Script Doctors | Series 2 | Mark Gatiss
When last DWM spoke to Mark Gatiss, he'd had a rather hectic 2004 and claimed he'd be 'taking it easier next year'. Since when, of course, he's recorded a second series of sci-fi comedy Nebulous for Radio 4, appeared in another run of BBC THREE's Nighty Night, overseen the release of The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse, written another stage show... and started writing another episode of Doctor Who. You get the impression it hasn't really worked out as planned, don't you? "No," smiles Gatiss ruefully. "That's true!"
The beginning of this year was dominated really by the release of the League film, and we're writing the tour show at the moment. And I'm kind of doing Doctor Who in the middle of it. It's episode 7, so it's much later in the run than my last one, I think it's part of Block 5 or something, and at the moment I don't even know when it will be shot. I think the recording's going to be quite late this time, it may even be the beginning of next year, although obviously that can be moved about a bit. The state of play is that I delivered a first draft quite a long time ago, but only last night managed to have a sit-down meeting with Russell in Manchester, because obviously they're up to their eyes in the first couple of recording blocks. Which is very different to last year, because my episode came quite soon in the whole process, so it had to be done quicker. But lessons have been learned. I could easily have done a couple of drafts based on wrong thinking, and then had to go back to the beginning again - like I did with The Unquiet Dead - but this time round I've missed out those drafts. It's different with a new Doctor, of course, and the success of the show also changes a lot of things in your approach - because it's worked phenomenally, completely beyond anyone's expectations. 'Follow that!'.
Was that scary for you the first time round as well? I mean, obviously your episode was done and dusted months in advance, but in the week following The End of the World, two episodes had gone out and been huuuuuge. Did you have a week of worrying 'I'm next - what if everyone hates mine?'
Oh yes! I mean, I felt confident because I'd seen it and was very proud of it, and also I was very confident in Russell's vision of the first few stories. But the time when I knew that the whole thing just felt 'right' was at the press launch for Rose, when they showed clips of the rest of the series, including what was basically the pre-titles sequence of The Unquiet Dead. And you could see journalists almost visibly thinking 'Fuck! This is really scary!' - and that was a marvellous feeling...
On which subject, actually, your episodes was one of the ones which had a minor tabloid furore - probably blown out of all proportion - about the scariness and appropriateness of the content.
I went on PM on Radio 4 to defend it, and was very careful not to sound too glib... but to me that's absolutely the point of Doctor Who; it's a healthy scare, it's a roller-coaster thing. Fear is just as important and healthy an emotion as happiness, because it makes you feel alive. I'm humbled and thrilled at the amount of people who have said to me that their kids are still talking about it even now. And to me, if, in twenty years' time people are still saying 'Do you remember the one with the old lady..?' then that's just like 'Do you remember the one with the maggots...?', you know? My work is done! David Tennant told me that the thing that moved him most about the whole experience was watching a report from the Doctor Who exhibition in Brighton on Doctor Who Confidential. Seven year old kids going 'I like the Slivveen and the Darleks!' moved him to tears, quite rightly, because, well, who'd have thought?
Go back just two or three years and the whole notion would have seemed completely ridiculous. Even though every now and then one would hear stories that someone was trying to revive Doctor Who - and you were part of that at one stage - we surely never thought it would come to this...
The key is that the BBC had such faith in Russell that they didn't pettifog him with the usual round of talking heads, picking the idea to bits and give it the death of a thousand cuts. Brilliantly, Russell was given his head and that's what made it a success. It's amazing how often that lesson has to be re-learnt.
Looking back, your episode feels to me like the one which is most self-consciously Doctor Who-ish - you can almost taste The Talons of Weng-Chiang off it. Was that your intention and are you doing something similar second time around, or have you moved away from that?
It's funny -The Unquiet Dead certainly looks the most traditional, but I don't know if it actually is. To people like you and me, part of the whole Doctor Who tradition is the number of historical and pseudo-historical stories, and obviously Talons casts a very long shadow - it's a Victorian story, and so with The Unquiet Dead you do immediately feel 'This is like Doctor Who as I remember it', and obviously I'm delighted with the actual production and Euros's direction. But as to the actual content, certainly the aspect of Gwyneth's sacrifice - that is, I think, very moving, and 'moving' is not something Doctor Who really strove for before, except when a Doctor died or a companion left or something. It wasn't really that kind of show before, but it is now. And so The Unquiet Dead certainly looks like an old-fashioned Doctor Who episode, but content-wise it's different. But my new episode... I don't know. What can I say? It's set in the past... and there's a new Doctor! Also, the companion is more experienced than the Doctor - Rose has been through an awful lot, that's probably the main difference. She's more seasoned than he is...
So even by the time of your episode, the new Doctor will still have a kind of 'ingenue' thing going on?
I think it's more to do with it feeling like that for the viewers. It's the same as experiencing episode one through Rose's eyes - it's important that we get to know the new Doctor through her eyes. It's the same thing as was done years ago on The Power of the Daleks - you have to break the audience in gently.
Even after just one year of the other guy? You feel that he's had such an impact that you need to be gentle with the viewers?
Well, I don't know because I'm not writing the first six episodes! But I think so...
I couldn't help but think, whether it was planned or not, that Chris's departure was all to the good. Because if he'd stayed for three years and been a phenomenon, he'd have been irreplaceable - whereas if he's very good but leaves straight away, he can be more easily replaced and the show has more chance of longevity...
I don't think you can plan those things. It's a measure of the impact Chris had, that by the time of The Parting Of The Ways, you felt as though Chris had been the Doctor for three years or more. It was so affecting, I cried my eyes out at the holographic message, and the bit where he betrays Rose. It's fantastic.
The bit where the hologram turns round and looks at her...?
[Gasps] Oh yes, that - that was absolute, copper-bottomed genius! Just at the moment your brain is thinking 'He should have delivered this speech direct to Rose... oh!'. But when he pretends she's got to do something in the TARDIS to help him and he runs out and just stops... it's fantastic. And the regeneration is up there with Planet of the Spiders and The Green Death for me. It's like a piece of very rare, 'proper' telly.
So despite your close involvement and the fact you must have had some idea of what was coming up, the show still had that sort of impact on you?
Completely. I actually didn't want to know about the later episodes, I wanted to just watch it. So some things were a big surprise to me. I'm doing the same this time round, really. I think it's always difficult bringing a new Doctor in, but David is going to be fantastic. He's a fantastic actor and a wonderful person, and there's a new audience who are going to be as shocked as you and I were Jon Pertwee became Tom Baker.
Oh dear - I obviously look older than I am! I barely remember Pertwee. But I do know what you mean.
There's a lot of comfort, in a way, from Rose having been around - she's our point of contact. I've been watching the old series through for six or seven years, doing my own 'Time Team'... and when I got to Tom's departure in Logopolis, it's extraordinary, when you look at it dispassionately, that what happens is: Romana and K9 leave, Tegan, Adric and Nyssa join, the Doctor changes... and within the space of three or four stories, everyone's different. I would have kept Romana on, and killed her off in Earthshock. How much more impact would that have had, if it had been a companion you had spent years with who had died? It's a shock to the system that the entire crew changes within three stories. And those sort of things I don't think you should be too glib about. Changes like that mean something, there's a reason that the first Tom Baker story is a UNIT story, it cushions you. And then the Doctor's off, and that's fine. There's a reason, most brilliantly, that in The Power of the Daleks Polly believes this new guy is the Doctor and Ben doesn't - and that by about episode 3, Ben's just calling him 'Doctor', and you never really notice the point at which he starts to say it. It's a very gradual shift, very cleverly written by David Whitaker, and the sort of thing you can't take for granted. But I can't say often enough that I think David [Tennant] is going to be wonderful...
I quite agree. It freaks me out a little even now that they've actually cast who I would have cast! How freaky was it for you, working on Quatermass with him the week his casting was announced? Especially given that the last words we exchanged were you, ever-so-knowingly, refusing to even countenance ever being offered the role yourself...
You know that story Sylvester McCoy used to tell about having been announced as the new Doctor, he went to a convention in Atlanta to be confronted with a question about 'When you arrived on Peladon, what were you thinking when..?'. Well, David is the first Doctor who could actually answer that! 'Well, what I was feeling was...'. But obviously, as long as I've known David, we've both talked about how much we'd love to be the Doctor, so yes, it was extraordinary. But honestly, I'm completely thrilled for him. I think it's a brilliant choice, he's reached just the right stage of his career to do it, and he's a fantastic actor. And he loves it so much that he will completely embrace it and rise to the challenge, while being aware of everything the old show meant to him.
It's bizarre seeing David turn up on Blue Peter as, already, 'Doctor Who'. It wasn't an introduction, it wasn't 'You won't know who this guy is, but...' - he was just 'Doctor Who'.
Mmm. What's genuinely magical about the success of the new show is that Doctor Who is not a cult programme any longer. It's back to being 'the children's programme that adults adore'. And that means you're not faintly embarrassed about getting DWM out on the tube, that you're able to accept that when 'Doctor Who' appears on Blue Peter to judge a competition, everybody knows who he is, as you say. After half a minute at the end of episode thirteen! And I've heard that sales of things like Pyramids of Mars went up by a thousand or so the week after Rose was on. It's just what we always dreamed of! It's interesting to think what kids might make of the old show, because although it's the same, it's very different.
Yes - it's not as fast, it's probably not as funny, but it's got the same heart to it...
I remember thinking very early on in the pre-production process on the last series, that the whole thing was so Doctor Who! Much more like Doctor Who, in fact, than the Paul McGann film, which, superficially, is incredibly, slavishly Doctor Who, but it's actually less Doctor Who because it doesn't have the same heart to it...
It's slavish to the iconography of it, but not really telling the same sort of story.
It's not really telling any sort of story, that's what's wrong with it. I mean, to me it seems to be absolutely 'bleedin' obvious' and self-evident - but the TV movie mentions Time Lords, TARDIS, Daleks, Skaro, the Master... all in the first minute and a half. And again, brilliantly and perfectly cleverly, Russell bleeds this information out slowly, because, of course, it's Doctor 'Who?', it's a mystery - why on earth would you need all this information at once? I remember watching the TV movie thinking I would have started like An Unearthly Child, because it was for a new audience. You start with a box that hums, and a strange man. That's all you need - and that's essentially what we got, this time round.
It was great that after the second episode, The Unquiet Dead more or less started from scratch, and that happened in Aliens of London and Dalek as well. You could watch them without having seen any previous episodes. An actor I was talking to at a Big Finish recording recently asked me why they had gone for single, self-contained episodes rather than serials with the new series, and I quoted one of Russell's comments that it would be TV suicide to have every new story open with the words 'Part One'... and this actor said 'Oh, God, yeah - I don't want my TV trying to tell me what I'm doing this time next week!'. The strength of her agreement almost shocked me!
It's a funny thing, if you think about it, that what we've got now is the equivalent of 'Horse of Destruction' and what have you - it's an episode title a week, like it was for the first few years, rather than 'Part One', 'Part Two' and so on. I want to write 'A Desperate Venture'!
It was something some fans were worried about, this change in format. And yet I'd contend that by the time of The Unquiet Dead, you're not even noticing the format any more...
No, absolutely. There are times when I think it would have been nice... [tails off wistfully] I'm thinking particularly of Steve Moffat's story, which I loved and which really justified its two-part status, and that was kind of an 'old' four-parter. But you can now tell an awful lot of story in 45 minutes. I think the only casualty, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, is the comparative lack of time you have for 'mystery'. If Russell had said to me at the first meeting that the explanation of the Gelth would be the Doctor saying 'It's gas! It's made of gas!' I'd have said that was too 'on the nose'. But in 45 minutes, you've got to be. Had it been a four-part story, you'd have had two episodes' worth of 'What on Earth is going on?' and then you'd start to explain it. But TV has moved on, and it's much more exciting, because there's no room for 'corridor shots'. With the best will in the world, some great Doctor Who stories are quite flabby, you could edit them down to make a really sharp script. Which I think is what we're trying to do now.
Even when Doctor Who was last around on a regular basis, they were trying to condense things down into three parts, and you barely noticed that they were shorter - certainly you didn't think of them in a 'lesser' category, as had happened with the occasional two part stories of previous years.
No. And I don't feel that my story is not a 'proper story'. It's a story - not an 'episode' in the old sense - and it feels perfectly substantial.
It's more substantial than The Awakening, say, which has more or less the same amount of screen time... Speaking of your scripts - what can you tell us about your second episode, then? You must be able to spill something...
I don't know if I can tell you! Well - at the moment - it's set in 1953, and it's about the coronation. And it's about a sort of electrical alien who tries to take over the world through television. It's interesting, because what they really wanted from me was a full-on, rock'n'roll 1950s thing, and I fought for this coronation idea - and this is the first time I'll say it, but it's going to come out eventually, I discovered that I had lifted this from a script that David Miller wrote years ago called The Adventure of Morris Oxford, a lovely script about this 1950s vicar who solves crimes. I read this twelve or thirteen years ago, and it's coronation-based, and I want to say here and now that I know that's where my inspiration came from! I think they're doing a buy-out to avoid any unpleasantness, and David seems to be fine about it. It's one of those big, grabbable ideas, just like 'Doctor Who meets Dickens', is 'Doctor Who goes to the Coronation' - everyone who was around at the time remembers it. Everyone's parents!
And, actually, for such a big and comparatively recent event, it's one you don't see or hear a lot of in terms of fiction being based around it...
No. When we first discussed it, I said 'It's 1953 - so it's not rock'n'roll, it's kind of post-austerity'. And they said that was fine, and I wrote a first draft, and then they said 'Er... it's not very rock'n'roll, is it?' [laughs]. In the interim they'd decided to make it late-50s, much more of a 'teddy-boy' kind of thing/ So I did a revised storyline set at the seaside - a funfair with gangs roaming around. But actually, they've decided that the coronation is the thing and that they now want to do that. I've had a bit of a lull in the middle, with the result that essentially my second draft is going to be very largely based on my first draft, and I've avoided doing unnecessary drafts! That's where I am, as of yesterday... It's not anything like Delta and the Bannermen, though - that much I will say!
Something that appeals to me about the new show is how different the Doctor is. I love the fact that he doesn't look or sound or react the same as any of his predecessors, but that he's still recoginsably the same guy. I mean, I'm not a creative writer so I wouldn't have known how exactly to define how I wanted him to be different...
...but once you got it, you knew what you wanted? Yes. It's a funny thing that over the course of the season I felt the Doctor got slightly neutered, that he didn't always solve the adventure enough - he was slightly backgrounded. I know that's deliberate, but it's now almost become the defining characteristic of Chris's Doctor. He's the first Doctor post-Time War. He actively picks up his companion because he's lonely, and he relates to her in a different way to any of the others, perhaps because he's properly on his own. He's kind of traumatised - and because it was just that one, finite, year... it depends, I suppose on what happens with David and how he approaches it, but it feels like Chris is a very singular Doctor...
So you think, for instance, that if there are people writing Ninth Doctor novels or audios in years to come, that that might be how that Doctor functions within them? In the way that Peter Davison's Doctor, for instance, was the one who made the most mistakes, the Ninth Doctor will be there not so much to save the day himself, as to encourage other people to do so? The most explicit manifestation yet of the Doctor as 'catalyst hero'?
I think so, yes. He's almost like Peter Davison-redux - and sometimes the Fifth Doctor needed to be more to the fore, like in Frontios where he's suddenly on the front foot...
... to use a very apt cricketing metaphor!
But he is the hero of the show, and I think you have to bring that out more.
In terms of working in the mainstream, then, is Doctor Who the biggest thing you've been involved with? Though you've done plenty of acclaimed work, you've been more of a BBC TWO, minority channel success thus far.
Oh yes. And you get paid more once you've written for BBC ONE! It's the biggest audience I've ever had, easily, 8.9 million. Er, or something like that... not that I had people texting me the figures the day after transmission, or anything, honest! Stop to think how many people that is... that is a lot of people. I got so many people saying 'I loved your episode' - people stop you in the street to tell you how much they liked it, it's amazing.
And now that it's come back and been a hit, what do you reckon to the future? Three years and out? 12 years? 26 years? Totally speculative, but I'm curious as to what you might think...
I'd love to think that it would last... you have to wonder, though, do things always have to decline? The lesson of history is that yes, they do, but the joy of Doctor Who having come back is that it's done by people who love it but who also know how to make it work in a new way. And so I suppose the future depends entirely on how long Russell stays, and then on what happens to it subsequently... I have no idea if Russell has plans to always stay on the show in a sort of 'Phil Redmond, Godfather' sort of position, but it would be a bit odd for him to do three years and then for the BBC to offer it to Timmy Mallet or someone. The BBC loves a popular success, and at the moment Doctor Who is as big as Casualty, it's a 7-8 million viewer programme...
...and even bigger than that in terms of impact...
...and the product itself - you don't have a walking, talking 'Charlie Fairhead' or 'Nurse From Casualty' action figure...
... and you can't walk round the set of Holby City on Brighton pier!
No - thought I've proposed that idea! [laughs] But look at the history of Doctor Who - at the end of the sixties the ratings were dropping, the BBC wanted to replace it with a new Quatermass, that didn't work out, so they brought Doctor Who back, with Jon Pertwee who made it a big success, and by the time Tom Baker took over, it was a healthy programme and they were happy to continue. So it's just a matter of who can keep doing it. But it's amazing to have the Doctor back in the world - back in the universe! - on Saturday nights. It could so easily have gone wrong. Thank God for the BBC publicity machine pushing it, it really made a difference, all those wonderful teaser trailers. A lot of great things that are made just aren't watched, so 'Doctor Who' as we know it now could easily have just not happened.
It seems to be something that Russell's fallen foul of before. Something like Mine All Mine which I really enjoyed, I only found out much later that hardly anyone had bothered to watch it...
Yes, so it's a marvellous thing that the audience stayed for Doctor Who, the ratings stayed fairly consistent. Though, of course, ratings are all nonsense!
Well, they're not the most important thing in the world, but it's nice, for a change, to be saying so from a position of strength, rather than having to argue, say, that 6.6 million for one episode of The Greatest Show In The Galaxy represented something impressive...
Of course. It's good to be on that side of the fence!
