah and K9 would both have been familiar to you…
Oh yeah – I had the K9 doll, when I was a kid!
…did that add to the thrill of working on it, that you knew you were writing for what are, from DWM's cultural perspective, icons?
I think, to be honest, it was lucky that I wasn't quite as immersed in that world as other writers are – if I had been, it would have completely freaked me out! Certainly bringing them back added a frisson of excitement to it. Russell said at the time, 'This is going to be the cover of the Radio Times'. And as soon as he said that, I got the fear! But when you go into a TV series just to write a single episode, you invariably have to take on storyline considerations, stuff that's been building up before your episode, and you have to leave your episode with certain things in place for the next writer…
What we would call 'arcs'? Although apparently nobody in TV does…
Oh, I do! That's how I'd put it – you need your story arcs. So consequently having Sarah Jane and K9 was no more or less strange than having any storyline feeding into it where they're saying 'We need this to happen in your episode'. Also, it played to my strengths - I wouldn't know how to write period dialogue, for instance, my dialogue is naturalistic and 21st century, so in that sense it was a good choice for me to be doing a modern episode. On Series Two, Steven's done a period thing - I just don't know how I would go about something like that.
Hey, it could be another steep learning curve…
It could! I mean, I'd love to give it a try…
So when, exactly, was this all going on? Had the first series been on TV yet?
No – they sent me the pilot script from the first series, and I felt very honoured to be getting that through the post. Of course, every page is watermarked with your name through it… And then at my first meeting with Russell, I was taken into a room and shown the first episode, which was a month or so before transmission, and the Aliens of London, World War Three two-parter.
Did that mean that when you started work, you didn't know you weren't writing for Chris's Doctor?
No, this was the strange thing, because that happened just as I was starting the first draft of the script. And I found out about it just as everyone else did, I wasn't given any privileged information. I turned on the news one day - '…fucking hell!'. Of course up until then, in my mind, I'd been writing for Chris. But already David was being touted as taking over. Casanova I was a huge fan of – I'd not really been aware of David's work before that, but he was a revelation, absolutely stunning. I guess my chief difficulty at the time was that I'd seen enough of Chris that I had a good idea of his angle on the Doctor, and the problem after he left was, what's the new Doctor going to be like? I was writing blind. But because I knew it was probably going to be David and the only thing I knew was Casanova – I thought, 'I'll write it as if it's Casanova'. Casanova without the shagging, that is! But with the same spark, and that magnetism, and the agility of thought that David has. So that was how I got through the first draft, and handed it in thinking they would come back saying 'This is an absolute disaster'. But as it was they loved it, they said 'This is exactly how we see the character going, this chimes very much with how David sees the character'. Pure luck that Casanova had been on, because it gave me that way into the character. I read this fantastic interview that Mark Gatiss had done with Tom Baker at the NFT, on the Sight and Sound website. And the transcript of this was one of the funniest things I'd ever read, because Tom's such a huge eccentric, and that's what the character is, this gorgeous avuncular genius. And I think that the Doctor Whos that really work are the ones where they harness an aspect of their own personality and magnify it, and that's what David's done brilliantly. I haven't seen any of the rushes of the second series yet, but certainly at the readthrough for the Christmas episode, plus episode 1 and mine which is episode 3, David just blew the roof off. He was so mesmerising and so eccentric and so funny and intelligent. It's absolutely the part he was born to play…
Your episode must surely all be in the can by now? I thought you might have seen some of it by now…
Not yet – James Hawes rang the other day to say he'd seen the first rough cut, and he couldn't be happier. I'm itching to see it!
You've got a pretty high profile guest star in Anthony Head…
I met him at the readthrough. It was strange because essentially it was David's first day, that readthrough, and I'm sitting next to Lis Sladen, and Anthony Head's first line is something like 'What do you want?' – and just in those four words… well, everyone just giggled because he was just so creepy! Instantly you just thought, yeah, it's in the bag! And he was absolutely brilliant. James Hawes was telling me he's extraordinary in the actual episode. I was pleased to get him because I knew him as a good character actor, but when I mentioned him to other people they were like, 'Omigod! Anthony Heeeeeead!'
It's the power of Buffy, isn't it? How was Lis?
Delightful. She looks absolutely incredible, and she was fantastic. I think that she is, understandably and quite rightly, very protective of Sarah Jane, because obviously as well as the original series she's done the K9 and Company stuff and so on, and I think getting her to reprise the role took some time and negotiation and some reassurance. And on the day I think he was still quite cautious about it – she wanted to see that we were treating the character with respect, which I think we do. But she was fantastic. It was bizarre, it was such a strange thing, the scenes with Sarah and Rose. There is this undercurrent of 'the ex meeting the new wife', that's kind of inevitable. But she was lovely, really nice.
Had you had to research five years' worth of Doctor Who history, just to get Sarah spot-on?
I watched as many episodes as I could get hold of, and also I found no end of stuff on the internet. But also she was such an iconic character anyway, and I don't know whether my tenure on No Angels was helpful in their choice of me to write the Sarah story, but part of the appeal of Sarah at the time was that she was a very modern character. Up until then, the role of the assistant had been to fall over and get captured, and she was the first one who was quite pro-active and resilient. And having written No Angels and various things like that, I had experience of writing that type of character before, so it was actually quite… easy! Or at least, it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.
Easy in the sense that the character had a handle you could grasp, which you might not have had if it had been one of the 1960s girls?
Exactly. Or Adric, God forbid…
I won't hear a word against Adric, thank you…
…but in the original script, Anthony Head's character is talking to someone and you don't see who it is for the first half of the scene. And then I wrote, in the stage directions, '…and she turns round, and the heard of every dad in the country skips a beat – it's Sarah Jane Smith'!
And how about K9? Although he's fondly remembered by anyone who was between five and ten in the late 1970s, he's not got quite the same respected, iconic status as Sarah…
Yeah, that was trickier. His role within 'the gang' had to be slightly different. Actually there's a point where I make a joke about the fact that in the old days they had K9 and now they've got Mickey, and Mickey at one point is talking to Sarah and says 'How did you all fit together?', and Sarah says 'Well, I was his companion, and K9 was K9. How do you fit in?'. And Mickey says, 'Well, the Doctor's the Doctor, and Rose is his companion, and … oh my God – I'm K9!'. And the scales fall from his eyes, a moment of horrible clarity. And K9's role was quite difficult to get right, because the tone and the personality of the show is very different now to how it was back then, so therefore K9 has to fulful a different role. I don't think he could be quite as centre-screen as he would have been back then. The meat of the episode is the Doctor's relationship with Sarah Jane compared to his relationship with Rose, and the rivalry, affection and sympathy between Rose and Sarah Jane, so K9 has to be on the periphery of that to a degree. That said, he still has a couple of very good gags…
Has the experience of writing this show, having been hired as a jobbing writer, been different to your recent experience which has been mostly working on your own show?
Yeah, very much so. The most difficult thing about Doctor Who, the biggest challenge for me personally, wasn't so much the subject matter, wasn't so much the traditions of the show - it was that I'd never written anything for 7 o'clock on BBC ONE. Writing for that time slot is unlike writing for anything else. Most of the stuff I've written has been post-watershed, with swearing and shagging, and also where you can develop stories that are slightly slower paced. But if you're doing something BBC ONE, 7 o'clock, Saturday night, you have to adopt a completely different style. Absolutely, completely different. All of the slow progressions of character and storyline and so on are thrown out of the window – 'No, we need monsters, and we need them running down corridors, and we need them NOW!'. Once I got into that, once I realised that was how to tell the story, it was fine - but it took a while for me, because I was so inexperienced in writing for that kind of audience. I've now got to a point where I can look at 'the story so far' and say something like, 'Right – at this point, we need somebody killed. Let's kill one of the kids!'. And Russell will go, 'Oh yes, marvellous! Let's kill some kids!!'. And that's just not how you would run a story at 10 o'clock on Channel 4. But - the deaths of children aside! - you need a 'money shot', and on a pretty regular basis. At first, that seems artificial, because it feels as though you're building up a false tempo, but after a while, that's just how it is. You can tell huge stories but because you cram it all in, you have a real momentum to it. To get that amount of story in, you need lots of big moments, big conflicts every couple of scenes. And once I got hooked into that being how to tell the story, I loved it – it was a huge liberation. That was something I learnt from Russell, in that the way he works is that he devises the big moments and keeps them in his mind, the sequence of the big moments, and his job as a writer is to link them. 'We've got that big moment – how are we going to get to the next one?'. And actually, that simplifies the process, because your task is then to get yourself to the next big explosion or the next chase down a corridor.
That makes it sound rather as if you're going back to your roots – it sounds like a very 'comic strip' way of writing, where everything has to be shorthand…
Absolutely, yeah, I think that's true. And also, both Russell and Steven have a background in writing for children's television, and it's the same model as that. High-octane stories, a lot of momentum. That they both have that background has been enormously valuable.
And do you think this experience will feed back into your other work?
I think it will, inevitably – it's a constant learning curve. It's taught me an enormous amount, though I wouldn't necessarily be able to point at scripts I'm writing now and say 'That bit I got from Doctor Who', but it all filters in. Because one's style as a writer is ever-changing and ever-development.
And what are you moving on to?
I'm developing a sitcom, which is something I've always wanted to do, and developing a drama series for BBC Wales, and another comedy drama for ITV. There's my big science fiction thing, which might be happening but which I can't tell anyone about! And I've just had a play on in London, and what was enjoyable about that was that I've been writing that for the last few years, it took a long time to get ready, and writing for the theatre you adopt a completely different style, you are allowed to let characters develop in a certain way, and it's quite nice to go back to that every now and then. Certainly writing for the theatre is something I think I'm going to be doing on and off for the rest of my career as well. But I made a very deliberate choice at the beginning of my writing career that I wanted to concentrate on drama, to learn about the mechanics of writing stories, of writing serial arcs and character arcs and build up a foundation of craft. Ultimately I want to write comedy, and if you adapt that same discipline to a comedy then that makes it a much richer experience. I'd like to have as eclectic a career as a writer as is possible, so if one day my agent rings up and says 'Someone wants to talk to you about doing some animation', then yeah, why not? I don't have huge ambitions to write movies, but I'd like to write single dramas…
Is that because the writer in movies is the guy right at the bottom of the pyramid?
The process is so slow and you can spend years and years in development hell with a script constantly doing the rounds, and trying to get funding, for something that ultimately does two weeks at the Curzon, Shaftesbury Avenue and is seem by about four thousand people. Which is nice, but on television the writer has more autonomy and inevitably, even though it's just on for one night, on that one night you'll get more of an audience.
Has the acting completely dried up?
No, not at all – I do bits and bobs. It's now become a question of time. I'd like to do more because I do miss it terribly. They're currently filming the last ever episode of No Angels, and to give me a sense of closure they gave me a tiny little part in that. And I wrote an episode of a series coming up next year called Hotel Babylon, and I've got a tiny part in that as well…
If autonomy is important to you, do you have ambitions to turn into what Russell now is, which is essentially a 'show-runner' – writer-producer-executive?
Yeah, ultimately I'd like to do that. What he's doing is following quite an American model of working, where a show has a 'lead writer'. In America, all of the writers are producers as well. The thing Russell has which all writers want is to have as great a level of control over your work as possible, because otherwise things get taken out of your hands, and decisions are taken which you'll find hard to swallow. So ultimately to be in a position where you have control over your work is what all writers want.
