Script Doctors | Series 3 | Stephen Greenhorn
The Lazarus Experiment has more-or-less completed production by the time of our meeting in the middle of a particularly drab Glasgow winter. "But I've not seen it yet!" writer Stephen Greenhorn muses mournfully, as he grabs the milk for the coffee from a fridge decorated with a huge portrait of Celtic legend Henrik Larsson. "I think they're still doing all the CGI effects…". Not that he has time to worry, as he's not only suffering badly from the same cold that I've caught – told you it was a Glasgow winter - he's currently hard at work on the musical Sunshine on Leith, based on the songs of Fife duo The Proclaimers. Something of a departure from Doctor Who? Yes indeed, but you don't know the half of it yet…
So, Stephen – how did you get started in writing in the first place? From a quick scan of a list of your credits, it seems to have been a fairly wide-ranging career you've had…
It's entirely haphazard and accidental! Writing is something I've always dabbled in - I remember at school being asked to write a story, and where other people would do the minimum required, half a page, I'd get so into it that I'd hand in five pages. Much to the annoyance of the teacher who had to mark it! So I think there was always something there - an overworked imagination, or a need to go on at length about things – but it never really occurred to me that there was anything that could be done with that. When I left school I went to Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to study physics, because I wanted to be an astronaut. Which does seem a bit ludicrous now, but at the time Heriot-Watt were doing all sorts of laser physics tying in with the space programme in the States. I was there for a year, and discovered that I could do the physics all right but the maths was just impossible - they plunged you straight in on the assumption that you'd all done A-Level maths, and I hadn't. So I left after a year and drifted about London for a while, came back to Scotland and decided to go back to University. The only one which would take me was Strathclyde, to do a general arts degree thing, which eventually became English and Psychology. One of the key decisions in a chain of events is, you read plays, novels and poetry in the first year and then in the second year you have to opt to study particular things, the Victorian novel or whatever. And I decided I didn't want to be reading big Jane Austen tomes – it was much easier to read Arthur Miller plays. You could read him in an afternoon! So I took all the drama options, and that took me through the rest of my university career – all the drama and poetry options, because they were easier to read! The consequence of that was that I got the chance to do a practical theatre studies class in the third year. The reason I did that was that there were fewer essays to write but one practical project, where you did a little bit of acting, a little bit of directing, a little bit of set design and all that stuff – and I realised that I couldn't act, didn't want to direct, so it kind of narrowed down, and when it eventually came to the practical project you had to write something, and I wrote a play, which ended up being performed and won a prize. And then I got asked to write jokes for Radio Scotland, and suddenly I was being paid to write. So it was completely accidental, but really quite exciting. You put a play on in front of an audience and you hear them reacting, you hear them laughing at the point where you want to make them laugh, and that becomes really megalomaniacal. The play was an autobiographical thing about working with a quadriplegic guy, and was put on at the Edinburgh Fringe in about 1988, and it won a 'Fringe First' award. That meant that in the final year of university I was writing jokes for radio - which was a great supplement to the student grant, as it was at the time - and when I graduated, two theatre companies had asked me to write a play, so I thought I'd write these plays and then go and get a job. But once I'd written those two, someone else asked me to write another one - and then about eighteen months later, when all those jobs finished, I thought I'd get a job - but I could not get employed for love nor money. I realised I'd made myself unemployable. I'd done a joint honours degree, English and Psychology, because that's what interested me, but that meant I couldn't really specialise in either because I hadn't done enough of the classes. I ended up applying for a petrol pump attendant job in Edinburgh, permanent night shift. And the woman wouldn't take me! She looked at my CV and said "What have you been doing since you left university?", and I said "I've been writing plays", and she said "I'm not taking you on! It'll take three months to show you how to work the till and by that stage you'll have written a play and have pissed off somewhere else!". The other thing that threw her was that when I'd filled in the application form, she got suspicious because everything was spelt correctly! So at that point I started doing a lot of radio work, and then came back into doing theatre things, and was taking it more seriously, being more hard-headed about it. The Scottish theatre company 7:84 put on a play of mine, toured it and took it to the Edinburgh festival. It was a kind of Greek tragedy, but set in a Scottish fishing village, and for some reason somebody – and I still don't know who – saw this play and thought "He'd be really good writing for The Bill". Which is insane, because the play had nothing to do with that kind of world. So I got a chance to write for The Bill, and that was the first step into telly, which was exciting. So I did a couple of episodes of The Bill but I was still working in theatre, at Paines Plough – Vicky Featherstone was running it at the time, she's now at the Scottish National Theatre, but she also had contacts in telly. She was working with the writer Ashley Pharaoh on a show called Where The Heart Is, which was just about to get its second series. I ended up doing two episodes of that, which was kind of my apprenticeship in telly.
It seems to me that you'd had quite an eclectic set of gigs – 7:84 being highly political and grounded in social realism, but Where The Heart Is being a cosy Sunday night thing. How do you jump from one straight into the other?
You're absolutely right, my CV doesn't look like it makes any sense whatsoever. The criterion whenever I get offered something – and this was the case on Doctor Who – is, is this going to be interesting and challenging? I get asked to do things all the time – I did a recent TV adaptation of Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and suddenly got all these nineteenth century romantic adaptations offered to me, but I thought "I've done that, I want to do something else now". Those early things were mainly about learning to write for telly, and they were great because the people working on them really took you through the ins and outs, the absolute practicalities of script layout, the procedure through treatments and rewrites, the discipline of what's possible and not possible within budgets, and about the length of things – because in theatre in doesn't matter if you're writing 95 minutes or 75 minutes, but in TV it absolutely has to be the right length. So it was that kind of training ground, but it was never plotted out as a career arc.
After Where The Heart Is, the TV stuff was just an interesting adjunct to my theatre work, whereas now it's kind of flipped over. Vicky's sister Jane is a TV producer, and worked for a company that asked me to write a TV series called Glasgow Kiss. They originally asked me to do something set in a restaurant in Manchester, and I said that I couldn't write about Manchester or restaurants because I didn't know anything about them, but I would do it if I could set it in Glasgow and make the character the Celtic correspondent for the Evening Times! I got away with that, and wrote Glasgow Kiss. Jane was the producer on that, and that was the first time that I'd done something that I'd 'authored', if you like - it was my six part series, and that became a kind of calling card in terms of other projects for TV. What's interesting about working on The Bill and Where The Heart Is is actually that the experience of working with existing characters and taking on a format and a tone and a style that already exists, and that you cannot screw about with, is really important in terms of coming on to Doctor Who. If I'd only written things that I'd originated myself, I think it would be much more difficult to step into an existing series like that and not feel confined and thwarted by the fact that I wanted to ask questions of the Doctor's sexuality or kill him or something – because the discipline of working in someone else's series is a really specific one, and I think those two things equipped me most in terms of stepping in to what Russell was doing with the new Doctor Who series. But there was never any game plan. Although if you look over the work you sometimes see themes recurring, about identity, about Scotland, about politics. Some of the 7:84 stuff which ends up being dragged out in a different genre but rehearsed in the same way – in the guise of a romantic drama about whether this guy whose wife had died could ever have the courage to go out and find someone else, actually what I was writing about was whether Glasgow as a post-industrial city could have the nerve to re-invent itself and sell itself as a service industry, tourist industry cultural hub. Which it clearly has done…
…but twenty years ago nobody expected it!
Exactly! And that's come out of me being at university here at the time of the Garden Festival in 1988, the town was really struggling to make that first move. But the idea of working in different genres has never thrown me, the question has always been about whether the genre you're working in is something you will enjoy working in and whether it can carry some of the things that you're interested in saying. So I think people get thrown sometimes when you're developing a serious fact-based drama about the Paddington train crash at the same time as creating a soap opera for BBC Scotland – but if they're both things that give you a way of saying things that you want to say, then really the genre's not that important.
How did you end up creating that soap opera [River City]?
It came out of the blue – I'd done Glasgow Kiss and was working in the theatre and was trying to develop something else for BBC Scotland, a little drama about the Scottish Parliament, and it became clear that there was something else going on, which was that they were taking in pitches for this new soap opera. And they were taking ideas from outside, and they had an idea of their own on the inside, and they wanted to talk to me about helping them develop their idea. They told me their idea, and I thought it was terrible! So I thought that was the end of it – they'd bought me lunch and told me about it, and I'd given my response. They wanted to set it in a particular place, and I thought if they set it there nobody would watch it. But they came back with another lunch, and said "Okay - where would you set it?". At that time they were trying not to set it in Glasgow or Edinburgh for various complicated reasons about thinking that Glasgow was over-represented in terms of TV, and that Edinburgh wasn't really Scottish! But I thought, you're really stuck, in that case – if you set it anywhere else in Scotland, the problem is that all your younger characters will reach the point where they're going to go off to Glasgow or Edinburgh. Set it in Stirling or Ayr or Cumbernauld, there's a certain point, growing up, where you think "Good – now I can leave!". So there's no stasis for your characters. And then I had this fantastic idea! I was sitting in Leith one day, where I have lots of friends, and it suddenly occurred to me that Leith is in Edinburgh but it's not of Edinburgh, and if you set something in Leith, people in Glasgow would absolutely identify with it. Leith, at the time, was going through that transformation from being a working-class, docker environment, into warehouse-conversion flats – but you still had junkies and hookers on the corner, even though you had the Royal Yacht Britannia moored there and the Scottish Office being built there. So I thought you could set the show on the shore, because on that one street you have millionaires and civil servants, the finest seafood restaurants on the east coast, but also really dodgy pubs and the women on the corners and junkies in doorways. The whole of Scotland in one street! I presented this idea to BBC Scotland and they bit, so I spent six months developing that idea, creating a soap opera that really was a microcosm of all the ranges of urban Scotland. I'd developed all this and submitted it, and they came back to me and said "Yours is the one we're doing!". Which was great, because I was really excited about it – so I said I would develop it further along with them. I wasn't that desperate to do a soap opera, but this idea was really interesting. But, eventually, they said "Just one thing – we're going to relocate it to Glasgow!". But there's nowhere like that in Glasgow, Glasgow has schisms, you have a golf course or a railway line separating real poverty and real wealth… but it became clear that a policy decision had been taken to set it in Glasgow. So it took about two and a half years of my life, and the thing that kept me hanging on and hanging on was to keep hold of the integrity of some of the characters, and to hold on to the idea that it should actually be about something. There's a cynicism abroad - which is paralleled a little bit with attitudes to sci-fi and popular drama, in the way that the original Doctor Who was seen to be children's stuff. The attitude within the BBC, with some of the people making it, was "It's just soap opera". And the assumption that makes about the audience is that you can give them stuff that you don't have to care that much about, because they're not a proper audience. But I used to stand up at meetings and say "How much TV drama did you watch this week? Because the audience that we're putting this out for will have seen about 25 hours of drama". If they're watching our soap, they'll probably be watching EastEnders, Corrie, they'll probably watch Hollyoaks - they are the biggest consumers of TV drama. And with the early episodes of River City I was trying to write, they kept trying to push me to overwrite. For instance, if you wanted to write a pregnancy scare, they'd want you to have someone coming downstairs and saying "Oh, I feel a bit sick, oh, I didn't wear a condom with Darren the other night, oh, do you think I might be pregnant!". Whereas all you need is to have her mum say "Do you want any breakfast?", and her reply "No, I don't feel like breakfast this morning" - and that audience will already be thinking "Who's the father?! Who's the father?!". They're that fast! So there was that whole battle about the sophistication of the audience for popular drama, against the assumptions that some of the programme-makers had. There's a difference from theatre writing, where the dialogue has to carry so much because you can't guarantee that the back of the theatre will see all of the detail, or if you're doing a novel you have complete control about where the reader's mind is going because you're directing them through whole sentences – but on TV the image, the shot, that single stage direction… "He reaches out and pats her shoulder, he leaves his hand there a moment longer than necessary" – that's the thing that, if an audience is paying attention, they'll really pick up on. The TV audience is really sophisticated, really fast now. You can cut, cut, cut much more quickly, because the audience is so used to that pace of music videos, especially a younger audience.
Having developed a soap and produced all this other TV work, what specifically was it that brought you to the attention of the Doctor Who people?
Begging! And threatening letters! No, I'd written a lot of serious telly, some which didn't get made. I'd spent a while developing a series about the privatisation of the NHS which got spiked because it was too political, and then I spent a long time working with a Panorama journalist on a drama about the Paddington train crash and the inquiry afterwards, about the privatisation of British Rail. There's a recurring theme here! On the back of that I had spent a long time developing this project about the diamond industry in Africa, about how the trade in rough diamonds is very strictly controlled by one company. And that got spiked one traumatic night - I think the BBC weren't convinced that an audience would follow something where most of the story was set in Africa, and they had a conspiracy thriller in development which I think became The State Within, so they decided to go with that rather than my diamonds thing, which was a real kick in the teeth. And at that point, I said to my agent that I needed a break from these kind of intensive, researched, serious things – "Can we do something that's fun and straightforward?". And we spoke to Jane Featherstone who'd produced Glasgow Kiss, who's now at the production company Kudos, who was working on a project with the producer Elwen Rowlands, who used to be script editor on Doctor Who. Jane said "We've got this book Wide Sargasso Sea - you probably won't like it, it's a romantic costume drama, and BBC Four want to tie it in to the BBC One production of Jane Eyre". But I read it and said "That's great! Yes, let's do a bodice-ripping period romance!". So I did that and it was such good fun to do, adapting original material, which is tricky but interesting. I'd adapted for the theatre but not for telly, and it was really liberating to think "It's not about my voice, it's about taking Jean Rhys's voice and adapting it for a different medium". It happened really fast, for various reasons, astonishingly fast. I read the book, we got held off because we couldn't get the rights, and suddenly we got the rights just at the point where it was almost impossible to do it - which meant that instead of doing lots of preparation, I went straight off and wrote the first draft in three weeks. And once they got the first draft they committed straight to pre-production, straight through the whole process in a few months. And Julie Gardner was the exec-producer on that, it was done through BBC Wales, and she was great to work with as well. So I'd had these two great producers, Jane and Julie, and I was speaking to my agent saying what a relief it was to do something like that – it's not 'your thing', it's something different.
And also the relief of something getting actually on-air? You can spend a career in development hell…
Absolutely. And my agent asked if I'd want to do something else like that, and I said yeah, and she said what sort of thing, and I said that ideally I'd really like to do a Doctor Who… but that that was never going to happen! And she suggested speaking to Julie, because she was the exec-producer on Doctor Who as well, which I hadn't twigged. So really it was a case of begging! The first series had gone out by this time, the second series was being shown, and they were in the process of putting together the third series, it was about May last year. I'd watched it and loved it, that whole thing of it looking like the best thing on the telly and the most fun to write for. It was so well done.
Was Doctor Who a thing you'd been aware of before the 2005 'comeback'?
Oh yes, it was stuff I'd seen before, but when I went to a Doctor Who writer's dinner, and met Paul Cornell - who later described me as a 'Glasgow hard man'. I'm very pleased with that! - he described me as 'less steeped in fandom'. The difference is that my Doctor Who 'fandom' is specifically telly, I've not wandered off into the novels or the online stuff or the radio plays, my knowledge of it is specifically through all the TV shows from Pertwee through to Davison, and now the 'reincarnation'. I'm a child of the telly, really! I was thinking about this, because if someone had said, "Do you want to write a radio Doctor Who?" or something, I wouldn't know how to do it - the only way in for me, into that 'canon', would be through the telly. My 'fandom' is narrow and specific! When it finished the first time round, in 1989, I was just a beginner playwright, but one of the other playwrights that I sort of knew was Rona Munro [writer of the final TV seventh Doctor story, Survival] - who's now a really good friend of mine – but at the time I was thinking "Not only are you a famous Scottish playwright, but you've just written Doctor Who!". As a kid growing up, you can't believe that someone you could reach out and touch, someone you could have a pint with, had actually written for this show that you'd watched for twenty years. Coming on to the new series, you're constantly reminded that it still has that effect. My partner's nine-year-old boy is completely unawed by me, but his friends are starstruck, and that was what I was like when I met Rona – and as it turned out, she'd written this iconic thing, it turned out to be the very last one. When the Doctor Who job cropped up for me, I spoke to her, and said "I think I'm about to enter your twilight world!". She tells this great story, that about five years after Survival, she was at some supermarket checkout, and the guy was swiping her card, looked at it and said "Rona Munro!? The Rona Munro that wrote Survival?". And apparently in Survival there's one piece of plot logic which, if you didn't think about it very carefully, looked like a flaw - can't remember what it was now! – and people like this guy would come up to her and say "See when it says this…" and she'd go "No! No! Because if you remember this…!". And that's kind of been her interface with the whole Doctor Who world! Did you read Russell's thing at the back of DWM a few months ago? I met Rona after that night Russell was talking about, and she said "Oh, I think I've really embarrassed myself - I got really drunk at the Edinburgh television festival and was introduced to all these guys and suddenly realised it was Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies". And when I was down having this dinner with Paul and some of the other writers, I was introduced to Steven Moffat and he said "There was this really embarrassing thing - Russell and I were really drunk, and I think we've really annoyed Rona Munro at the Edinburgh television festival…".
One of the interesting things about Doctor Who is that there are so many writers on it, and the showrunner is a writer, and that makes a huge difference when you go into production meetings. Julie's a great producer and gives great notes, but producers are quite intimidating usually, you're constantly aware that they're thinking about overarching things, about budgets and commissioning and how they're going to get another series, all that kind of stuff. There's something comforting about knowing that the guy sitting opposite you who's going to give you notes and tell you your episode is rubbish is actually a writer, and he's going to put it all in terms a writer will understand. As in "It's crap, Stephen - do it again!". But there's also that community of other writers who are on it, people like Helen who's a script editor but also writing, and Simon Winstone who was my script editor on it and who co-wrote one of the novels for the Virgin New Adventures series. There's a sense that there are loads of people who've got experience as writers involved in different roles in the production. When I turned up for the readthrough I was really quite intimidated by the fact that Russell was there, and at the end of the table were Steven Moffat and Paul Cornell and Helen Raynor all waving at me. We all did that drunken nervous rambling at the bar afterwards, it was fun. Which you don't often get - most shows I've worked on, there'll be one key writer and if you come on to do an episode it's still 'their thing'. Whereas it feels like Doctor Who is actually, to a large extent, produced by a community of writers. And that makes a difference in telly, because a lot of TV shows are overwhelmed by other people involved in the corporation side of the production.
What was the procedure, for you, of getting a script together? Did you pitch an idea, or were you given a shopping list of things to incorporate?
Well, I got my agent to harangue Julie about whether there was any slight possibility of working on the show, if maybe someone had died or something – because I still thought it was never going to happen! And then I went for lunch with Julie in London, to talk about Wide Sargasso Sea, and Simon Winstone was there as well. And suddenly the conversation was all about Doctor Who, which I thought was quite exciting. And the next thing was, they took me on the train out to Cardiff, and I went in with Simon and Julie to meet Russell for what I thought was going to be an interrogation of an audition and an interview. And after about ten minutes I had to stop what was going on, because suddenly they were talking about 'this episode' – "So does that mean that I'm doing this?! I thought this was an audition" – but no, the audition was the lunch in London, and this was the actual thing. Normally you expect a phone call saying "You're going to do it, come and talk to us" – but my 'moment' came in the middle of the first script meeting! So I thought I would get handed this big bible that would explain it all, the masterplan for the arc of the third series, background on all these characters. What I got was two words - two fucking words! – from Russell: 'Mad scientist'… so we sat chatting about our favourite mad scientist stuff, to make sure we were using the same sort of reference points. And it had to be contemporary and London, that was the remit. And at that point I wandered off, slightly dazed but happy. But then, of course, you start to panic, because you start to realise the size of what you've got yourself involved in. So the whole thing was this weird process of disbelief and elation and abject terror. There are occasions where you think "I'll look on Wikipedia and check a few things", but you look on Wikipedia for Doctor Who and it goes on and on and on… the size of that world is astonishing. So I stepped away from that and started trying to put the stories together. The actual process itself was quite tricky, in terms of making the drama. It took a while just to find the right tone and pace. Simon and Russell and Julie guided me towards getting the sense of it right – because watching as a viewer is a different experience from trying to construct it, you suddenly, as a writer, become aware of how fast it is – it has to be bang-bang-bang. So there was a steep learning curve at the start, very steep, where my first few 'treatments' were a bit all over the place. But you learn things – there was a reference I'd put in which I thought added a little bit to the canon of information where the Doctor made a reference to some crashed alien craft starting the great fire of London. And of course I get a phone call from Simon, saying "Actually, I think you'll find that in the 1982 Peter Davison story The Visitation…". So at that point I stopped trying to do that! Concentrate on the characters and the plot! Except… usually, if you're doing an episodic drama, you have your central character, and during the course of the hour or 45 minutes or whatever, something will happen to that character which will make him different by the end. That's the normal way to make drama, that characters are changed by impact. And the bigger the drama, the bigger the change. But on Doctor Who, you can't, because the Doctor is almost a constant – not quite, but almost, and certainly I'm not the writer that can decide to effect a significant shift in it. So the Doctor has to operate as a catalyst for this change in other people – and so you look at the central relationship, which is between the Doctor and the new assistant. And you realise that there's a bit of leeway in that – that's what I had to go back to Russell and Julie with, what I could do with this relationship. And there was stuff that was allowable in that. And then you realise that that has also got to be kind of 'contained', because that's got to play out over the whole thirteen episodes - so you look at the other characters, in this case Martha's family, and you get very excited by them - and of course you start using them too much! And you have to be gently reminded that the show's not about them. So there's a little bit of that, about keeping the focus, about the need for real clarity in the writing.
What's it been like creating the new character Martha Jones, responding to the Doctor being on the rebound from Rose, as it were?
That's been really interesting, because of the order things were being written in – because even though mine was episode 6, it was one of the first four to be written, it was made in that block. I think I saw the scripts for 1 and 2 before I was embarking on mine. So you felt that actually nothing was set in stone yet, and it was one of those interesting things where you can push it a little and then go back and ask, "Is she like this?". The outline might say she's 'strong and independent', but does that mean she'll argue, or be silently strong? You have this period of negotiation, and I did feel that I was helping to flesh out this new assistant – who I think's going to be fantastic. And that was exciting for me right at the start, the arc across my episode. The episode starts with her being booted off the TARDIS, and told that the ride's over, and then at the end of the episode, there's a moment where she's 'promoted' back on. And that arc was the most important series arc in my episode, that was really interesting, because it marks a shift in the relationship between the two of them from a 'passenger' mentality, from someone who was just a passenger, to someone who had earned the right to be considered a proper associate.
Does that mean you found it easy to avoid falling into the trap of writing the same lines as you might have done for Rose?
Yes - and especially after series two where the relationship between Rose and the Doctor had got quite emotional and romantic, you couldn't just go straight back into that flirting, pining, boyfriend relationship, it had to be different. Russell sent through his script for episode 1, and you really got the sense from it that it was a 'proper adventure', where you've got these two characters who are going to create friction, but there's a real sense that circumstances have kind of flung them together and it might or might not work out. My favourite bit is at the end of the episode where they've talked all this through, and they're talking about her feistiness, and the idea was that by the end of the episode she'd have proved herself and would be taken on board. And I have the Doctor do that… but she basically goes "Fuck off"! And she then re-negotiates the terms under which she's willing to come on board. And in terms of the series arc, that was the big satisfying thing for me... she's a great character. The family's great as well, they're great fun. They were explained to me, and I got so interested in the family because they were so funny… and I had to be told "A little less of the family - it's not a sitcom!".
One of the things that's most attractive about Doctor Who is the audience it gets – I was sitting watching it with my girlfriend's dad and her son, we were all rapt in it, but the only way that can happen is if the storytelling is really clear. If you start to veer off into indulgent territory, then the younger audience wanders off and the older audience doesn't quite know what's going on. Once you've got those parameters straight, it becomes about the emotion – it's not about the chases, it's about the emotional arc, about what's happening to these people. It becomes much more interesting then, because what I started to look at was not about how you change the Doctor but about what a character with his kind of odd experience has to say about our lives – so that you can watch it as a human being in the 21st century and have this extraordinary character make you think about your own existence. Thematically it all began to come together about that point, it became a thing about death, and life, and extending life, and that's what the mad scientist idea developed into. We had a couple of ideas about the experiments going horribly wrong, which got booted into touch because they were too close to something that was happening in Torchwood. There was an alien involvement early on… so actually in the end there's no alien involvement at all. It's entirely human-based. Which is not to say there isn't a 'creature'!
That's very unusual for the new series… I can't think of another episode that does that. It's an interesting take on it.
I was trying to think of one as well, I raked back through them all. It might turn out that that's the USP of the episode! But it's not by design, in the end we just didn't need it, it all became about this Professor Lazarus and what he was up to. And it's got Mark [Gatiss] as the baddie, which is great. I only knew him from The League of Gentlemen and his scripts for the first two series, but one of the first episodes I saw was The Unquiet Dead, which I thought was fantastic. By the time of my readthrough, they hadn't cast it all. Russell's was all cast with Ardal O'Hanlan and so on, but for mine David Tennant was reading through the script with the production staff! I'm insecure enough at the best of times… but they really came through with Mark, and with Thelma Barlow – you know, Mavis from Coronation Street. There's a moment in the relationship between those two characters, which we discussed at, I think, the final script meeting - how far could we push it? I'd thought about having them physically involved, but I also liked the boss-underling relationship… but Russell said "If we have them physically involved… they can… they can… SNOG!!!!". And I'm saying "You have this really good-looking young man snogging this really… that's… fucking…. BRILLIANT! YES! LET'S DO TONGUES!!". So there will be a moment for all the nine year olds to go "UUUUUURGH!". It will be great!
One of my favourite moments in the whole process came when we were talking about the opening of the episode, we'd had an opening scene which had been working fine, but then for various practical reasons that couldn't happen, and Russell said "I think we should have a little scene inside the TARDIS before it lands!". And I thought, does that mean I get to write 'Int: TARDIS'…? And that was quite exciting… the practical meetings are usually about "You can't do this, make that shorter," or whatever, but every now and then, during that process you get an exciting moment like that, and 'Int: TARDIS' was one of them.
You spoke about the production issues being so important on the show, the production in essence informing the writing so much. Because it's a sci-fi adventure show and, as you say, the effects and sets are very limited – does that make the process vastly different to other shows to work on?
It's not, no – if you're coming in to any show that already exists you have to absolutely respect the rules and guidelines that are set up for that show. How much freedom you get depends on what the show is. In the case of The Bill there were huge strictures at the time about sticking to police procedure, you weren't allowed to explore their personal lives, they were policemen on duty and that was all they were – the story was resolved by the end of the episodes. So there are always those kind of rules, and in some ways those procedural rules were more strict than the Doctor Who ones, because actually I think if you can understand the tone and the nature of what they're doing from Russell's point of view, they can give you the freedom to tell whatever story you want as long as it fits with the overall sense that they have for the whole series. That's what it felt like, that there was freedom there as long as… I've just realised it's kind of like the fifteen year old whose parents are going off on holiday! "We'll give you a bit of freedom here, as long as you don't wreck the house"! Which doesn't mean that you can't have a party, but you better make sure you get the French polisher in before they came back. That is kind of what it felt like, I thought it would be "Your Auntie Betty's going to be staying and keeping an eye on you", but it was far more "If you don't wreck the place, you can do what you like". In some ways it was very liberating, because they make it perfectly clear that they have confidence in you and that they will let you do what you do. A lot of TV productions, they'll bring you on as a writer but you're teamed with someone else second-guessing what you're writing, and that's kind of frustrating, because they'll offer what are effectively 'accountancy' solutions to writing problems. And what you pray for is a show where the accountants do their job and the writers do their job, and on Doctor Who if you're brought on as a writer then you're used as a writer, and if you get notes those notes are pitched absolutely in terms of what isn't working and looking for a 'writing' solution to it.
It's entirely 'artistic', you mean?
Well, not entirely – we had one major decision which was quite gut-wrenching, where a location pulled out on us at the last minute and we had to rejig everything, and there were elements in the plot because the location was so iconic, so they all got ripped out at the last minute! Some of my favourite bits of writing in the episode! But we had to rejig it for a different location, so there was some pragmatic reworking toward the end of the process. And also, the closer you get to the end of the process, the more you're sitting thinking "How many shots of the monster have we got?", and going through the script marking them all out. One of the first things that happened at the very first meeting was discussion of the schedule for writing treatments and the first draft, and of course one of the first deadlines is to give them an idea of 'the monster', because that's the thing that takes the longest in terms of preparation work - whether you're looking at a computer generated thing or a costume, certain practical things which apply. It was pointed out to me that because of the budget, the number of shots of a monster you're allowed is really tight. I didn't believe this at the time, but I went off to watch Tooth and Claw counting them up and going "God, they're right"! And so I watched it again thinking that I'd need to get really clever about cutaways, shadows, POV shots - there's only so much you can show. Which I think lends itself to that whole old-school horror film thing of 'suggest, suggest, suggest… reveal!'. Look at Alien – in the first film, you barely see it, and it's all the more terrifying! So you get much more pragmatic, but apart from the monster stuff, those considerations are all pretty standard, and you hone it and hone it and hone it… the initial discussions are all about getting the tone of it right, and the later discussions are more pragmatic, about whether things are possible in terms of budget, location, scheduling. And then you occasionally find yourself altering things because you find a more elegant solution that doesn't create huge problems for anyone.
Do you find that 'essential pragmatism' creatively inspiring in its own right? I've spoken to writers before who prefer to have clear parameters defined, or else their imagination doesn't fire…
Always having worked in low-budget theatre and television, those restrictions are always there. One of the things that most excites me as a writer is overcoming problems. If someone says "These are the limitations, but within these boundaries, you can do what you like". And you think, "Within all these many, many boundaries… what's the thing we can do here? How can we subvert that and still keep within the rules?". The whole process of writing for telly is that there's always that element of the excitement of finding a solution to practical problems. Part of you always wants to let your imagination go mad, and you do that, and that's the first draft, but then somebody reminds you of the situation. But there's not a point where you go 'Aw!' in disappointment - you always knew it was going to happen, and it's equally creative for the story that you want to tell, you have to kind of be realistic about what resources are available to you. And then the question is, how do you tell your story – how, creatively, can you deal with the practicalities of the situation? And actually it's exciting doing that, finding elegant solutions to things… writing your great speeches and plotting great thematic moments, there's no single moment where you think 'Yes!!' because you've just come up with something brilliant - there's no point where you're really proud of yourself! It's only later, when a problem crops up, and you find a solution – at script meetings, people do leap to their feet and scream "I've got it!", and it's always at those moments – it's not the big thematic stuff, it's when someone shouts "I know how to do this without having to use a crane!".
And given that you're episode's now most of the way through the production process, has it given you the change or break that you thought you needed from the other aspects of your career? Was it more 'fun'? Would you do more of it?
It wasn't really about 'fun', it's that I wanted to do something that was giving me space to tell a story but where I wasn't getting bogged down in that whole development process where you're writing pitch documents to commissioners, spending all your energy arguing about why something ought to be made, and only when they say 'yes', do you get on with the process of actually making it. It was that first process that had really exhausted me, and what I wanted was something where that process had already finished and I could come in and think "What do I want to make here?" rather than "Will this ever get made?". As for doing more… I'm trying not to show quite how desperate I am to come back! I don't quite what my best tactic is – whether to appear desperate and beg through the medium of your interview, or whether to obtain incriminating polaroids of someone, or what. And whether I should say "I've got this great idea!", or whether I should say "I'll do whatever you ask me to"! In truth, I would do whatever they asked me to do… I think I'd like to do a murder mystery one. But I loved doing this, and it's absolutely not that I'm thinking of it is 'an adjunct' to other things – I needed to do something like this just to get excited about writing telly again. The stuff with the long 'genesis period' is really draining and although it's really satisfying when it happens, if you do all that preparation and then it doesn't happen, it's not easy. I've been relatively lucky in terms of hit-rate of things getting made… but this was about going back and reminding myself why I wanted to write for telly in the first place, that's what Doctor Who's been like. When you start to work in drama, you want to do something exciting that will reach a wider audience, something that you can be proud of, something that will have life beyond some little TV niche that has a broad canvas – and you can lose sight of that. On River City I got caught up in massive, massive discussions about the whole project, and doing Doctor Who was about stepping away from that and reminding myself why I wanted to write popular TV drama in the first place. And if it's an enjoyable process for the writer, then you assume that that will transfer through to the audience as well.
When you say 'something that will have a life beyond', are you thinking in terms of this currently being BBC One's biggest mainstream hit, or do you mean in terms of there being a subculture of people - like the readers of this magazine - who will always remember the thing you've written? Possibly even long after you and I are dead and gone?
It's not about the BBC thing, there are other things I've done that have that kind of mainstream impact – it's much more about being aware of what that whole world of Doctor Who is about. It's nice to feel that you can step into that and be a part of it. It's weird to think that even if I never do anything else ever again, at least I've done that Doctor Who! That I might be swiping my card in the supermarket one day many years from now, and the guy behind the checkout will look at it and say, "Stephen Greenhorn? The Stephen Greenhorn that wrote The Lazarus Experiment? Er… you know that one plot point that doesn't make any sense? Well…"
