Script Doctors | Series 2 | Tom Macrae
Having a conversation with Tom MacRae is rather like being attacked by an affable tornado. Almost before taking off his coat, certainly before sitting down, and long before I've even thought about switching on the audio recorder, he's launched into a story about the 1987 story Paradise Towers. "I'm very good at networking," he later confidently asserts. Given the speed, depth and range of our ensuing chat, I have no trouble believing this; his phone apologetically rings to arrange essential meetings every few minutes. And of course, as with so many people writing the new Doctor Who, he was a fan of the original series as a kid. Unlike most of the others, though, being only 26 he was a kid – and a fan - much later, during the brief, coruscating reign of Sylvester McCoy as Doctor Who. "We had a shower attachment that coiled, and I used to pretend it was coming to life and strangling me. That was from one of the Doctor Whos, Paradise Towers… I'm sure the people making it wouldn't have intended that kids would pretend they were being attacked by a shower coming to life, but…"
I think the word I'm looking for is '…anyway'… so how did you, at the age of 26, get into a position where you're working on TV Doctor Who? What got you into writing in the first place, for instance?
I've been writing now for about five years. I did a sensible academic degree, Anthropology, at the University of London. I'm a qualified anthropologist! And towards the end of that I knew I wanted to get into writing or directing.
Had writing or movie-making been a hobby, prior to that?
No, I just had a lot of ideas. I've no formal training whatsoever, and I've learned a lot on the job. I don't come from a theatre family at all, my parents are teachers, so I'm proud of my contact-making skills. And I wanted to write a script about something, but I didn't really know what. Then I had a couple of summers where I taught 'English as a foreign language', and it was the most fun I've ever had – completely debauched, an absolutely crazy six weeks, where we all did everything together. I thought that would make a good TV show. And then when I saw Queer As Folk, it had an energy that I'd never seen before in a TV show, and I thought "My show should be like that". And I thought if I met Russell, he could show me how to do it. So when he did a book signing in London, I turned up to that, with some quite clever questions, and I said to him that I'd like to be a writer and could I show him some stuff I'd done? It went better than I expected, Russell was quite impressed with it all, and so we became friends and he sort of mentored me. Until he started on Doctor Who and became too busy to do anything else, he would go through all my scripts and give me notes. And with his notes and pushing and advice, I wrote a pilot episode of this show about being a TEFL teacher. Then I got a job as a runner on a Paul Abbott show, Best of Both Worlds, and met Paul and got on well with the producer. And I said I had this script and she asked to read it, and she eventually bought it off me. It never got made, but it brought me to the attention of an agent. About six months after I'd finished being a runner, I was the lead writer on Mile High on Sky One. And then I did two stand-alones for Channel 4, and was BAFTA-nominated for one of those, School's Out. And then I did As If and a kids' show called You Get Me on BBC TWO. Then I had a lot of stuff in development that never went anywhere, that seemed to take up a lot of time. And then I did No Angels and then Mayo, a cop drama for BBC ONE. I script-doctored Nine Lives, a British horror movie that had Paris Hilton in. And then Doctor Who, and… I'm probably getting these out of order! I've done a lot of stuff. And I'm on Marple now, and I've just sold my first novel. And I've got my first kids' book coming out in March, which is dedicated to four people, one of whom is Russell – so there's a Doctor Who connection, so everyone should go and buy it! I've just moved house, and I had to take two weeks off to get it ready. I'm getting back into work now, and it's made me realise how much I was working. Having been really busy and taken two weeks off, to go back to how busy I was from having done nothing for two weeks, made me realise how crazy I was. I did get very ill in the middle of writing Doctor Who because I was pushing myself. I'd be up all night writing Doctor Who and then having meetings about other shows all day, and getting about four hours' sleep a night. I don't think I can do that any more. But yeah, I will be busy again. I have, what, eight shows in development…? All with Channel 4. It's mad. For the last three weeks I've been having two meetings a week at Channel 4 for different things…
And how many of those do you think will definitely go through…?
One. Two, maybe? But hopefully, one! I've spent the last five years with shows in development and none of them have been made, although some of them have got close. You get paid for stuff that's in development so I have been able to live off shows that have died, but I do have this one year hole in my CV which has come about because I was desperately trying to get my own series made. Now that I've done Doctor Who, suddenly doors are flying open. Marple as well – that's a two hour show, so it's like writing a feature, just like my Doctor Who is, being two episodes. But particularly Marple because you're left alone to do it, where Doctor Who is more of a team effort. Between Doctor Who and Marple, everyone I've ever met in my life will watch one of those shows. My nan doesn't really like Doctor Who but she loves Miss Marple. And a lot of my friends won't watch Marple but they will watch Doctor Who, so I've sort of spanned the generations with these two, from kids to ninety year olds. So that's quite a nice thing to have, that mass appeal.
At the start of our conversation, you mentioned having been a viewer of the show, and having grown up with Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, and loving things like Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol. To what extent would you actually have described yourself as a Doctor Who 'fan', either now or in your youth?
I think, to be a fan, you have to be grown up. I don't think kids are 'fans' – when I was a kid I just adored it, I used to write Doctor Who stories, and play Doctor Who all the time. At our primary school we had painted hopscotch areas and things on the playground, and one of these was like a giant dartboard with a bullseye, and I used to pretend that was the TARDIS. My brother, who's much older than me, was a big Doctor Who fan as well, and his Doctor was Tom Baker. When I was very little, my brother was an arty type and I'd ask him to draw me a picture of the Doctor and he drew me a picture of this guy with a scarf and curly hair, and I was like, "Who the hell's he? That's not right…". And I remember building the central console out of toilet rolls, and sellotaping it to the carpet in my bedroom, and it would keep falling over. And making circles to put on the walls. Even up until secondary school, I used to pretend I was being chased by Daleks, so I really loved it. But having now worked on the show - and met Steven Moffat! – I realise that I'm not 'a fan', because I only know about my bit of it, and what it meant to me. I didn't know about the Doctors before mine, I'd never heard K9's voice – at the readthrough Phil [Collinson] did his famous K9 impersonation, but I've yet to hear what the real one actually sounds like… I didn't realise that there was a pre-Davros Dalek era – that, to me, was strange. I don't watch the DVDs, but I really love what it meant to me, it was very influential.
Given that Doctor Who has now been in active development or production for over two years, and that there has already been one series which you didn't work on, at what stage did Russell get you involved?
I got a call just after the first episode went out. I had a big meeting at the BBC for one of my many abortive shows, and as I was going into the meeting the head of drama said "I had Julie Gardner on the phone today checking your availability, for Doctor Who". And I thought I had gone on to some sort of 'long list'. I didn't realise that if someone 'checks your availability', that means they're sort of offering it to you! I rang up Russell, and left this message where I sort of couldn't breathe… "Hi… I don't know what to say… are you gonna… I don't really… what's happening?!". I remember speaking to my mum as well, and breaking my cardinal rule, because I never tell my parents anything unless it's absolutely confirmed, but I told her "I think I might be writing Doctor Who". About 10 o'clock that night, the phone rang and it was Russell - I hadn't spoken to him for ages because he'd been so busy, and I was congratulating him because Rose had just gone out and it was so marvellous, and he said "No, let's talk about you. You're writing two episodes of Doctor Who and you're bringing back the Cybermen." So I rang up my mum and said, "Oh, I'm not writing an episode of Doctor Who… I'm writing two!". But it was all secret and I didn't tell anyone else for ages, and then I got to announce it to all my friends, which was really cool. Though I also told them all "I'm bringing back the Cybermen!", and about 90% of them said… "Who?". "You know, the silver things" …so they weren't quite as famous as I'd thought…
But did you understand their significance?
Oh God, yeah! Completely! When you look back, they had become very generic silver monsters. But when you're a kid, simple things like the fact that they were silver and shiny is enough to hook you. A lot of things that you remember vividly as a child tend to be simple images. Do you remember the cartoon Mysterious Cities of Gold? There was an eagle made of gold that they flew around in. I remember nothing of the plots, but I remember that and I remember loving it. There are images that are powerful, and unless you're a kid, you don't get how a simple image can stick in your head forever. So the fact that the Cybermen were silver was enough. Now we want to say, What makes them tick? What makes them special? So the kids can get the same impact that I did, which is that they look cool, and the adults who don't pick up on things like that will find a story to keep them viewing.
In terms of thinking about what makes them tick and what makes them special, did that involve a great deal of research on your part?
Clay, your editor, sent me all the old DVDs, and I read a lot of stuff and it was interesting to do that - but what we did was get back to the root of it. A line I had in an early draft which eventually disappeared, and although it's not on the page I kept in my head all the time,… there was one point where the Doctor said these things are worse than Daleks, because the Daleks are aliens – these things started out as human beings. And that is why they are scary, because inside those silver body suits is a person, and they won't kill you – they will make you into them, into the living undead. They're a sort of cross between vampires and zombies, and that idea wasn't ever really explored properly in the old TV show. So although it was interesting to watch the old shows, we were looking to do the story that they'd somehow missed. And the way that Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis were interested in the idea of medical augmentation, pacemakers and artificial limbs, you can update it and say, What is the technology that fascinates and slightly scares people today? GM food for example - not that there's a GM food parallel in it - but you think, How do we make this contemporary, what are the fears do they play on? And those are analogous to the old stories but at the same time they're different. And the continuity's all screwed up anyway, The Tomb of the Cybermen actually takes place in the future even though it comes before Silver Nemesis and so on… so everything else can be ignored, because the Cybermen don't have a mythos like the Daleks have, so nothing can really be inaccurate.
How much of this was handed to you that day Russell said "You're bringing back the Cybermen", and how much of it was your own thinking?
There's a certain series continuity which affects my episodes specifically more than most other episodes, and so I had to be careful with that. What Russell does with everyone is says "It should be in the Blitz!" or "It should be Dickens!" - everyone gets that simple pitch. So I got "We want this to happen, which leads into episode 2 where this happens". And then halfway through we changed the story quite a lot from the original one that I was given – things just weren't quite working – and came up with something that went right to the heart of why Cybermen are scary, which is "How appealing is it for someone to become a Cyberman?". Because there are people who want to be vampires, mad cults in New Orleans who file their teeth and drink blood and want to be vampires, so for them Dracula isn't a horror story, it's a love story. Likewise - are there people who would want to be Cybermen? Like with Cassandra, this women who, to remain beautiful, has gone to these horrible extremes. And you read endlessly about people who do horrible things to themselves in an effort to be beautiful. So we ended up looking more at that side of it…
There's been speculation that your episode might have some parallels in the Big Finish story Spare Parts, perhaps fuelled by the fact that Dalek was based on the same premise as Jubilee…
I've heard Spare Parts, in my Cyber-research, but other than that you're seeing the Cybermen 'emerging', there's no other parallel. Spare Parts is very good, but very different from the story that I'm telling. They both have Cybermen in, but Remembrance of the Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks and Dalek all have Daleks in… not remembering Spare Parts in incredible detail, I really can't think of anything that it has in common. I did like the cybernetic horses in that. If we could have afforded those, I would have stolen them! I don't know yet what the voices are for mine, so it might be those sing-song ones…
Have you had any input on that side of things?
I met [Cyberman voice] Nick Briggs, briefly, but didn't get a chance to talk with him about the voices, so I look forward to that. I don't even know how many actual Cybermen there are. I think they're about seven feet tall, and one of the things I kept putting in the scripts was that the head turns… In the early drafts, I said that they kind of looked like the Chrysler building - the heads, at least. And if you see them from the side or the back, they actually do look like the Chrysler building. Regarding the voices, when I saw The Tenth Planet, and the Cybermen opened their mouths and that voice came out – my friends and I all thought "That's wonderful!" – and these were friends who weren't Doctor Who fans. I like the really old episodes - they're so dated, but as long as you accept them for what they are, there are wonderful images and they're really charming. And we thought, "We've got to have them speak like that!". But after about five minutes, you realise you can't have a conversation with them if they talk like that. And while I have lots of scenes where they're running around shooting people, they do also need to be able to talk… if the scary thing is that "It could be you", then they shouldn't sound like a 1980s video game.
How do you find the collaborative scripting process compares to other shows you work on?
We don't really have 'show-runners' in this country, so Russell is kind of a one-off. It is very different to other shows, you feel like you're much more part of the team. For example, we all went out for a writers' dinner – this wasn't an 'annual BBC event', this was Steven Moffat herding us all around, and then Toby was roped in to sort it all out, and eventually Stephen Fry took us all to The Ivy. And I've never been on another show where all the writers have gone out, independently of the series, just because they wanted to talk about how lucky they were to be working on this show. Also, this is a show where you want to talk about the ideas in your script, and on Doctor Who you can't talk to all your friends about it. You might put your friends into the scripts…
…as a certain Mr. T. Davies did to you in The Long Game, I believe?
Oh yes, Suki MacRae Cantrell! But the way that the writers feeling like they're in a gang is not common. I remember the day that I finished, I spoke to [script editor] Helen Raynor. And I was saying "Well, goodbye!" and she said "Well, we'll still speak to each other…", and I said, "Yes, but I won't talk to you every day…". And it was strange not to have Helen on the phone every day. So yes, it's a lot more work than most shows, just getting it right. You only know from rewriting and rewriting and rewriting until it hits home. And you're inventing your little brick in the wall of a very big mythology, nothing you write will be forgotten. On most shows, if - at the end of the day - you realise it's going to be awful, you're not going to burst into tears, you're going to think "Just one of those things, move on, tomorrow's chip wrapper", or whatever. But with Doctor Who that isn't true, it's got to be not just good but brilliant. You can't find yourself saying "It's not really finished, but it's Thursday night, it's due in on Friday and I want to go to bed." If it's not really finished, then you stay up all Thursday night and finish it. And so that is quite a full-time commitment. It's not that you're paid more than on other shows or that you have a different clause in your contract, it's that you don't want to let go of it until you're really happy. Steven Moffat's obviously had his own shows and I bet he's as passionate about those as he is about Doctor Who – but on Doctor Who you get an involvement that you don't really get on other shows, unless it's your own series.
Is that a function of it being something you loved formerly, or of the way it's being made now?
It's both. I can't think of another show, with the possible exception of Coronation Street, which you could write with that sense of "I used to watch this as a kid, and now here I am writing it". It could be like writing Star Trek, I suppose, but I don't really like Star Trek. But there's not much where you're writing part of British popular culture that isn't disposable. These DVDs will circulate until the DVD medium is obsolete, and then the episodes will still be around on whatever medium. Quite feasibly, people will watch my episodes in two hundred years time. Doesn't mean I'm any happier to die at the end of the day, but it's nice to think that you have done something that counts. Take Delia Derbyshire – not a name I'd heard before. Helen Raynor is a big supporter of Delia Derbyshire, she thinks it's a scandal that nobody knows who Delia is. Now, I didn't know Delia's name - but everyone in the country knows "….oooo-eeeee-ooooo". And you don't have to have an ego about it - people won't know my name, but people will know what I've done. And that's satisfying.
Are you aware of the significance of the director you've been given? Graeme Harper's one of the original show's most respected directors, and there's a stratum of fandom that seems more excited by having him on the show than almost anything else…
I know, because Clay has told me! They're more excited by Graeme than by me…? [Laughs] But if Graeme's that good, that's fantastic, and I'm very lucky. I'm sure he did Coronation Street for a while. Everything I've heard about him sounds fantastic, so I can't wait to see what he's done. I look forward to meeting him, but he's not been in London and I've not been in Cardiff. And he doesn't have a mobile phone, or email, or something like that, I believe.
And how is production going, so far as you can determine?
Well, my episodes didn't get a readthrough, the clocks were kind of against us. Mine are in a four episode block so there was a very tight schedule and we dropped the readthrough. Which is fine because readthroughs are nice, but far from essential. They're not even that useful for timing, especially if you have a lot of action sequences. But I did go to the first readthrough for the season, and David was brilliant, absolutely electric. Most readthroughs, you hope the actor will put on a bit of a performance, but at the Doctor Who one we had people putting on full-on alien voices, miming their transformations… David doing the whole thing, bang-bang-bang. Absolutely brilliant. And I got sent my filming schedule yesterday, and I've got to pick a good day to go down and visit.
If you went to an early readthrough, you'll have met David and Billie by now…?
Yes – well, a friend of mine is really good friends with Billie, so I had a connection there. I got on very well with David. When I went up to him and said "David, that was fantastic!", he wasn't responding "Oh, I needed that pat on the back", it was genuinely "I'm really glad you think that, because I'm not too sure and it's nice to know…". And David let me play with the sonic screwdriver and everything…
How do you think the dynamic has changed with the fact that the leads are different?
Well, I watched the first series as a fan and a viewer - I've never met Christopher Eccleston - so I don't have an analytical hat on for that. When I started writing it, I had Chris's voice in my head… but then we had that first readthrough, and suddenly I got it, and rewrote everything, understanding how David would do it. He's much more clown-like, and chameleonic in the way that he speaks, his vocal rhythms shift and change all the time, it's almost like changing the speed on a tape recorder, he'll suddenly speedupandbetalkinglikethis and then heee'll sloooow doooown… playing endlessly with the rhythm of the words, and is very unpredictable with that. So you never know how he's going to read a line. Though I have to say the same is true of Billie – even though Rose isn't the cleverest woman in the universe, and she doesn't get the same sort of incredible long speeches as the Doctor gets, Billie always manages to say a line in a way you hadn't really thought of, that is ten times better. And the way that she laughs as she's talking, she puts humour into everything, it's fantastic. I don't know if she realises how charming she is, or whether it is just natural, but she lights up when she does it.
Is your involvement with the show finished, or are you likely to write more? Given that, as we've established, you have so many other irons in the fire?
I'd love to write more, definitely. I'd quite like to not do a two-parter. I'd like to do the cheap episode! The one where they pull back the budget to get enough excess to blow on 12 and 13, to blow everyone out of the water – I'd like to do the cheap episode 11.
What is it that appeals about that idea?
I thought that having a big budget and all the special effects means you can do anything – but I didn't realise many tricks you have to pull to make it look as though you're doing something enormous. So you come up with big ideas and pare it down and pare it down to juggle the money around. I had a choice in my episode - and the call was quite rightly made by Graeme, rather than me - where in the script a Cyberman did something extraordinary, and then died in an extraordinary way. And we had to choose between 'the extraordinary thing' and 'the extraordinary death', and Graeme wanted the extraordinary death, so it's a bit more prosaic to begin with, but ends with the big bang, and you're endlessly making those choices, whereas if you start off with a simple idea, you keep more of the original tension. You can't write it like a Big Finish production where your effects budget is limitless and anything and everything can happen - you have to be realistic about what you can achieve. You'd be stupid to think you can write every scene with a CG character and a big explosion and everyone levitating at the top of the Taj Mahal – you have to have a sense of how much you can achieve. It's quite a wake-up call.
And if you did write 'episode 11', what would you do? 'Trapped in a lift'?
Something involving the passing of time… where the Doctor and Rose stay in one place and the world ages around them. But keep it all indoors…
And what else would you like to use Doctor Who as a springboard to move on to?
I'm very interested in fantasy. Many of my favourite novels, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to One Hundred Years of Solitude to Carter Beats The Devil, have a fantastic element. And I really love throwing a magical element into a script, like on Six Feet Under where you have the ghosts, or Desperate Housewives where you have the dead woman narrating, it's a really good way of telling stories differently. And now Doctor Who has made those sort of commissions possible, commissioners now take it seriously because of Doctor Who, and they'll take me seriously because of Doctor Who. I'd like to do films, but writers on films are treated like shit, so I'm not going to even get involved in that until I could produce, or at least exec-produce. I'm hopefully going to do some exec-producing on a show next year that's mine, and hopefully some directing as well, fingers crossed. Russell has introduced the concept of the 'show-runner' to this country, and I think we're going to see a lot of that. It was not a word people used five years ago, and that's how much it's changed because of Doctor Who. Casualty now has a show-runner, and The Bill is going to have one – but at the moment Doctor Who is the only one, and that makes it different from everything else. At the moment when you submit a draft on another show, it disappears into the ether and gets passed round committees – with Doctor Who, you have Russell, you know where your script is going to and where your notes are coming from. It's different when you have everything rooted in one person, because there he is, that's the guy you need to persuade – there are no hidden agendas, no internal politics, you've just got him, so it does make it much more personal a show. So you have a meeting with Russell and take your notes from him, and that's straight from the horse's mouth and that's what's going to happen.
And you think that very definite chain of command is beneficial?
I think TV works very well when it has a 'king', yes. And Russell is fantastic – he brought back Doctor Who! I was in a meeting today with people who were talking about what a big hit it was, and I was pointing out that Russell had taken such a risk. They were all saying that the reason Doctor Who is such a success is that it had forty years of goodwill behind it, and I said "No – it had forty years of stigma behind it!". And they all think it didn't really have a stigma. But just remember – before Russell came along, it was so dead… and now it's the coolest show on TV. People quickly forget what it was like, it was by no means a sure commission. Russell had been rumoured to have been writing Doctor Who for about five years - and it wasn't even true! – and that's how long it took him to get in a position to get the power to take control of the show and say "OK, we've tried to do this before, now it's my turn, and I'm going to do it how I think it should be done." And that autonomy has reaped incredible rewards!
I wouldn't deny it… and with that, Tom MacRae and his energy and his phone vanish into the Chiswick night. No time to draw breath, though. Out there, somewhere across town, Toby Whithouse was waiting for me…
