Script Doctors | Series 3 | Steven Moffat
Steven Moffat's son Joshua has made him a Doctor Who coffee mug. A rather lovely thing, with the Empty Child on one side and a Clockwork Robot on the other. "No-one gets to drink out of it except me!" Steven thunders, before completely contradicting himself and handing it to me anyway, because he's put milk in the wrong mug. I feel rather privileged, for a few seconds. "I hope your interview technique's up to scratch these days" Steven begins. Er, why? "Well, just the other day I was interviewed about Doctor Who, by Doctor Who, on the set of Newsnight. So, you know, no pressure or anything…". Well, here goes…
You've won some awards since last we spoke…
Two awards in fact! The Hugo Award's up there, on that shelf. You've got to love an award that's got a detachable rocket… and there next to it is the 'TV moment of the year' for 2005, for the end of The Doctor Dances.
For the Hugo, I seem to remember that you mentioned in the acceptance note you sent to the States that you'd been aware of these awards because of David Gerrold's book about his Star Trek episode…
The Trouble With Tribbles, yes. I'd sort of forgotten about them, I was a bit vague when I got nominated, to be honest, you know – "What is that?" But then I remembered - of course, it's a thing that Americans win for Star Trek! And as the memories came flooding back, the best thing was – and I wish I'd said this at the time – do you remember a science fiction magazine called Starlog? I'm sure it's still around somewhere. When I was young, in Paisley, I used to see Starlog, and it would never ever talk about Doctor Who, it was all Star Wars and Star Trek, and I would leaf through it in the hope of finding a little piece about Doctor Who that would in some way confer status on it. And then one month, I saw on the top right corner of the Starlog cover, the words 'Doctor Who'. Fantastic! And I had to save up to buy it, that's how long ago it was – and then it wasn't even a proper article about Doctor Who. It broke my heart! But it did contain the sentence "Doctor Who is unlikely ever to win a Hugo", and the rest of it was just as patronising. And I was devastated. But all these years later, Doctor Who got the top three places! And I came top! So get it right up you, Starlog - get on your knees! That was a great moment of personal triumph…and The Girl in the Fireplace has also been nominated for a Hugo now, along with Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and School Reunion. I'm a bit relaxed about it now; "I've already got one, guys - if one of you would care to join me… but it still won't be level, because I'll have a Hugo and a nomination!". And I've been nominated for a Nebula. Er, whatever that is…! It's kind of like the RTS Award to the Hugo's BAFTA…
Does winning these 'niche' awards mean as much to you as it might to some of the other writers? You're not really as 'steeped in fandom', as Paul Cornell might put it, as some of the writers…
Oh, of course it does, it means something every single time. I mean, to be singled out of a series like Doctor Who, on a couple of occasions now, is phenomenal, because it's a phenomenally good show. The standard of Doctor Who - we can get relaxed and cynical about it and have our favourites and our least favourites, but the fact is that there isn't an episode of modern Doctor Who that isn't hugely entertaining and enjoyable – even the weakest ones are funny and engaging, and I've definitely watched them more than once. And anyway, what do you mean, "not steeped in it"? First Thursday of every month, I'm out in the pub with all my little Doctor Who friends… Paul's more of a serious science fiction buff, I think it's kind of his lifetime ambition to win a Hugo.
These days he says he wants to win one for one of his novels…
Yeah… but I don't think he'd turn it down, do you? And, you know, Human Nature has always been a phenomenal book, probably the best of that series, and if they bring it to the screen with all those values intact, I think it will romp home. It always has before! And David Tennant playing that material will be good – David can be a fantastic alien, but you watch something like Recovery and he's suddenly a human being again, and that will be amazing…
Moving on to The Girl in the Fireplace - I have vague memories that that story might, at one stage, have been the hook for the first Christmas special…?
It may be that that's true, although it's not something I've heard. I know it was at one time posited, tentatively, as episode one of series two, in place of New Earth, but that was not really what Russell wanted to do. At that time what he really wanted to do was Madame De Pompadour - as it was then called - as episode two, with what became The Christmas Invasion - David's first modern-day story - as episode one. But then getting the Christmas special meant that was lopped off and 'journey in the TARDIS' became the first episode. So it wasn't very satisfying that the first episode was going to be a Madame De Pompadour historical story. And when I handed my script in, Russell was doubly unsure – because The Girl in the Fireplace is not your 'traditional' adventure at all. And that's how you have to start a series, you restate in the simplest terms, what the series in – you get in the TARDIS, go someplace, and come back from there, from the framework of modern-day England. And so The Girl in the Fireplace could not have been as early in the series as originally intended. Because if you'd put that as episode one, you're saying 'This is what the series is…'
…and it's absolutely not – it's very atypical of the series as a whole. So what were you handed? Was it purely the title Madame De Pompadour?
That, plus the fact that in reality there had been a clockwork man brought to her, which played chess. So Russell suggested that, that the clockwork man might be an alien space monster. But I ended up going quite a long way from that idea…
How different was your first draft from the script you think they were expecting?
Hugely different! Majorly different. I now sort of realise – I've grown up since then! – that mine was a bit of a swizz. I put a spaceship in there. It ended up as 'Doctor in love'. They thought they were getting 'Historical Celebrity', but what they got was Tom's Midnight Garden with sex. They were very keen on the script, and it changed almost not at all as it developed, but nonetheless this time round Russell actually sent me an e-mail saying "Okay – is there anything you haven't told us? Just like the last one wasn't 'Madame De Pompadour', it was 'Doctor in Love'…what are you not telling us this time? And here's what I'm doing for the rest of the series…". He very kindly does give me the brief of 'whatever you want'… as long as I tell them what that is!
Given that it was 'Doctor Who in love', were you worried that you might be undermining - or undermined by – the extended Doctor-Rose love story that formed the spine of the first two series?
Yeah, but where my episode existed in the series – in the first series there is really very little 'Doctor and Rose in love', I think the first real display of it is the "Why do you assume I don't dance?" bit in The Doctor Dances. It's really only toward the end of that series that Rose stops popping out of the TARDIS looking for the first available male. She regards herself as absolutely available. So it wasn't a major element at that time – and her boyfriend Mickey had just come on board the TARDIS, anyway. And in point of fact, the Doctor and Rose are not in a relationship. They're not doing the one key thing that distinguishes a relationship from a close friendship, so there's nothing wrong with him having an infatuation with someone else. And anyway, who says the Doctor would have a problem with having two girlfriends? When I got stopped at the Gallifrey convention in LA by people saying "How could the Doctor love Reinette when he loved Rose?", I just say "Have you ever met a man?". No problem!
How did Mickey fit into all this? Did he complicate things, or make life easier for you?
Initially I wasn't at all keen on having Mickey, I wasn't sure what to do with him – but in the way the story was structured it worked well, that Rose had her boyfriend and the Doctor had his girlfriend. But anyway, I say it's 'Doctor in love', but we never really know what he thinks. It all takes place in a few hours for him – in the whole time he knows Reinette he doesn't change his shirt or shave – whereas it's her entire life. She's definitely in love with him, I think, and he's obviously quite smitten, but it's all just in the space of one reasonably long party for him. He wouldn't have made a major decision about his life in that time. He was keen, and in a wonderful moment of naivete he was going to invite her on board the TARDIS. Can you imagine how that would have worked? "Rose – good news! Been getting a bit blokey round here with me and Mickey, eh? Well, here she is – another girl!" And Mickey taking the Doctor aside and saying "Look, mate, this isn't how it works – you don't steal my girlfriend, then steal the King of France's girlfriend, and then put us all in the same box and think it's going to work!".
And on a more practical level, she'd never have got through the doors – not in that frock…
There was a line about that in one draft, which I think we dropped because it was a bit saucy - "Lose the dress"!
Why fix on the fireplace as the point of focus?
That's where I started from. I was reading a book – because I had to read a book for research, which I hate - and it was quite a long book. It's not really my kind of thing, that sort of period stuff. By 'period stuff', I mean 'history'! Stuff that happened 'ago'! It's all rubbish and I'm glad that it's over… so I was ploughing my way through this interminable book, and there was a bit about a man, Duke De Richelieu I think, who discovered his wife was cheating on him because she's installed a revolving fireplace. And as clues go… what happened, he was leaning against it and it fell open? "Darling! Are you having an affair with him?". So I was roaring with laughter at that idea, and thought I should have a revolving fireplace. But if it's Doctor Who, it's got to be a 'space and time' revolving fireplace – that's a given, isn't it? And I was thinking, how do I parachute the Doctor into this woman's life as quickly as possible, and decided "What if I just revolve the fireplace?". Initially I was thinking about just having him arriving in her bedchamber and her being grown up, but then I started thinking along the lines of Tom's Midnight Garden with lots of time windows into her life, and it all sort of evolved from there.
But I've heard you describe the TARDIS as 'the wardrobe', as essentially the route into Narnia – but here you kind of created another one…
Yeah, it's a weird thing, but I think the TARDIS has to be left where it is. It's the arrival point. There could be a version of that story where we used the TARDIS throughout, stuttering through time, you could do it that way… but instinctively I don't think the TARDIS should be at the centre of the story. It rarely is, and I never feel that it should be. It's how the Doctor arrives – he leaves the TARDIS and doesn't go back until the story's over – and he sort of, pretty much, never uses it during the adventure even though on many occasions he could presumably solve the entire problem using the TARDIS. There seems to be a fundamental unspoken rule about that – the TARDIS is a device to start and end the story, but isn't used during it. Maybe because it's too powerful – if the Doctor was allowed to use the TARDIS during a story, you start to think "Why doesn't he use it every week?". Never mind the time travel function, it's bigger on the inside – you could rescue the entire population of the Ark inside the TARDIS. Running out of air? Open the doors! I know I've had some stick, and quite rightly, for the bit where Rose asks why they can't use the TARDIS to rescue Reinette and he says "We can't – we're part of events now". I like to think that underneath that, that is part of the reason. The TARDIS is such a powerful, magical thing that the Doctor can only use it to enter and exit and he knows that if he tries to use it to cheat, that something terrible will happen to time, that the way it works has such an effect on the causal nature of the universe. I think there's something sensible about that, and also in story terms, this man arrives with the most powerful piece of kit in the universe and never uses it. So you have to wonder… why doesn't he?
Did the episode always open with the 'flash-forward' moment of being at the party?
First of all, it's technically not a flash-forward – we see her at the party at the beginning, and then 3000 years later the Doctor arrives on the spaceship and then we start travelling back in time. But no, I didn't – originally there was something else, someone being hacked up in Versailles by a clockwork robot. The reason I eventually opened it the way I did was that I knew if we had a reasonably big star playing Reinette, what with all the childhood sequences it would be about fifteen minutes before we met the guest star, and that would be holding back too long. So the scene at the beginning says "Look who's in it!". And then also, as it evolved as a kind of love story, I think you needed warning. So she says right at the start, "the only man, except you, that I have ever loved… Doctor! Doctor!". So you're told in advance, hang on tight, the Doctor's going to be in love - I think we needed to say 'this is where we're going to take you this week'. It now seems very quaint and charming, now that it's been a popular episode, but at the time it seemed quite a radical thing to do...
And what is it that's supposedly, logistically wrong with the broken clock?
It's very simple – the Doctor says that the clock is broken, but it's the wrong clock. Because the fireplace had turned one hundred and eighty degrees, so that the clock that was in Reinette's room is on the other side of the fireplace now. So someone had broken her clock to stop it ticking, so that its own ticking would not be noticed… but the clock that the clockwork man had broken is now on the other side of the fireplace. But actually, if you take that logic further, it's not really wrong, because the clockwork man would have to break the clocks on both sides of the mantelpiece, because you can hear through the fireplace anyway. And I think I was clever at some point, she says "It's weird that clock, sometimes it's broken and sometimes it's not", which I thought was quite a spooky idea, but I never developed because at the sort of pace these scripts have to work at, you'd never get that idea in.
Apparently the horse smashing through the mirror – or, as you described it last time, 'a thing on a thing going through a thing' - caused a lot of production headaches and was nearly dropped. What might you have done instead, if it really had been impossible to effect?
I had a couple of versions. There was one version that we all loved for a night which was exactly the same as what you saw, hearing the hooves drumming, and then the Doctor coming somersaulting through the mirror and landing on the floor, getting up and saying "there are times you don't want a horse to stop". We all loved that for a night and then all came to our senses, all emailing each other pointing out that we were making a joke out of the Doctor's big romantic gesture, so we dropped that. And then we got rid of the horse altogether and just had the Doctor leaping through the mirror. So we lost the idea of the mirror being difficult to break, and just kept the idea that if he did break it he'd never be able to get back…
So it was the horse that was the problem, rather than just the mirror?
It was all those elements combined. I think it's still the greatest number of most difficult elements they've had to combine in one shot. It was huge, one of the most complex things they've done. But I think it was worth it! If Doctor Who is going to make a big romantic gesture for a woman he loves, he'd better be on a white horse coming through a mirror! It had to be that big… it's one of my favourite things that I've written, that bit, it's so big and so mad and so perfectly romantic that she waits all that time, fifteen years or so, and he arrives at the crisis moment.
And did you always have it in mind that the audience wouldn't follow the logic of the plot until the very last shot of the spaceship exterior? And that Doctor, Rose and Mickey would never find out at all?
That was part of it from the start - I always had a vague sort of map, that that was absolutely going to be the case. I love things where you find out what's going on in the last frame. It's Citizen Kane, isn't it? And that reveal works really well. And I think it was also kind of necessary, because there are some other aspects of the plot where we never quite find out how they work. I had a logical system for how the spaceship works, for instance, but it's never shown on screen. Those aren't plot holes so much as plot omissions, and I think that's legitimate if it's a story in which the Doctor himself never finds out the whole picture – he finds out enough, but not quite the whole thing. He doesn't find out why the time windows operate sequentially – why does each one take him to a different place, why is it always in the right order? And I had stuff supporting all of that, and I did have a version of the script - which we threw away - where we made much more of that. But it was boring, and it took away from the romance and the mystery. I think as it stands, you have just enough to understand what's going on, although there are things you never learn. Like why the robots are clockwork, for instance - which I actually think should still have been in it – which is that they will continue to work even if the power is turned off. But if you want to keep the story romantic and enigmatic you don't want someone getting a flipchart out and explaining with a pointer how it all works. It was an exercise in mood - the logic of the visuals, of having a fireplace on a spaceship, stepping through the tapestry from Versailles to the spaceship corridor… all those things work visually and emotionally, rather than practically.
It's kind of the stuff you'd have explained in the novelisation, if you'd written the episode twenty years ago?
I suppose so! But I think even if the episode had been twice the length, there are things you would hold back on. The Doctor dashes through this adventure and I think it really affects him. It's not that he's actually in love, but he's definitely infatuated, it's a giddy, extraordinary whirl for him, and he never gets a complete handle on why the robots were after Reinette, he goes away not understanding that, and you want the audience to be swept up in that. Exposition doesn't half make the shadows less creepy! The Doctor often doesn't understand the whole picture - look at The Satan Pit - and that's okay, as long as you have him say "I don't know", as long as you make it clear to the audience that it's okay that they don't know. I hate it when I'm watching something and thinking "I don't know whether or not I'm supposed to understand this? Am I supposed to recognise that man, or what?". But if someone tells you "You're not supposed to understand this", that's fine.
Once again, your episode looked rather beautiful and expensive…
I don't know where The Girl in the Fireplace stands in the pantheon of expensive episodes. The 'mirror moment' was certainly expensive, but overall I don't think it was as big as the two part stories. The Empty Child was pretty expensive. My new one's cheap!
But even though The Girl on the Fireplace was a single episode, you did create two very different 'worlds' to situate it in…
They're very smart, though, and Russell is very shrewd. They can do 'period', the costumes exist, you just go and hire them. And as you heard Russell say on Doctor Who Confidential, let's not worry about them being accurate, let's just make them gorgeous. And I don't think it is all that accurate, it's 'Hollywood-biopic' accurate…
Which is the same philosophy as the Blitz in the previous one – it's not really what the Blitz was like, but it's how we want to see it.
Yes, it's a 'pretty' version of reality. So they went for gorgeousness rather than authenticity. And originally I wrote the spaceship as gleaming and hi-tech, a sort of Star Trek: The Next Generation Enterprise. And Russell pointed out "That's expensive – if we make it a tatty old spaceship, we can do that really convincingly". If it's gleaming, then one tiny thing out of place, one door frame a little bent, and the illusion is gone. But if it's tatty, you can get away with murder!
Both your episodes thus far seem to have been moulded to the classic short-story form – they're kept focussed and self-contained, with one main theme and a twist at the end. Is that something you're conscious of, or was it indeed deliberate?
I think for these 45 minute episodes, that's not a bad form. And I like the short story form – I've written very, very few, but I think I've written them rather well. And I like a twist at the end - I don't think it hurts, if you've done everything else right. Maybe Russell would disagree, but I don't think it hurts to be a little bit clever now and then, to show how all the plotlines really do meet up, when the viewer didn't think they would. I do take the point that Russell has made, very eloquently, that being cleverer than the audience means that audience is not on the rollercoaster with you – it's about the ride, not the destination. But I think if you get the ride right, I don't think it hurts to have a clever bit at the end, that you've worked quite hard to conceal in the build-up. I do think Doctor Who's biggest strength is that it changes in every aspect from story to story, it can have a totally different ambition from story to story. I would probably argue, for purely selfish reasons, that a bit of full-on cleverness has its place in Doctor Who. But it's like Russell's always saying, and again I think he's right, that 'funny' is better than 'witty', and I'm probably guilty of writing 'witty' rather than 'funny'. I always feel personally admonished by his interviews! But being witty, now and then, doesn't hurt either…
Your dialogue does feel slightly different to that in other episodes – not enough to be out of place, but clearly coming from a different mind…
There's probably - and it's not necessarily to my advantage - a slightly more 'studied' element to my dialogue. I probably try to pack as many funny - or witty! - lines in as I can…
You previously claimed not to like 'bittersweet' endings, but the one area where your previous two stories have differed very much is in the ending – The Doctor Dances is the happiest thing ever shown, whereas The Girl in the Fireplace certainly isn't…
Go back and look at that interview – I did say "You haven't seen my next one yet"! It's a sad ending – it's not a bitter or cheap or nasty ending, it's just sad. It's about two people who miss each other – quite literally, they miss each other, rather than her being eaten by a Klargthon or whatever, she just dies when she was always going to die. She reaches her allotted span. So it's bittersweet. On the whole, I do like happy endings… but that was the right ending for that story. I mean, you know that if someone's become Doctor Who's girlfriend and you know she's not going to be in it next week that she's going to croak! It's like saying "I love you" to James Bond…
Moving on to your new episode, Blink – at the moment I only know two things. Firstly it has the them of 'haunted house', and secondly it's this season's 'cheap' one, without much use of the regulars. Were these both presented to you or did you chase for them?
A bit of both. At the beginning there was some possibility, even quite a strong one, that I'd be doing a couple of episodes, which I was quite keen on. And then I worked out that I just couldn't, what with the time I was spending on Jekyll and other responsibilities. But I was still meant to be doing an episode early in the run and I couldn't do that either – they'd allotted me a slot and said I had this much money and so much CGI, but again I just couldn't do it. So on the third attempt, I said "If you want, I'll do the cheap one" - the bottom-of-the-season-poll one with no special effects, that doesn't have the Doctor in it. So I've done the season cheapie! I've fallen on my sword for Russell…
And was it a different challenge to your previous episodes, working within different restraints?
It's not different, really. I've written lots of things that Doctor Who doesn't turn up in! And Doctor Who kind of lends itself to that anyway. There's a strand of Doctor Who, if you think about it, where the scariest and most iconic moments take place in the main character's absence – because the one thing that can vitiate the impact of a monster is the presence of the man that can defeat them. So there is a strand that's about the companion being alone against something terrible coming out of a wall at them. And that's what this episode is – scary monsters appear, and the Doctor isn't there. He's in touch, but he's not there! But at the same time, I don't know how it will go down. I doubt it will top any polls, because of the simple fact that Doctor Who should do what it says on the tin, which is provide you with David Tennant popping out of his TARDIS and kicking the crap out of alien nasties.
But I think it needs an episode every now and then that's not just that…
I think ten weeks in, it's probably exactly the right moment to take a side step. And remind you of why you normally like it so much! But to do something slightly different with it. What Russell chose to do with his story in this slot [Love & Monsters] – which would have been my first choice too, but I didn't get first pick! – was to do something about Doctor Who fans, really. It's stepping outside a Doctor Who story, imagining what it looks like to someone outside it, which is the point of the Scooby-Doo chase gag. I didn't have that option, so I came up with another story which tries to be Doctor Who by being genuinely scary. And the Doctor is there, you're never in any doubt that it's Doctor Who – he has a presence by various means, and it's not like he's never in it. David still has a phenomenal amount of dialogue, pages and pages of the stuff, so you get your hit of 'Doctor', there's more of him than there is in Love & Monsters. There are some good, iconic Doctor Who scares, it's just that they're the sort of Doctor Who 'moments' you get where the Doctor's not there.
And what about the 'haunted house' aspect – everyone knows what genre you mean, but it covers a wide range of possibilities…
At the tone meetings, Russell always says one word that covers the tone of the entire episode. So for The Empty Child the word was 'romantic', and for The Girl in the Fireplace it was 'gorgeous'. And for this one, he said 'haunted house'. What he also said was "Don't get clever – there will be people watching this series who will never have seen 'haunted house' on television at 7 o'clock, and let's give a haunted house. Don't think you have to do a twist on it, or your great new take on what 'haunted house' should be – let's give them classic 'haunted house'!"
So it's sort of the classic Victorian ghost story?
Yes, it is that kind of setting, there's a conservatory and so on. And it is creepy, people have told me that it's scary - I find it quite hard to judge.
How are you finding writing for Martha, compared to Rose?
It doesn't affect me much, but I think it's hugely effective, the Doctor-Martha relationship. I think it's a very good plan for David's Doctor, to be in the presence of Martha, who really fancies him, but he doesn't really notice. He likes her, he warms to her, but he's playing it a lot more like one of the old Doctors – that she's a plucky, clever little thing! – whereas she's thinking "Phwooar! I wouldn't half!". David's character doesn't realise he's a hot young guy, and that's effective – he's got his tight suit on, and walking around looking gorgeous, girls are swooning over him, but he doesn't know, he's being a boffin. It makes him a bit of a 'Professor' again, it reminds you that he's an old guy, that he's not really going dancing…
'Dancing' again - is the metaphor extended further this time?
Not in Blink, no. I think I was getting a bit up myself when I did that, to be honest. It shouldn't matter that it's me writing Doctor Who this week – I shouldn't make it a sequel to my last episode, it should be a sequel to the episode before mine. I think I was being a bit arsey with the banana gag and so on. I never even thought people would pick up on it as much as they did, when I put the banana gag in again for David, that they'd remember Chris doing it. And the 'dancing' thing, I sort of drifted into – the Doctor and Reinette were actually going to dance, the scene just worked and creates a tremendous cliffhanger of ambiguity when she drags him off. It somehow makes a show bigger if you realise you've got to speculate on what happened after a moment like that. You have to work out what happened afterwards – no one knows, not even me. It's not canonical! Nothing that happened after than happened, I can have my theory but it's no more 'real' than anyone else's…
I get the impression some fans don't approve of the scene that follows that, the 'drunk' bit. Even though he's not actually drunk anyway!
There were a lot of people thinking along those lines when I was young, when Tom Baker took over. Doctors up until that point had been quite patrician and older, and he was the outrageous, student-y one, who seemed so young back then. But I think getting the Doctor right is partly about trying to get him to do the most surprising thing that you can imagine – that's when he's being the Doctor, when he says the most ridiculous thing, when his response to a situation is so unexpected, I think that's Doctor Who. And there's something weirdly down-to-earth about it, he's always talking about something really trivial in the middle of a crisis. So the idea that in the middle of this moment with every hoary cliché of science fiction – I specified the tables at forty-five degrees, the metal bands around Rose and Mickey, the robots threatening them, it's total sci-fi nonsense – and into this waltzes the Doctor, being the absolute opposite of it all, being apparently pissed-up…
You can see a parallel with the moment in Genesis of the Daleks, where Sarah and Harry are strapped up in the same way – though that was tonally very 'melodramatic', it's a perfectly legitimate thing to have the Doctor come in and undercut that sort of mood.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say – the 'undercutting' thing is very Doctor Who. The Doctor undercuts the mood of the moment, and that is frequently what he does in any scene – he's too casual or too flippant, he's off-key for the melodrama of the situation, which is one of the glories of the Doctor. And that scene was just an extreme version of it. And also, at a technical level, it was the exposition scene in the episode – it's as much exposition as you ever get. You have to get across all this rather boring information about the robots and the spaceship and Reinette having to be 37 years old – so you smuggle it in during a comedy scene, where the Doctor has his tie round his head and his shades on. I didn't specify the tie but I did specify the shades! But the two things that category of Doctor Who fan to which you refer absolutely hated, were that, and the wink – the wink from horseback, later on. Which I thought was fantastic - and it's David's wink, nothing to do with me. But some people have reckoned the wink was silly. Up until that point it was all quite sensible, apparently! Clockwork men from the distant future are trying to steal the brain of Madame de Pompadour to repair their spaceship… and you're worried about a wink?! I thought it was delightful – the fact that the Doctor's so pleased with himself. He knows what he's done, he knows that he's messed up and split himself off from his companions… but he's pleased he did it, and he knows he looks cool on the horse! "I smashed through a mirror on a horse, how cool is that!". And in that moment, he's quite pleased with himself. He's solved a problem and he looks cool!
As one of very few people involved on the scripting side across all three series, have you noticed the process getting easier as more and more people get more to grips with what the show actually is?
I think it has changed. The most interesting person to ask that would of course be Russell…but I'm much better at it, I'm much quicker. On Blink, my one and only script meeting was ten minutes before the tone meeting, which was about five days before they started shooting! I did my own notes and my own draft two. I sent that it and then the next day I sent in another draft, because I'd read it by then! And up until that point it hadn't been called Blink, and I said to Russell "I'm thinking of calling it Blink", and he said "Brilliant! But if you call it that you'll have to get the word 'blink' in there as much as you can". So I ended up having to change the entire script because of the title, and it's become this thing of "Don't blink! Blink and you die!". I could tell you a lot more, I could tell you the intimate connection of Doctor Who Magazine to this episode… but I won't. We got to the finished script really fast, there was very little that we had to do to the script. I think it actually broke down into its schedule really neatly, too, so we really did shoot the first draft with tweaks. I mean, I've been a sitcom writer – so contrary to what I imagine Phil and Julie might think of me, I really do know how to write to limitations! They probably think of me as the guy who gave them the London blitz and a horse jumping through a mirror – but the fact is, if you tell me I haven't got those sort of things, I absolutely can write to restrictions. So this time I devised a monster that wouldn't be too taxing, and so on. So it all broke down pretty fast, and it is pretty much the first draft. On Jekyll I'm doing this all the time – because I'm also an executive producer on that, so all the time I'm having to do that job of moving scenes between locations, and there is a buzz in that, although it can get wearisome. But I would characterise myself as really good at that – I'm smart at being able to write my way around anything.
In both your previous stories, it's apparent that there are no real 'bad guys' – everything is just a misunderstanding. Have you noticed that yourself? Does that continue or develop in Blink?
In both of them it was repair robots gone a little astray, yes. I think there are legitimate 'bad guys' in Blink… but I remember one morning that Russell and I had a long email discussion about the banality of evil. Before we got bored! But I think it's boring to say that something is just 'evil' – it's bad writing. 'Evil' is just someone who has reasoning you don't understand, and I think it's bad for the Doctor to oppose that – the Doctor is able to decode the universe from the other guy's perspective and understand what it means from his point of view. It's a bad thing to say, and I hate myself for saying it, but the guys who flew those planes into the World Trade Centre were engaged in a selfless and heroic act, which gained them nothing and cost them everything. I mean, it was an act of hideous evil, unequivocally an appalling thing to do… but from their perspective, they died as heroes. It wasn't for personal gain, it wasn't petty. Very few people are really cynical, we just accuse other people of cynicism because we don't agree with their particular take on the world. So dramatically it's much more interesting to have two people with opposing views, each of whom thinks he is the hero of the story and the other guy is the villain. That's interesting. I think the more Doctor Who–centric answer to that question is that you've got to give the Doctor an appropriate thing to fight – if it's just 'evil', then all you have is a war, and the Doctor isn't much of a warrior. I would prefer Captain Jack or the Brigadier or someone like that if you have a war – the Doctor retires to the lab and whoever he's hired to be the gung-ho one brings the bazookas out. So to keep the Doctor at the centre at the drama you should have a mystery, and to keep the story alive, you keep the mystery going for as long as possible - only solve it at the end of the story, at the last possible moment, in an ingenious and clever way that demonstrates the Doctor's brilliance. There are, of course, terrible things going on, people being killed and so on – but from the point of view of the bad guys, they're doing what they think they should be doing, and you have the Doctor trying to understand why they think that and trying to put it right, and that's a good story. It's a better story than saying "There are people over there who just like to be baaaad, and we're going to stop them with this bomb". That's boring, it's not a story. Whereas the Doctor saying "What are those things and why are they doing that?"… if he understands why they're doing it, he can stop them doing it, and the process of finding that out, and the surprise of finding out what it is they're doing – it can be horrible but satisfying to find out that a spaceship has been repaired with meat, for instance, or that the nanogenes are just trying to repair people. It's satisfying because it looks sinister, but the Doctor says "If you look at it from this other viewpoint, it's not sinister at all", and that's a role I think he fills very satisfyingly.
Your own kids are 5 and 7 now – what do they make of Doctor Who, and of Daddy's involvement in it?
Oh, they're loving it. I think Louis is a bit vague about Doctor Who, he's on the cusp of getting into it, but Joshua loves it – and yes, he's incredibly proud that daddy wrote two of the stories, and they've been talked about among his friends as two of the best ones. I love that! I took Joshua to school a few months ago, which I hadn't done for ages, and he walked in in front of me and announced "This is my daddy, he writes Doctor Who, and he's actually here!". The first time I've been in a school playground without being bullied… I've been to the school to talk about being a television writer, you know these things where they bring parents in to talk about their jobs. And of course, all they wanted to talk about was Doctor Who, quite reasonably and sensibly, so that's what I talked about. But they understand that it's written by someone and acted by other people and so on, they've done their own school shows so they know how it works. They know that the Doctor is played by David Tennant and that David is an actor, that's all absolutely clear to them, the lines between fiction and reality, in the same way it is to you and me. And they've all got their ideas for stories. I don't know what it is about Doctor Who, maybe it just makes it look easy, but everybody wants to write one. All the kids want to make up their own monster, they've all got their own ideas for monsters, and ideas for scenes in Doctor Who. It's a kind of magic thing, it does sets kids aflame with thoughts of 'what should happen'. It's not a show which is distant like Star Trek, where they think "I wonder what will happen next week?", the kids all say "I'll tell you what should happen"! Maybe it still seems a little homespun, as if you could make your own. It's quite domestically scaled, it doesn't look huge and imposing and 'other', it fits in your living room and you think you could have a go at it.
And that's actually feeding back into it – kids appear on TV getting to design monsters and pretend to be companions, but also the show's started to do "what have the kids always wanted to see". You have shots of a million Daleks flying through space, or Daleks fighting Cybermen and so on. So there's possibly a sense of involvement there.
Absolutely, yes. Russell's very good at those things. And he's a fan and has lived through the pain of seeing things done wrongly. It used to really annoy me when people went into the TARDIS and didn't react strongly enough. You wouldn't just walk in and go "Uh, bigger than it looks", you'd go "Bloody hell, this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen, it's extraordinary". Every human being who walks into the TARDIS should do that, I think that scene always works and should always play. It's the Doctor's big secret, and it should always be shown. Is it Black Orchid where the policemen just says "Strike me pink!"? You just wouldn't do that – this is the show's biggest surprise, it's the secret we all know and we want to see people do it. Just like every week you want to see Columbo fool someone into thinking that he's stupid and then mention his wife – you don't want short-changed, you want to see it done. And Russell is brilliant on this – on Blink, he said "This scene where those two characters go into the TARDIS; they are surprised, and we see the big shot round the TARDIS. Do it again like it's brand new!". So he's got that fanboy gene, but it's sitting next to a huge television brain! That's why it's both fan-satisfying and audience-satisfying.
You've now created a drama series of your own, Jekyll. It's not especially like Doctor Who, but it's vaguely in the same sphere, with elements of SF, fantasy and horror. What appealed about the Jekyll & Hyde story as prime for reimagining for TV now?
I always liked it as a kid, or the generality of what 'Jekyll and Hyde' mean, anyway. The story is quite different from what people think it is. I don't want to spoiler you, but the big twist at the end of the original is that in fact Jekyll and Hyde are the same person! So, you see, that story just doesn't work now… it's one of those stories that has escaped from its one specific telling. Everyone has a go at it, and this is my go. It's set in the modern day, a post-watershed show, but it's been moved now to a Saturday night post-Watershed show which means it's a little shorter and I had to take all the 'fucks' out. You can't say 'fuck' on a Saturday, before 11 o'clock! But I'm absolutely in favour of that, I wish I hadn't used the word in the first place – this show has an underground lair in it, and you can't say 'fuck' in an underground lair, it's just wrong! There are some genres you just can't swear in… but it's such a mad idea that you turn into this other man. What I focussed on in this version is that he's a descendant and he's inherited the condition – he doesn't drink the potion, he just occasionally turns into this other man. The bits I liked in 'Jekyll and Hyde' stories were never the bits where he drinks the potion. I always think that you want to get through that bit to the point where the changes are uncontrollable, because that's where it's scary. It's not scary if he has to go down to his lab, lock the door, knock back the potion and become a party animal. Because we all do that, to a degree! But when he can't stop the changes, which is where we find our modern-day Jimmy Nesbitt character, who's the descendant of the original Jekyll… that's scary. There are lots of things going on, and it's essentially a sequel to the original. Jackson – as he's now called, as you can't go round being called Doctor Jekyll, can you? – has a life which he's trying to conceal from Hyde. There's an ancient organisation that's been tracking him all his life which he hasn't known about and he's starting to realise in the series. And at first he doesn't realise he's the descendant of Dr. Jekyll, he just assumes he has this strange condition which he doesn't make any connection with what he assumes to be a fictional story. And there is the ongoing mystery of how he can be an identical version of Dr. Jekyll when Jekyll had no descendants at all and wasn't married. So there's an ongoing mystery about where he actually came from… we're sort of playing with expectation. We don't actually see Hyde turn up for half an episode, and he's not like a werewolf or anything, he's just a different version of Jimmy Nesbitt. Keeping you guessing as to just how bad Hyde is, is part of the gig of the show. He's quite frightening, but as in the original story, it's not that he's necessarily evil, it's more that he's not particularly bothered whether he is or isn't. He just wants to have a good time and to shag ladies! It was originally six hours, but now it's six lots of fifty minutes…
Presumably you didn't have ten minutes worth of 'fucks'…
No, but we were slightly in trouble already, because a lot of the shows were coming in either short or just right on length at an hour, and you really don't want to be in that position. You always want to be trimming stuff out. So to our great relief, the timeslot was reduced and we were able to remove the things we didn't like. There's nothing worse than having every last shot you recorded up there on screen… an hour is a bloody long time, anyway. When I started on Doctor Who I thought it was a shame it wasn't an hour, but actually an hour is too long. We're not used to an hour any more. All American shows are forty-five minutes. Every show should be forty-five minutes! If Doctor Who can do it, any show can do it…
Doctor Who stories that used to last six weeks can be done in three-quarters of an hour these days, and the only thing that's really missing is the cliffhangers.
And you sort of get that anyway. I think you now get the entire first episode of an old Doctor Who, right up to the cliffhanger scream, in the minute before the credits roll!
So do you now see yourself as a drama writer, rather than a comedy writer who dabbles in drama? Drama does seem to be all you're up to at the moment, and it's a long time since you wrote a sitcom…
I see myself as a writer, really. It's ages since I've done comedy, but I really comedy and I'm sure I'll go back to it. But the kind of comedy I like writing, though, was the most unfashionable thing. I liked big, studio-audience sitcom, the big night out with the audience laughing. And I do appreciate that has sort of died…
I thought it had died but is sort of coming back – The I.T. Crowd and so on…
Yeah, and that's a good show – but I think what's happening is that if a show like Coupling was starting up now, you wouldn't even dream of doing it in front of a studio audience. It's sort of a drama show with laughs, it takes place in more or less the real world, which The I.T. Crowd clearly doesn't – it's a mental world, like Father Ted, it's a hugely heightened world. And I think that's what sitcom has become, whereas something like Coupling would now be made Cold Feet style. By the time Coupling was ending, we were looking round and asking "Is there anyone else making a vaguely real world sitcom in front of a studio audience?" and not seeing any. And that was the kind of comedy I liked, almost as a lifestyle choice as much as anything – the week's rehearsal, the studio audience, the boozing afterwards. Because there's nothing more boring than single-camera filming. The results are polished and lovely, but it's so boring! I don't do much at filming, I just keep up with rushes – otherwise your entire writing life would pass you by. Because for the most part, as a writer, you don't do anything on the set at all. And if there is something for me to do on the set, it means something has gone wrong! I've already been to 28 meetings about that day's filming, so I shouldn't still be fixing things. But it was such fun doing Coupling for all those years, I miss it.
Is Jekyll self-contained, or might it continue?
It's both. Like the wise old television tart I am, I've given it both an ending and a cliffhanger, so that you can take your choice. From the final scene you could absolutely take the view either that it could never come back… or that it must come back! I've got used to writing those over the years. So if it fails entirely, I'll tell people it was a one-off. "What do you mean? It was a one-off, it's finished, it had an ending!". And if it comes back, "Come on! Look at all those things I left trailing…!".
And I understand you're working on a Tintin movie with Steven Spielberg…?
Well, I might have been sacked from it by the time this is printed – there are Americans involved, and they do tend to sack people. That came from Doctor Who! The people at DreamWorks liked The Girl in the Fireplace and The Empty Child, so they got in touch with me. And because Spielberg was involved… how do you say 'no', exactly? I have now started to say "I'll take my phone – Spielberg might call!". Because he might! Or someone might say "Spielberg called while you were out" – well, yeah. That happens now! My wife Sue got to hand me the phone saying "It's Steven Spielberg". "Hello, Steven, how are you? Mate?". It will get miserable, I'm sure.
And is there anything else, or are all these projects occupying 52 weeks of your year these days?
Oh Christ! I've got a romantic comedy TV pilot I'm writing for my wife, called Adam and Eve, which I still haven't finished and I'm trying to juggle with Tintin at the moment. I suppose Adam and Eve is comedy, but done in a drama slot. Because truthfully, when I look at Coupling now, a few years later, I become aware of a certain amount of damage inflicted on the intelligence of the show by the braying of the audience laughter. It sort of coarsens it. Coupling is not a stupid show, it's quite a clever show, but the clever remarks are ignored and people saying 'arse' gets a bellow from the audience. So it's a smarter show than it came off as. So this Adam and Eve is kind of in the same area, romance and all that, just without a studio audience and without quite so many sexual references. More granny-friendly!
Any plans for more Doctor Who, now that we know for sure we've got at least a fourth series?
I've got a good idea what I'm doing…
…but you're not going to tell me what it is?
No! It's an idea I suggested, I think after I'd written the first episode of my two-parter, The Empty Child. So it's an old, old idea that I proposed ages ago and Russell really loved and we've kept meaning to do it, but he gave me Madame De Pompadour instead, and on the third series I volunteered to do the Doctor-light episode. But now at last, this idea's time has come…!
