Script Doctors | Series 3 | Helen Raynor
Anyone who's been with us since before Rose hit our screens might still harbour a romantic notion of the Doctor Who script editor being the guy who was best writer on the last series, best qualified to rewrite everyone else's shoddy old scripts this time round – the guy who needs to know where the aspirins are kept. And they might therefore wonder why it's taken the best part of three years before one of the new series script editors has found the time or opportunity to turn in an actual script for the show… but, as Helen Raynor will be first to tell you, TV just doesn't work like that any more. She isn't a 'guy', for a start…
What prompted you to get involved in script editing? Given that you hadn't been a writer, but you'd been working in theatre as a director and assistant director…
I did bloody everything in theatre, one way or another, and I'd worked a lot, latterly, in new writing. And doing a new play is actually a brilliant experience – so I'd got more into the dramaturgical side of it. I guess at the point where I moved into telly, I'd become less of a director, and I was doing literary management work as well, which is kind of the theatrical cousin of script editing. There were lots of reasons why I crossed over, one of which being that I thought it was time to get a Proper Job, with Capital Letters, you know, and it seemed like script editing might be more of a Proper Job. But also I've always had this anxiety about theatre – you can do the best production in the world, and have the best time doing it, genuinely a life-enhancing experience… and it's still going to be seen, in the course of a run, by a few thousand people, if that. Doing a hit show in Edinburgh you can play to a room of fifty people in a sell-out show, and at the end of the run maybe a thousand people have seen it…
…and you're suddenly ten grand in debt?
Exactly – you can have a great show but nothing to show for it but some press cuttings and an overdraft. So I actually thought, Well, I do watch a lot of telly… I started off as a script reader, which is what generally what you do before you become an assistant script ed, and then a script ed. And I did go about it in a genuinely speculative way, because I didn't know enough about the industry to know if it was something I would really want to do or whether I'd be any good at it – I did it in a sense of giving it a go and seeing if I could get something out of it. But I genuinely enjoyed it, and found I liked working with writers, and also seeing stuff happen on a telly screen – all of a sudden you're talking about millions of people seeing it rather than hundreds. There is that megalomaniac aspect to it, it's quite rewarding to think how many people will see it; it's not necessarily going to get reviewed in The Guardian or The Independent, in the highbrow way that theatre gets that massive prestige profile – but two million people going about their lives will have seen something. That was quite a big factor, that it's nice to be able to chat to somebody's mum and realise that they did see that episode of Doctors you worked on - and either liked it or hated it, but they could at least have an opinion about it. And I was just getting a bit older, too – change of scene, that sort of thing.
And how did you come to the attention of the fledgling Doctor Who office, in Cardiff?
Right place, right time! I started off in drama series in London, in what was Mal Young's department, which is a good place to start because you get to work on a huge range of shows. Then a job came up in Wales, which was nothing to do with Doctor Who, pre-Julie Gardner, before there were even any rumours of Doctor Who coming back. It was an odd job for telly, in a sense, in that it was dealing with getting new writers into telly, thinking what you could do at the BBC to smooth people's paths into telly, demystifying the process, finding new writers and introducing them to the world of telly writing. I was quite evangelical about that, but also very naïve, and I wasn't convinced that what I was doing was actually that helpful, ultimately. Bringing writers into TV when they're not attached to a particular show is really difficult. What you're doing is encouraging them to write vaguely speculative scripts and trying to bring those to the attention of people who you think might quite like them. But, you know, what's an agent for? So I had an odd kind of year, slightly frustrating, and I really missed being in production, being attached to a show and having concrete output, something tangible to show for your work. So I was slightly kicking my heels and wondering what to do next. And then Julie arrived like a whirlwind, and all sorts of things started to happen – Cardiff did genuinely become a much more exciting place to work, you were aware that there were some potentially very juicy projects to work on. So the script editors, including me, all pestered Julie to death with "Miss! Miss! Can I work on that show?". And then, of course, it was announced that Doctor Who was going to be made at BBC Wales, and we all more or less mobbed the poor woman, "You must let us work on this, it's going to be incredible, we'll get to work with Russell T. Davies…" and so on. And, very fairly, Julie said "Right! Two of you who are very keen to do Doctor Who, Helen and Elwen [Rowlands] - there you go, cut the series in half and work together on it." So that was it, but it was literally being in the right place at the right time. Elwen was actually more experienced than I was as a script editor, but Julie had seen enough of us both dancing around various development projects to know that, if nothing else, we wouldn't break the show. I think it was very much a trial run for both of us, although Julie never said that, obviously. And it's brilliant for both of us, career-wise – we have moved on in very different directions, but very much springing from Doctor Who. And I'm aware that actually, that must make people want to kill me – all the people who wanted, and still do want, the script editing job on Doctor Who, hearing me saying "I just happened to be in the right place at the right time" might as well be "Please stab me now"! But I hasten to add that Julie wouldn't just have employed any random enthusiastic muppet who happened to be hanging around Llandaff at the time – if Elwen and I had been seriously pants at the job, we'd have been out of there pretty quickly.
Was it Russell or Doctor Who that excited you? Had you had any affection for Doctor Who before?
Russell was a huge factor – Casanova was happening, and he's the best writer in telly, so that was a huge thing. But the really weird thing about Doctor Who - and I have to be careful how I saw this – is that I've never been, in any area of my life, an encyclopaedic, fact-collecting fan of anything. I remember talking to [director] Joe Ahearne about comics - because I love comics, I love the storytelling, it's a genre I adore - and he's a huge comic enthusiast as well, and he started laughing and interrupted me and said "You can't say you're a 'fan' – if you were a comic 'fan' you'd have kept them in sealed bags, in alphabetical order, in your room… and you'd probably have been a boy!". And I think that's probably true of Doctor Who as well – it is the first show I can remember seeing on TV, and I remember being terrified by it and obsessed with it – the first games I remember playing with my little sister, I wanted to be the assistant and she was the Doctor, and that was my imaginative world. And I still remember the stress of the cliffhangers – I didn't enjoy them in a "How exciting, what's coming next?" kind of way, I was terrified! And I used to go through the week really anxious about what would happen in the next episode. And with hindsight I probably had a girly crush on Tom Baker, and wanted to be Sarah Jane Smith. But in terms of a role model, thank God it was her rather than Sindy or Charlie's Angels, you know what I mean? You could do a lot worse… so it was a huge part of my early childhood. And my dad was a huge fan as well – perhaps because of Louise Jameson running round in a leather bikini - so it was quite a big fixture in our house for ages. But when it started hopping around the schedule, it did subtly change identity. In some ways, good - I remember feeling like 'My show' had become somehow more important, because you got two nights of it – but it just wasn't the Saturday evening family viewing that it had been. And not to blame the show for this at all, but the nearer I got to being a teenager, the less cool anything like that seemed. Like a lot of kids, I was very precocious early reader, I just read anything that was around the house, and my dad was and is a classic SF fan, so there was Robert Heinlein and Doris Lessing – Asimov, H G Wells, and I seem to remember reading a lot of John Wyndham very young, he made a huge impression on me. I would have been too young to get everything out of them, but I loved those worlds. And then I got more girly in my reading, Ursula Le Guin, more fantasy than sci-fi. But all that stopped when I started worrying about being cool! It's as sad as that – I discovered boys, booze, make-up and going out, and I'm afraid Doctor Who and The Lord of the Rings had no place in that world. Or it didn't then, at least – it's hilarious how much that's turned around now, you get glamorous TV presenters saying "I'm a geek! I'm a geek!". And you think, "Would you have said that ten or twenty years ago? I bloody wouldn't"! So I suppose in that sense my love affair with Doctor Who has been very treacherous, in that I loved it as a kid but never got into that kind of stamp-collecting aspect of it. Which has, obviously, disadvantaged me hugely! Because what I can remember from the old series are particularly strong story moments or character moments, and it's interesting watching them again and seeing how close or far they are from my memory of them. I couldn't, at the time, believe the treachery of the show - is it the end of The Hand of Fear, when the Doctor drops off Sarah Jane and they say goodbye to each other? I felt so betrayed by that. I would have been 4 or 5 years old, and I was thinking, "When does she come back in? When does the TARDIS rematerialise and pick her up? How could you have done that, you bastards?"! But what I can't do at all is discuss the merits of the third part of Story Whatever – particularly when the conversations veers towards Ice Warriors versus Zygons, you've got to have a good knowledge of that stories, and I ain't. And they are fascinating conversations that do get incredibly heated very quickly, but I don't have that sort of knowledge. The funniest person about all of this is David Tennant, because I know for a fact he'll lob an obscure Doctor Who reference into the conversation and then go "So what do you think about that, Helen…?", and I'll be thinking, You bugger, you know I've never seen that! And it's important for me to make that distinction, that when I say I was a fan as a child, I mean as a child. Although I remember quite fancying Peter Davison…
So having worked in stage directing and latterly in script editing, where did your interest in actual writing spring from? It's a very different job to either of those, especially in television today…
I started script editing in for television drama in 2001-2002, and it is a great job but I thought from the start I'd need to do something else at the same time. In theatre I'd never done any actual writing, and oddly, never thought I really wanted to write, at that time, in that context. So when I moved to telly, I'd done some basic dramaturgical work in theatre, but I personally I wasn't writing at all. So I don't know, really - when I started working in television I was around a lot of writers, work wise, socially… it's a really good question, I hadn't thought about this! I started writing theatre pieces which were kind of the opposite of what I was working on on television – not because I didn't like the shows I was on, but just because it was a very different thing to do which used my brain in a very different way, and kept me thinking. I just wanted to do something personally creative. And then I had a huge stroke of luck. Do you remember when the train was derailed at Chancery Lane, and the Central Line was down for months and months? I was working in White City at the time and living in Brixton, and the re-routed commute was nearly two hours each way – so you're going to get through a lot of reading, or you're going to twiddle your thumbs and think about stuff. And I found that I really enjoyed the process of that, spending time in my own head with characters in a way that I hadn't, really, before. I hadn't had a creative gap to do it in - I was doing a job in theatre that was very fulfilling and very rewarding, whereas script editing… it's a fabulous job but it's not such a creative job. And I can't paint or play a musical instrument or tap dance, so… yeah. I suppose also, being honest, if you're around writers writing, you do start wondering what you could do yourself, and I think it's better and healthier to do it yourself. I think script editors should do that, rather than just sitting there being terribly wise about everyone else's scripts, I think that's an unhealthy situation to get into. The worst script editor in the world to get is a frustrated writer – if they're writing as well and they're happy with it, fantastic! But I think it's one of those jobs which can let you feel like a bit of an expert very quickly because of the role you're in, that's seductive but I think quite dangerous as well.
So I wrote a very creatively exciting - but all-over-the-place - first draft of a stage play, and sent it to Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany at Paines Plough theatre company. My boyfriend Gary was working for them at the time, and rightly thinks the world of them - they're both now running the National Theatre of Scotland - and as it happened, someone had just dropped out of a writers' scheme that they were running, so they invited me on to that – which was very fortunate timing. They put me on this scheme they have called 'Wild Lunch', where you do a series of structured workshops, with the most interesting people they can find. Once a week, five or six of the writers they're interested in meet up and spend two hours talking about writing and actually doing writing, being very focussed. And at the end of a month or so they lock you in a room for a weekend and get you to write the first draft of a short stage script, which you then work on for the next few weeks, and then they do it as a reading – at the Young Vic, normally. And it's a brilliant thing to do because it gets writers working on something new, rather than revisiting that angsty script they've been working on for the last five years, opening the drawer and blowing the dust off it… so it was a very good thing to do and got me very enthused. And then I wrote a radio play, Running Away With The Hairdresser, because by then I was at BBC Wales, and one of the people working there was a great radio producer, Alison Hindell, who's now Head of Radio Drama. I've always been a radio drama fan, and I had an idea for a theatre play that wasn't going anywhere so I nudged it into another medium and it took off and became a different beast, and was commissioned as a Friday Play for Radio 4… so the short answer is that I've always written alongside the telly work that I've done, making things that I find interesting and creatively satisfying – and if it finds a home somewhere, then great, but I'm not writing it thinking "This will earn me a thousand pounds" or whatever – it's not been that targeted. Cos I've got a job! So it's nice to do something which feels actually very self-indulgent somehow, that's a good thing to do. And then this opportunity came up for a short telly piece which was part of the Brief Encounters strand [a BBC One ultra low-budget daytime drama initiative in 2006]. I used to work in that department, on a daytime drama Doctors, and I asked if I could pitch an idea – I felt I knew the slot and the audience well, and could pitch something that should work. You also had to pitch with a producer, and so it became a joint effort between me and Elwen Rowlands, a great friend and now a fabulous producer. I had a couple of commissioning meetings about the idea, we reworked a few things, and they went for it. And that was just hilarious, because the idea was that baby writers are paired up with a creative mentor, and as a Welsh writer at BBC Wales, I got Russell! So it became a very enjoyable little family business effort. Russell was ever so sweet and encouraging about it, and I loved writing it, it was nice character-driven stuff – a bit sugary, but in a fifteen minute piece I wasn't aiming to change the world or rip the audience's hearts out. It was a huge amount of fun… then I got a commission for a theatre play, which is still sort of hovering in the background, and then we started meeting about Torchwood in January 2006.
Very early on we had the usual producers and script editors get together to talk about the show, about what sort of writers and stories they'd like, and what kind of a show it's going to be, really. We spent a couple of days doing that – Russell, Julie Gardner, Chris Chibnall, Richard Stokes, Brian Minchin, me…. And at one point Russell and I nipped out for a ciggie and were chatting about this, that and the other, and he was being very encouraging about my theatre commission. And he said "You must be sitting there wanting to pitch ideas for this show, as well…". And I said, Well, yes, I'd love to, but equally I'm not going to be pushy enough to say "Goddamit, I want to write an episode". I genuinely didn't feel I'd done enough as a writer to push myself forward, hand on heart, and say I felt I was good enough to be considered. But Russell, being heroically encouraging, said, "Go on, pitch an idea". So I worked up an idea and handed it in to Russell, Julie, Chris and Rich. And doing something like that, you have to be aware that you might be putting people in an awkward position – if these are people you're working with anyway, in a different role, and you give them something that they don't like or they don't think is very good, then you've got to be prepared for them to say "Actually, sorry, it's rubbish" – and also you've got to make that alright and not make them feel awkward for saying that. So it's an opportunity but it's also a risk.
I put an idea in which eventually became Ghost Machine, and I know I was in a very lucky position to do that. I'd been in on a lot of conversations about the parameters of the series, about the characters and the type of stories we wanted in the show, and I thought someone would write a ghost story pretty quickly – but there wasn't one there yet, so I thought I would do that. And people liked my idea and after I'd re-worked the outline a couple of times, everyone said "Fine, go and write a script then" - without any real thought about where it would go into the series or even if it would go in, because of course a good idea doesn't necessarily make a good script. I set myself a tight schedule in January of knowing how many pages I had to write and how much time I had, so I wrote over nights and weekends – because obviously I was still script editing very much full time. Then I handed a first draft in at the beginning of February - which was the deadline I set myself - and went on holiday for two days thinking, OK, I've done my bit – they'll either like it or they won't, but it's enough to show them whether or not I can do it. And luckily, everybody was hugely positive about it! I was on leave, so no one wanted to bother me, but they all wanted to make contact too – so I had the most amazing night, in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, where my phone was bleeping every 2 seconds with text messages – Chris, Russell, Julie, all saying "My God, we love it"! Imagine how ecstatic I was - and relieved as well, that they didn't have to negotiate that embarrassing situation where I'd handed them a script that just wasn't good enough – and they all said "Right, brilliant, it's going into the series". Which wasn't what I expected – I thought the best that might happen is that they'd think it was a promising script, but it's an audition piece, and now I should go away and write something else, something proper… or that it might be back-up script, if others failed, or that they might get me to co-write with somebody. There could have been a number of outcomes. I genuinely didn't expect "We'll film that, then…". I kept saying, "Really? Are you sure?"! I went through a few more drafts on it, but it was really only polishing, there wasn't much to do on it, which is astonishing. Not to say, "Wow, I'm so wonderful", but things normally do change a lot, that's just the way scripts happen – but that was it, it was filmed. The easiest job I've ever done – ridiculously smooth, and I'm very aware of exactly how lucky I was with that. Right place, right time. Any number of factors could have made it a trickier job – but the weather was good and the coffee was good and everything was fine!
Do you think if you hadn't had the script editing experience on Doctor Who and other shows, and the initial set-up of Torchwood, you'd have been able to do that?
There's no doubt that it was a huge advantage. It's a good question, because not having written for any other series apart from Who and Torchwood yet, I can't really say. I think if you watch a show and you genuinely engage with and re-watch every episode, then you're going to get a good idea of what the show is, just as a viewer. That's not to knock the enormous advantage that I've had, but you'd be amazed at the number of people in telly who say "I'd really like to write for show X", and then you realise that they've only seen three shows out of ten, or they've seen the series finale but not the slightly deeper episodes seven and eight. You have to learn the bones of a show and sink yourself into that world. As a viewer you're slightly behind the production process, and changes will happen between series so that you'll need the production team to feed you information on how the show is evolving, but I think you can do it if you do genuinely love a show and are very much inside that world. I absolutely love Shameless, it's a hilarious and brilliant show, and I'd love to say that I thought I could write for those characters just because I'm a fan… and there are other great shows I'm glued to as a viewer, so I think if you genuinely like and know a show, then that gives you what you need to write for it. Assuming you can basically write in the first place!
Was it then harder work to get a writing commission on Doctor Who? What was the process of that?
Being honest – and I don't think I've even told Russell this – at the back of my mind, when my theatre and radio writing was going well the year before, I'd thought, Of course I'd love to write an episode of Doctor Who, but I'm absolutely not pushy enough to put anyone else in an awkward position – people might have to say no, and that's not a very kind thing to do to them. So my grand masterplan - insofar as I ever have one particularly - was to secretly write an episode of Doctor Who, a spec script, that would be so good that I could hand it to Russell and say "Would you mind having a read of this?" and he'd read it and say "Why, Helen – what a script! Come and live with me in Doctor Who script land!" But I wanted very much to do it in an 'open audition' kind of way, to know that I hadn't only got the gig not because I'd been pushy or because people didn't like to say no - it would be clear-cut, and I like clear-cut challenges like that. And also, being much more selfish, there's a huge advantage to writing stuff secretly where the only pressure on the script is whatever pressure you put on it yourself. And that was very much the case with the first Torchwood script, nobody really knew I was writing it - Russell, Julie, Chris [Chibnall] and Brian Minchin knew I was, albeit with no concrete idea how and when I was doing it, but nobody else did really - and I just got on with it and handed in my homework when I'd finished. That's a pretty good way to do it. It's certainly the comfiest way. So that was my grand masterplan which, in the event, I didn't even have time to put into operation – when I wrote the first Torchwood script, Julie and Russell said, "We'd love you to write another one", which I thought was fantastic, and I started thinking about another idea for Torchwood. I was aware that the third Doctor Who series was still settling into place in terms of writer availability and what was going where, but I absolutely wasn't thinking of myself in that category at all – I just thought, "Do a good job on Torchwood, spend a year on two scripts for that in your spare time, and that will be a way to get a pop at writing a Doctor Who". And there was this hilarious day where I was in the middle of some script editing stuff, and Julie came over and said "Would you mind coming in for a chat with me and Russell…?". And I thought, "Oh, what have I done wrong now? I'm going to get told off for something". So I went in frantically wondering if I'd made some terrible mistake, has something terrible gone out on television which was my fault… and then they started by saying "Have a think about it, and we'll understand if you say no because it's quite a big job, but do you fancy having a go at doing a two part Doctor Who…?". I'm laughing now, but at the time I was just saying "Er… er…". It was one of those moments of actual, literal shock. God knows what they were expecting me to do, but I just sat there like a muppet - it genuinely hadn't even occurred to me even that they were thinking of me as a writer for Doctor Who, and here they were offering me a two-parter. So I had a glass of water and choked a bit, and had absolutely nothing to say apart from "I think you're mad, but please can I go home and think about it because I'm slightly in shock and I really have no idea what to say!". And they were very calm and said, "Of course, off you go. We'll completely understand if you say no". And then Russell, evilly, said, "It's Daleks, and it's 1930s New York… just so you know!"
Of course I didn't tell anybody in the office, I finished my day's work and hopped on my bike and pedalled home through the park, thinking, if I get run over now nobody else will ever know that I was even asked to do this! And then I paced about the kitchen at home, thinking "I know what's involved in writing these scripts, it is a very difficult show to write for, for all sorts of reasons – is it too much too soon? Am I better off saying can I practice a bit more and do some Torchwood…?". It was so surreal. And round midnight, when I'd done enough pacing, I thought, well, of course I'm going to say yes – the only reason I'm thinking of not doing it is that I'm scared I will be rubbish at it, and any big opportunity you get to do anything always falls into that realm of something you're not sure you can achieve. It's all very well saying you like a challenge, but I don't think many people do – I don't! I like little easy things I know I can do! But I knew that in a way I'd rather try it and make a pig's ear of it and say I had a go, than not do it and wonder what it would have been like if I had done it, if only I had said yes. This is all easy to say, I mean, of course actual failure and rejection are crushing and will knock you sideways, but I do truly believe they're still the preferable option to being too scared to say 'yes'. So I emailed Russell and Julie and said, "Of course I'm going to do it – of course I was always going to do it!". So that was it. I had a chat with Russell in the canteen where he mentioned the ingredients he'd like to see in the episode, which is very much more like him giving you a shopping list rather than a story – he will tell you to go off, do some research, think about it and bring in a story. I was just looking back at the tiny little piece of scrap paper I was scribbling on at the time, before I came to talk to you. I was given 1930s New York - although the episodes are actually 1930 rather than any later – Daleks, obviously, and Daleks arguing amongst themselves about what they could become. Which I thought was a fabulous idea, it gets right to the heart of what Daleks are. And pigs, was the other thing. Pig men.
Not like Aliens of London..?
No, no indeed. That was a decoy, a pig with a bit of alien rewiring - this one is very much more Daleks experimenting with their nature and with their own survival. There's a huge irony about the Daleks in Doctor Who, which is that they're the most powerful race in the universe… but if that's the case, why aren't they ruling the universe? They always seem to fail, and it seemed like a really exciting idea to present that to the Daleks as a problem that they have to unpick. There is a line in the script which is something as simple as "If we're right, why aren't we rulers of the universe? If we're so strong and humans are weak, why are there billions of them and only four of us?". I like the brutal logic of that - it's about them being intelligent and looking for a solution. And Pig-men - Russell loved the idea of pig-men monsters who are… I don't want to say Ogrons, but they are like footsoldiers. They're a bit nippier than Daleks, if you need something to sneak around and kidnap people or whatever. More seriously, they're the result of genetic experimentation – which again, goes to the heart of what the Daleks are about. Trying to make something more suited for their purposes, trying to improve on what nature seems to offer them. And sewers, that was the other ingredient. Because we've never done 'period-abroad', in a way. We've done 'period' London and Cardiff, but doing 'period' America, right from the beginning I was thinking, the poor bloody art department – they're going to have a heart attack. So I did know right from the beginning that whatever the story was, it was going to have to be quite clever where it went in terms of location. And things living in the sewers under the city, it's a tried and tested formula with a long and honourable fictional tradition. We're scared of things coming up at us from below, it's all very Freudian - literally, from beneath us, from the darkness and the slime, up through the gratings, you can't see them but you know that they're there… and also there was that story about alligators living in the sewers of New York, and in our story it's not alligators – it's much worse. And also there's something quite funny about the idea of Daleks hiding in sewers - something a bit 'How the mighty are fallen' about it, which I liked. So those were the ingredients…
What do you think appealed to Russell about New York in the 30s that made it good for Doctor Who?
He's kind of in love with depression America, in a filmic way. Much like the Blitz is quite beautiful, in a way – which always sounds rather flippant because of course they were horrendous times. But as Steven [Moffat] always says about his two episodes from series one, "Yeah, okay, London was having the shit bombed out of it, but everyone had beautiful cheekbones". And it's true! Their clothes were beautifully cut… and 1930s New York is like that. There are things we never used, gangsters and that sort of thing, they worked beautifully in Bugsy Malone in a sanitised way, but we're working on a truly family show, not a kids' show, which is something different. But the 1930s are a beautifully elegant time, although there's a lot of desperation about it – which is good for a story. You wouldn't want to visit somewhere fin de siecle and terribly decadent, because you'd know this was a civilisation that was about to be overthrown for being too bloated and horrible – whereas if you go somewhere like this, the story is already about 'survival'. And if you put the Daleks in that situation as well, you get all these great parallels about what you have to do just to survive, and at what point do you betray yourself and your sense of self just in order to stay alive another day - what responsibility do you have to yourself and to those around you? If society is already breaking down, everything is a lot more fluid, you get characters who wouldn't ordinarily meet each other forced into one another's company. But if you say 1930s to most people, they'll immediately think of King Kong, of gangster films, of Al Capone, and it's very easily identifiable. People will see one publicity still from these episodes and immediately know where and when they are… it's very attractive from that point of view.
So I went off and did a load of research about 1930s New York. There was so much of it, really fascinating and varied material, and I was thinking, which bits do I take from this, and which chunk of time do I use? Because I think for a good Doctor Who adventure, the weird thing is, you can't be too flippant about your story time. You can dip in and out of your primary narrative to go to the beginning and the ends of the world – but actually you want your chief adventure to happen for our heroes in as near to real time as you can get it. One of the first things I focussed on was the Empire State Building - which looks like a giant stretched Dalek the more you look at it, it's really weird. And that was being built in '29-30, opened in 1931. I thought that was too good an opportunity to miss! And the more I read about it, I found out fabulous stuff about things like the mast on the top - which is there because it looked quite cool and the architects wanted it to be the tallest building in the world, but in order not to seem frivolous they said it was a mooring mast for zeppelins. Bollocks! There was no way you could do that. They did a publicity stunt where they flew a zeppelin quite near it, but there was no way they would ever have got people jumping down off a zeppelin in hundred mile an hour winds. So you've got a built-in mystery there about this mast – what is it for? Who wanted it, and why? So I went down the line of thinking, what if the Daleks had hijacked the construction and were using it for purposes of their own? That was sort of a gift. And there were irresistible things, things like showgirls – another really iconic thing from that time, which is also a good way of getting fun, funky female characters in there who are happy to run around in sewers chasing monsters. So I got the idea that the Daleks had hijacked the Empire State Building quite early on, and then I got the idea that Dalek Sec is still the leader, still the visionary, and becomes someone who will lead them out of the darkness toward a new future, and will show them a different way of being Daleks and being successful – because, as I said, if they're so strong and right, why are there four of them hiding in the sewers? And that therefore means compromise, betraying a bit of yourself… and that doesn't go down well with the other Daleks, obviously! And there's a strange thing which I think is always there with the Daleks, which is that they have a fascination for Earth and for human beings, and I'm picking up on that kind of love-hate relationship, and the fact that Dalek Sec recognises that humans have these adaptive qualities which mean that they have survived where Daleks haven't. We might be weak where Daleks aren't, we're prone to emotions and so on, but we're adaptable. So he's thinking of picking up on that, and trying to kind of hybridise, eventually. And to a very pure-race animal, the idea of hybridisation is anathema… so that's the tension to the Daleks and what they argue about. So it's essentially about creating a new race of Daleks that will survive and flourish in a new, different way… what else is there? Frankenstein, of course – the Boris Karloff version was released in 1931, and is such a resonant story, about trying to control and create life. And there's a love story, in a classic 1930s kind of way, about a showgirl who's in love with the most perfect man in the world who then turns into a pig. What do you do…? And it's Ryan Carnes, such a beautiful man…. and we've given him a snout and tusks! It's heartbreaking but also very funny at the same time, he does it very well. It's very Doctor Who. I've been nipping up to the edit suite to watch things being assembled, and Mike the editor said "We watched these rushes in black and white the other day!". And he showed me a clip of Tallulah the show girl running through sewers with Daleks. And she looked like Fay Wray, it looked like a Universal horror film. Obviously we won't be broadcast in black and white, but it was nice to see it like that, it looked so authentic.
Given the Torchwood writing seemed to be no hassle, was Doctor Who as smooth, or was it, as Paul Cornell has often been heard to rue, an 'eighteen drafts' job?
I knew when I started it that I'd been incredibly lucky with the first Torchwood script, and that even my second Torchwood script was never going to go as smoothly as that – the gods had been smiling on me…
Beginner' luck?
Absolutely, yes, I'm a strong believer in that. And Doctor Who is such a difficult show to write for, largely I guess because there are no other shows that are like it on telly. Torchwood is a unique show with a unique identity, but it's a bit investigative – so if you can write a decent Spooks or a decent Hustle, chances are you could write a decent Torchwood. It's a little bit X Files… it has got related satellites in terms of identity. Whereas Doctor Who doesn't, it's such a unique beast, tonally. The weird thing I've found writing for it - and I've chatted to a couple of other writers who've found the same thing - is that usually writing a script you're going down a particular path and you can step a little bit to the left or right as long as you keep going in vaguely the right direction for the story and the characters tonally – you've got a little bit of space to waver, and if you've done something that's a bit wrong for the show or a character you can rewrite. On Doctor Who, there's this really weird sensation that the path is much narrower, and if you take a tiny step to the left or the right you find yourself miles and miles away, falling down the mountainside. It's odd in that sense, because there were times when I didn't feel I was making incremental progress each day. In a day I might write five pages that I absolutely loved, think, wow, I'm on a roll here, tomorrow will be so good – and then the next day I might get two pages, and it would be like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of tube, and I'd look at them again in the evening and think "These are really bad, I've got to start again tomorrow…". You know when you've got it absolutely right, but where in another script you might have got it 70% right, with Doctor Who being 70 % right just doesn't stand up, you're either wrong or right, tonally. You're either marching on or sliding down the hill.
I'd written an outline which said what would happen in the two episodes, and we did three drafts of that, literally the short story version of what was going to happen to whom and when. And then I went off and began at the beginning. I wrote a first draft of episode 4 and handed it in, and Russell and Julie were very enthused and positive about it, and I think also very relieved, because if I'd handed in an absolute stinker of a draft we'd all have been in trouble. They'd probably have had to pull me off it and put another writer on it, if they were lucky enough to find someone at short notice. At that point I went round to Russell's flat and had a chat about episode 5 – because that was the verdict, push on with the second half. And on that episode, I did the classic writer thing of realising that there were things in the story that just didn't work – you can set them up, but you can't work them out and you can't make them pay off. So I had a much harder time with the first draft of episode 5 – it was wildly ambitious and quite ridiculous in places, it went insane in terms of scope. The sort of thing you get from a writer and wonder if they've gone slightly mad – but I prefer, as a script editor, getting things like that to getting things which are desperately careful and boring. At the same time, while it's all very well for me say that, I don't think it was terribly reassuring for anyone else to have to get that script… "She's gone mad!"
Was that script perhaps your mind's reaction to having to always be the sensible one, over the previous couple of years?
There's an element of that. You think "I'm in charge of this world, I can do anything I want!". I became a moustache-twirling villain, on episode 5! But I had this latent feeling - that I'd chosen to ignore and dismiss as baby-writerly fear - that there were things in the story that weren't working, and I think I'd gone overboard with other things to compensate for that. So when I handed that first draft of episode 5 in, we had a very odd meeting, which was probably the stickiest point for me of the whole process – I think because everybody knows me on the show, they sometimes forget that they're talking to me as a writer, so they talk to me as the script editor who's going to go off and give notes on someone else's script. Which isn't quite the right mode to be in… so we had this meeting with Russell, Julie, Gary Russell and Lindsey Alford [new script editors], and nobody had had any time to gather their thoughts or come to any consensus about it, so I had that classic writer's nightmare of four people in the room having very different opinions about it, and me thinking, well, you all seem to like different things and dislike different things, and I'm leaving this meeting very worried and none the wiser…. So I headed off on another draft, but I literally couldn't finish the story – it had an ending that couldn't be the ending because it didn't make any sense. Russell actually rang up the same evening we had the script meeting, I think as a result of a conversation with Gary Russell, who'd been as baffled by the script as anyone else, but applauded the ambition from a writer's POV! So Russell said "I think we were a bit harsh there, I think we forgot you were writing it – are you all right? What do you want to do next?" Which is such a brilliant thing to do as a busy Writer/Exec – God knows there are enough shows where no one cares about writers enough to do that. It was just a great and necessary conversation which kept me positive and grounded, I could let Russell know I was bruised but still in one piece! And he could let me know he was still totally behind me, and knew what I was going through – so out of a grim meeting, I came through braced for the next step. So off I went. And as a script editor I knew that even though we had a good first script, I had to go back and rework the story – time to bite the bullet, no point going through another script draft, I have to go back to the bones of it. Which was the right thing to do. And then we had one of those brilliant meetings – just me, Russell and Lindsey for an hour and a half going through it step by step, the whole two episodes, and kept the best of everything that worked. And actually, at that stage, you always end up stripping it back rather than adding things. And that's the right thing to be doing at that stage – if you're still adding, it means that you're worried that the fundamental bones of the story don't work. So I reorganised those bones and did another draft of each episode, and was really happy with it, the scripts were in good nick and everyone was enthused about them. And we got to the point where they were being released to production, which is the stage where you get a whole other set of notes from a production perspective, generally saying "Brilliant – but we can't do it!" or "We can achieve this bit really well, but if we're going to chuck resources at X, we're not sure we can do A, B or C…". There are so many challenges – theatres, showgirls, choreographed routines, sewer sets, the Empire State Building with all its art deco consequences. So we were approaching production, and the deal had always been that I would take the scripts as far as I could and then Russell would do the polish that he does – which is actually a very good safety net for someone like me, it means I know I'm never going to destroy the show because they won't let me! But weirdly, as we got closer to that point, to the end of my redrafts and notes were coming in about this, that and the other, Russell got really ill – he got a terrible cold, flu bronchitis thing that lasted six weeks or so. So he became much less available, because he was writing his own scripts at the same time. In a way that was fantastic for me, because I got to push those scripts on a lot further than I might have ordinarily – but of course, the longer it went on, the harder it got. I have a memory which will be burned into my mind forever – each episode has a tone meeting, and Russell always handles them. Sometimes on his own, sometimes with the writer of the episode there as well – but at that point, with big decisions to be made, you need the creative heart of the show there. But we hit our tone meeting and Russell was ill. Julie phoned me the night before and said "Would you mind taking the tone meeting, as the writer?". And it was a room full of people looking at scripts that were so mammoth and ambitious and not knowing what was going to stay or what was going to go, and only having had a draft the day before. Of course, Phil [Collinson] and James Strong could sort a lot of things out, but not everything. I had to say "Look, these aren't shooting scripts and I know they're an impossible ask, so by all means chip in – I can't talk with Russell's authority and we probably won't have as many things as we'd like sorted at the end of the meeting, but that's the situation". Because these meetings are normally the point where, if Russell's going to do a polish of the script, he can steer the conversations about what's going to change, because he has production knowledge that nobody else on the show has about how to solve things, creatively, as a writer. But he was still poorly, so I ended up doing another draft of both scripts over the weekend to push them further on and solve as many of the production problems as I could – which wasn't all of them. It's an awful thing to say that I was lucky because Russell was ill, but in a way it meant I had an opportunity to do more than I would otherwise have done…
It seems to have been the story of your 2006 – that every few months you were being chucked back in at an even deeper end than before…
It was the year of deep ends. There is something brilliant about those opportunities, because as I say I do like clear-cut opportunities where you've got no excuses – you'll either sink or swim, so you get on with it and there's no fannying around, there's no "I'd be doing really well if not for this or if only this or that would happen" – cards are on the table, you get on with it. That said, I don't want to give the impression it was a walk in the park, there was plenty of fear along the way! The darkest moment I had was in the middle of work on episode 5. I woke up at four in the morning very anxious, I didn't know how to solve the problems I was wrestling with… but I thought "I can't afford to be this cripplingly anxious about it – let's entertain the worst case scenario: am I really saying I can't write this script? OK, then I'm going to have to ring Russell and Julie, hand the money back, fake my own death and leave the country. Which, now I've managed to articulate it, is clearly not a sensible option". Having been on the new series since the start, I know that you've got to be practical and you've got to get on with it, the episodes have to be made somehow. I didn't need protecting from a process I was already very familiar with. So I had no excuses, and that's a really good incentive not to fail!
How has it worked on a practical level – throughout the process, have you still been a day-job script editor, or did you take time out?
Ghost Machine I wrote while I still had the full-time job, and then when they offered me the Doctor Whos, Julie said "You must stop what you're going – take a year's sabbatical or whatever you want." And I thought, No - the worst thing I could do now is to step away from things that are familiar, to step away from the day-to-day running of the show, to be locked away on my own writing a script and handing it in - I don't think that would have been, mentally, very helpful. Being in meetings about production issues and about other scripts, seeing which way the wind's blowing and being aware of tonal decisions is really helpful because in a way you're always getting notes, albeit not necessarily on your own script. But I knew I'd have to scale back on the script editing side, I thought "Right, let's drop this down to two days a week, or whatever". But this being the BBC, that didn't actually happen until about 4 months later, by which stage I was saying "I'm sorry, I don't see another script editor arriving, but I have to go and write these scripts now". And at that point they got Lindsey Alford in to join the team - and she inherited me as a writer, lucky girl. But I've always fought tooth and nail to hang on to some aspect of the script editing, because you get so much back from it. It's like something I was saying to Steven Moffat, whose script this year I'm working on – I'm holding on to working with him for selfish reasons, because his head is so fizzy, he's very rewarding to be around. Listening to Steven talking about his ideas and his scripts… it's not that you nick ideas, as such, but you're aware of someone thinking very creatively and inventively, and it's a tonic. It's a good way of scrutinising your own ideas, to be around good writers, you learn something from everyone you work with. It wouldn't suit me anyway, I'm not someone who wants to live in a garret and never see anyone, it would drive me mad.
You're the only person to have worked on both sides of that fence – script editor and writer…
In terms of the new series, yes. There were loads on the old show…
But the script editor's job isn't the same thing at all now from when Doctor Who was first on the air – formerly it was, essentially, the person who drove the scripting process, who motivated the commissioning of scripts, who stepped in and wrote or rewrote things that didn't work. That's more directly one of Russell's responsibilities now, and you were saying earlier that you don't see the script editor job as being a creative one at all these days…
It's in the next seat to creativity, but it's a nuts and bolts job. It should be said that the whole structure of the TV industry has changed so much since the old series, nothing works the same way on any show really. But also you're dealing with a show, quite rare in British telly, where the lead writer is also an executive producer, and he's the person driving it in a very hands-on way. And script editing varies hugely from show to show – for example on a high volume soap, there's no way any one writer can be across all the scripts and upcoming story arcs, and so the day to day 'guardians' of the show tend to be the script eds, because a single ep of a soap is basically a small slice of a huge ongoing serial story, where characters' journeys are worked out a long way in advance of an individual scriptwriter coming on board. And often production will be scheduling and budgeting on the basis of what they know is going to be in that ep before it's actually written. Even then, script eds tend not to be the story 'creators', that's more an exec and producer job, although script eds might contribute to storylining. Obviously roles are different on a lower volume show, where 'story of the day' is a much bigger feature. But again, the role is more to facilitate someone else's ideas – to liaise between execs, producer and writer, and really, how much responsibility the script ed has depends on how those roles work out… So you do participate, you are a part of it, but you aren't driving it, as a script editor. You know in American telly they don't have script editors at all? The whole system is very different to how it is here, but they're genuinely baffled by what a script ed does over here, cos their structure – having writer/producers on staff, on each rung of the ladder - means they just don't need them. So the current job of script ed is really a by-product of the way that telly production has evolved in the UK, which is a suitably humbling thought. A lot of the job is 'management', being the go-between – there are lots of shows where, as a rule, writers never get to talk to the Exec, or even the producer! All conversations happen through the script ed, as middle manager, and how enjoyable and successful an individual writer finds a job depends a lot on how good their script ed is, and how good that relationship is. A lot of writers suffer from the wrong kind of 'help' - script editors who don't feel that they've done their job until they're rolled their sleeves up, got stuck in and told the writer how to write it. Always beware the drama queen script ed who rolls their eyes and says martyredly, "Well, of course, I had to write the script in the end…". Isn't that a weird attitude to have? I've never quite understood that…
Is it perhaps a legacy of what the role formerly involved? People thinking that is the function of a script editor because, actually, that used to be the function of a script editor…?
I think that's entirely possible. I also think it's true that people don't stay a script editor for life – a script editor is what you are before you go off to become a producer, or a development producer, in general. And at that stage you start generating creative projects. In that sense, I think, script editors see themselves as bridesmaids, essentially – waiting for the moment where they step up to a level where they do drive things more. If you get a script editor who doesn't think creatively then they're not very ambitious, but to be a good script editor you have to have respect for the process, and accept that what you're doing is helping, not driving. Some people find that frustrating, but if you look at how much you learn peripherally from it, it's a job where you're putting experience in the bank for the time when you will have a different role. If you're champing at the bit to get your paws on the scripts because you think you know how to sort them out, and trampling over territory that isn't yours, that's when you're not doing the job so well.
I'd forgotten until you mentioned it yourself that you're the new show's first female writer. It's very noticeable that the new show has much more of a female audience than the old one – have you any idea where has that come from? Given that, as you say, if you were a fan you were 'probably a boy'?
I think of the new series as an adventure show first and a science fiction show second, and I think that an adventure story appeals to everyone. I think the magic dynamic of 'Doctor plus companion' gives you a girl's way into the story. I could wax lyrical about the gender politics of that, because breaking it down to the bare bones, in the classic series, you were nearly always got an older, wiser man, along with a girl who doesn't know everything that he does. But in terms of the new series, I think the way that we've always viewed the companion - and the way that Russell is very passionate about using the companion - is that there is something that they need from each other – it's more mutual. So as the girl companion, you're not simply along for the ride as a bit of colour and decoration – you're with someone who needs you as much as you need him, on an emotional level. I think the show has done that incredibly successfully and actually very subtly as well – because it's not as simple as them falling in love or Chris and Billie snogging. Yes, that's a part of it, but it's more that they are not complete without each other, and that's the basis you start writing their relationship from. They have to need each other. I think other shows have helped build a female audience too – Buffy, for example. And Angel was watched by boys and girls alike for one very good reason, which is that he's a sexy fucker! And OK, those shows are supernatural and paranormal, not sci-fi, but they're close cousins. It's interesting – I wonder how it breaks down for something like Battlestar Galactica, because I love that, but it's not necessarily a girl's thing, it's more of a boy's show. It's a brilliant series, completely different genre to Doctor Who, but it kind of satisfies the butch side of me, running around with guns and uniforms! And on Doctor Who the science fiction side of it isn't in any way alienating, you don't need even a nodding acquaintance with quantum physics or anything like that – as a child, you just need to accept that there's a magic button that can do great and fantastic things. There might be a great pseudo-scientific explanation reason, and if you can make the real science work, even better, but at heart, it's like going into a wardrobe and finding Narnia. That's where the adventure starts. I also think the casting has been amazing -Billie and Freema are a fantastic way into it, little girls have loved Billie and little girls will love Freema – they've both got a bit of a 'little sister' quality about them, they're very sweet and naughty and you want to give them a hug.
What's it been like developing the Doctor's 'rebound' relationship with Martha? It presumably can't just be a retread of the old one…
It's interesting, because in a way the basic dynamic of 'they both need each other' is still there, but the major change is that actually poor old Martha has inherited someone who's been through a fabulous love affair which ended. So she is in love with him, and gets very frustrated that he can't see it. And he does still fundamentally need someone there, but he's refusing to pay attention to that and refusing to address it. In a sense, it's like the whole relationship has matured in quite a classic way – the first love affair between Rose and Chris's Doctor, and then Rose and the new revised version, was a very simple, elemental meeting of souls, a relationship which, in a way, will never be broken. They are slightly more 'adult' now, in a way – Martha's a bit older as well, and she's not going to fall in love with somebody in an adolescent way. There's a brilliant moment at the end of episode 3 where Martha doesn't let him get away with it any more, she actually says "Tell me why you're so sad. What's so heartbreaking? You're lying to me, you're not being straight with me…". And there's something quite adult about that, it's someone demanding that the relationship changes gear and moves on in a different way. I don't want to paint it that all of a sudden we're in Thirtysomething territory and everyone's being very cynical about divorce - it's not that sort of thing at all, it's just that they aren't each other's first love. And I quite like that someone says to the Doctor "You're not being honest with me and you can't treat me like that", and he opens up a bit and she realises what a heartbroken, complicated man she has on her hands… so there are key moments where they have to renegotiate the relationship, and I like that.
Having now spent several years working on the show but only now started writing for that new relationship, do you ever wish you'd had a chance to write for the previous one, knowing what you know now? To write for Chris or Billie, maybe?
Oh. That's a very good question which I haven't thought about at all. God, that's really interesting. I suppose so, yes! There are some things I'd love to have written. It's weird because the first series exists in such a concrete way in my head, it's in its own little bubble, that I can't think where my episode would go, because the stories are all there! But I suppose in a way it would be fabulous to write for Billie and Chris, but because at that time I didn't have any real idea of putting myself forward as a writer, my mind isn't in that area. There are episodes in the new series, in addition to my own, where I've thought "Oh! That's a really nice story – I'd love to do something like that!" But I'm sure in time, that will happen again. But in a way I think it's interesting that your favourite Doctor and your favourite companion have to be the ones that you're writing for now, you have to fall in love with them and believe that they're the best characters you could possibly be writing for – you can't think "oh, if only…". It's interesting though, that there are other Doctors I do think about – how interesting would it be to write for them. Obviously I'm of the Tom Baker generation, but the one I'd love to write for is Patrick Troughton. Which obviously for various practical reasons is impossible now, but there are things he does which are so charming and cheeky, he can turn on a sixpence, quite like David in that sense. But it seems ridiculously hubristic to think I could have written for series one – that wasn't on the radar in any way!
Having been involved from the ground up on both new Doctor Who and Torchwood, what's the difference been in the development process? How would you compare their gestation and birth?
I think one of the odd things with the new Doctor Who is that even if you're not a fan with encyclopaedic knowledge, we all as British TV viewers have some race memory of the old series. It's amazing how that legacy hangs around and still infests the writing to some degree. I know in the early scripts for series 1, the big bugbear everyone was wrestling with was 'posh Doctor' – the Doctor who would be faintly arch and distant about everything. The ghost of Jon Pertwee was hanging over those early scripts! Obviously once Chris had come on board people clicked that "Okay, it's Christopher Eccleston" and got what Russell was driving at, but people did still need daily reminders that it was a different idiom, that he won't say "Why, my dear girl…" or wear a cape or anything like that. And that was very bizarre and it happens even now. There are things I know I wrote in my first script where I looked back and thought "Why have I suddenly gone all posh at this point? It's ridiculous", but without me even realising it, the ghost of the old series was hanging over it again. With Doctor Who classic series, it had gone through a long phase where it was the subject of mockery - or, at best, affectionate send-up. So folk were familiar with pastiches of it, funny references and sketches, where they were looking for the ridiculous, so to try and rescue something from that, where you're looking for something heartfelt and genuine, was quite a big thing to have to do. I think some writers were a bit scared of going after the big emotional moments for fear of looking silly – which is very much an actor's dilemma as well, actually – and so there's a sort of creative nervousness where you pull back a bit to defend yourself from being too exposed. Obviously with a brand new series like Torchwood you're not wrestling with anything from the past in that way. I think they're similar in the sense that we found a lot of it just by doing it – you can have all the meetings in the world. I'm sure every drama series in the world has had the same meetings, you know, "It has to be warm, contemporary, fast-paced, exciting…"
Yes, it's more or less meaningless – as if anyone's going to sit round in a meeting saying "We want this new show to be cold, outdated, slow and dull"…
Exactly – and anyway, one show's exciting is not another show's exciting. So inevitably, the early scripts always have a more bumpy ride than the later ones because you're kind of defining it as you go along. That said, you have always got Russell available every minute of the day. I suppose with Torchwood, because it has more relatives as a show than Doctor Who, you have to make sure you're writing Torchwood and not The X Files or Buffy or Waking The Dead, which are all related to it in a certain way. You make sure you don't stray too far towards something else, and make sure also that you're asserting its identity as a show. And also with Doctor Who, you're always thinking 'family show', and that's a big big difference that cuts right across the board. It affects the stories you tell - which are not less complex, but more linear – it affects relationships between characters, tone obviously, dialogue – you don't swear in Doctor Who – so one being a family show and one being post-watershed mean they are very different things. There's masses there, I'm not sure I'm doing the question justice.
Did the clean slate on new Torchwood, where you could start anywhere you liked, make it easier or more difficult to know where to go and what to do? Given that Doctor Who had some ready-formed templates and people kind of knew, instinctively, what kind of show it had always been before…
I think that made Doctor Who harder, actually. I think it's a bit like the pain of childbirth, in that we've done a very good job of forgetting – but on that first year, before it was actually on the screen, we had to cope with everyone's idea of what Doctor Who was. And I swear, if I hear one more joke about Daleks not being able to go up stairs, I will throw myself off a cliff. Everybody trotted that one out, and the wobbly sets one. Generally people had a hugely affectionate memory of it – which is a blessing and a curse. It reminded me a bit of doing opera. Because if you're doing Tosca, everybody has their favourite recording of Tosca, and therefore to a certain extent if you're doing a new Tosca you're putting on something which is only ever going to fail, essentially, but fail by everyone's very different standards. You have a fear of letting people down, because so many people feel a sense of ownership of it. Although of course you can't really worry about that, when you're writing something you can't start from the point of weakness of worrying about letting people down or upsetting somebody. But still, when you're thinking about how people are going to respond to it, you are very much aware that you're looking after the nation's baby – and it's a huge responsibility. Don't drop the baby! So having a clean slate, on an adult show… yes, there's a lot more floundering and the show's more complex in its premise – because Doctor Who has the simplest premise in the world – but inventing from scratch can seem more exciting, in a way. But even as I'm saying that I'm kind of picking at my own answers, because on Doctor Who it didn't really feel like continuing something, it had to be a new show for 2005. I think it's easier to find writers for Torchwood, because, as I say, there are closer relatives to that show. If somebody's done Spooks or Shameless in a funky way, you can bring them onto Torchwood and they should do well on it – but there aren't really any shows which can serve as an audition piece for Doctor Who in that way, it's such a unique thing that there aren't any natural 'feeder' shows for it.
It may always have been a bit like that – Rob Shearman's written an entire audio play [Deadline] rooted in how surprised he was, as a kid, that the people who wrote Doctor Who also wrote for Juliet Bravo, and there really doesn't seem an obvious connection. Even something like Blakes 7, which was probably the closest cousin, was a totally different programme…
And also people who are happy to work on a family show are quite unusual. In general, professional writers who will write for 'grown-up' shows - whether they're post-watershed or 7pm shows - aren't going to have written CBBC stuff. And there are some lovely kids' shows out there, but writers do tend to ghettoise themselves or get pigeonholed – you might have a terribly good 'grown-up' writer but wonder if they would be willing to work on a family show, or you might have a good kids writer but you wonder, can they take a step up? And we've not, so far, taken someone who's solely, or even predominantly, known for their kids' stuff… although saying that, get Steven on the subject of Press Gang, and that's him off for ten minutes, he's still very proud of it. And likewise Russell and the Chuckle Brothers! I'd love to write a good kids's series, they're the kind of thing that always stay in your mind…
You might only have a million viewers, but it's a million people who'll remember it in ten or twenty years.
Absolutely – making an impression on somebody at that age with a great series is a brilliant thing to do.
So your episodes have finished filming now. Were you down there on set every day?
I was like a stalker on set! It's been a really exciting and emotional time. Me, Phil, James Strong, Dave Houghton and the Confidential gang went to New York together for a few days before filming started, and had a fabulous time. It wasn't a holiday, contrary to popular rumour… We went partly so Gillane could get material for Confidential, but also so production could get 'plate' shots. I think they're really going to make the episodes - they're going to give you the New York that you need to see, the big view from the Empire State Building, background for Central Park, and so on. I do try and get down to filming, anyway, when I can, simply because it's lovely and interesting and it's not the office! And also because as a script editor, if you don't go down just 'on spec' every now and then, just to get to know people, then the only time they get to know you – and this was very much the case on series one - is when you turn up with bad news. Turning up with new script pages every day like bloody Typhoid Mary, nobody wants to know you! But on my episodes I was down there every day, more or less. James is brilliant, and the cast were absolutely lovely. A lot of the episode is set in Hooverville in Central Park, and they rebuilt that in Bute Park, all these huts and shacks - with enormous attention to detail, and it was like a huge adventure playground, it was extraordinary. And there were some massive explosions… and then there's all the theatre stuff with the showgirls. So it's very nice being around, seeing it happen, and also not having any responsibility for it – which you don't, once it's actually being filmed. What are you going to do, run up and shout "No! Not like that!"? The first day I turned up, which was filming inside the Empire State Building office, they had this beautifully detailed art deco set. I wanted everyone to get off the set so I could play with things! But what was hilarious was, of course I know virtually everybody working on the show, and I've been on set dozens of times, standing behind the monitor out of the way of people with a real job to do, wardrobe and make-up and script supervisor and so on. But this time Phil shouted "Somebody get Helen a chair!" - and this poor runner went off to get me a chair! It was very nice of him, but I couldn't sit in it, I had the piss taken for the best part of an hour as it was. It was also lovely nipping into the art department, using their spare computer to check e-mail, and they're all like "Here's the writer – let's beat her up! Have you seen how much work she's given us to do!" – where normally, I think, they'd have to be quite proper and formal with a writer, it's a bit more like a state visit. But it was lovely seeing it all happen. When you write, you're aware that whatever ends up on screen will only ever be an approximation of your original idea, even if it's in some ways probably better – it's never going to be exactly what's in your head. But I was walking round Hooverville thinking "This is exactly how I saw this in my head – this is astonishing!".
I'm getting the impression from all this that your episodes are kind of the 'money shot' ones – the ones where every penny spent is going to be very evident on screen…
I hope so. Of course, there are some things you simply cannot do – there was one production problem in episode 5 which eventually Russell had to solve, where I'd originally written a big shoot-out sequence in a New York Street, a big battle, and we just can't do that. It's about spending the money wisely where you can – for example, if you're in a New York office, you can have one fantastic POV shot over a shoulder of downtown Manhattan. You then know it's out there, and you don't need to see it in every shot. And James is brilliant about this, about putting in the big shots where you need them…
So, you say you don't really make plans and your career is a right place, right time kind of thing. Now you've done Doctor Who for a while and have a few writing credits, are you going to continue on the show, or do you have any specific ambitions, either old or new?
I suppose it's a bit disingenuous to say that I don't make plans at all – I wouldn't say that I'm not ambitious, either. I'm very ambitious to write things which I think will be brilliant and exciting and I'll have a great time doing. The distinction I'd make is that I'm not one of these people who says "In three years' time I want to be doing X job for Y company", or whatever, I don't have goals like that. Partly because I've found that they haven't really worked very well for me – there are some people who are very goal-driven in that way and they tend to have very good careers in a very linear way. But I think, how can you possibly know what you want to do in three years? Everything changes all the time, and in a way, yes I have been extraordinarily fortunate in having been in the right place at the right time – but if I'd been very career-driven and very linear about how I'd done things, I probably wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time, because I'd have been too focussed on doing something else, pursuing my own narrow course. So I think there's an element of sheer accident to these things, but there's also an element of making sure you're open to the possibility of something unexpected landing on your plate. I made myself a promise when I agreed to do the Doctor Who two-parter – of course I wanted to write the very best scripts that I could, but also I thought, I have got to enjoy this process – I know there will be bits which are hard going, but the process has to be worthwhile, I can't just go through agony to produce something good at the end of it. I don't think that's a sustainable life plan…
