Latest / Half the Picture / #42 - STEVEN MOFFAT

Transcript

#42 - STEVEN MOFFAT · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  No one cares about Doctor Who anymore, screams 14 headlines. And a show that's talked about as endlessly as that isn't going anywhere. It will be back and it will be good. I had no idea what was going to happen with Blink. It might be the best one we've got. I said, no it's not. It's not got the bloody Doctor in it, has it? The Empty Child. Which was possibly the worst read-through I've ever attended of anything. The script girl read in The Empty Child. Are you my mummy? Are you my mummy? Are you...
• 0:29
  I'm here and I went from normal television life to being one of the guys in charge of Doctor Who and one of the guys in charge of Showbuck and went what the hell happened there it was like being hit by a very nice bus every sentence has to make you want to read the next sentence all the words should lean forward we're all Puritans and we're all sinners and anyone who ever sets themselves up well I'm a great ally and I stand with you set your watch set the countdown and find out what they've been on ha
• 0:58
  Humanity is extraordinary, and we should be elevated and excited every time we do something amazing, and forgiving every time we do something awful.
• 1:16
  So Stephen, welcome to Half the Picture. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. Our pleasure. I mean, okay, I have been a fan of yours for years, all the work you've done on television, and I think most of us can say the same here. I mean, like, the amount of sleepless nights I think you've given us, you know, the last 20, 21 years. That was just the comedies. Okay.
• 1:35
  But like, you know, all the stuff, you know, the laughs and the scares, you know, stuff for like coupling. And then of course your work on Doctor Who, you know, bringing Doctor Who back, Russell C. Davis and then Sherlock and then up through to Inside Man, Dracula number 10 and going back to stuff like Press Gang as well. I mean, the Brett for your work is fantastic. So it really is such a pleasure just to be sitting here chatting to you. Well, it's lovely to be chatted to at my age.
• 1:58
  And do you mind telling us a bit about where we're sitting right now? Because we haven't shot in a place like this before. This is my office where I work. I had it redone immediately after I finished on Doctor Who and Sherlock, which for me sort of ended at the same time insofar as they ended. And I just thought, oh, I'll have my office.
• 2:17
  I'll have a nice office. It was kind of a rubbish office up until that point. So I got it redone. There's a hammer cover there. There's a few relics around the place, the Silurian gun and Clace Bang's teeth from Dracula. So these are his exact... Yes, I casted his teeth, yeah. Wow. And a few posters. So, you know, it's nice. It's nice. I like it. Does it feel nice to be sitting in here and doing your work? Well, I never like working, but, you know, it's as nice as work ever gets.
• 2:47
  And I think it's important to have a cosy space. Well, it's not a disadvantage. I mean, and also you need to mark out your territory if you live in a family house. You need to actually say, this is where I work, and that's all that happens in there. And you have to be a bit of a, you have to be mean about it and say, no, you're not storing that in there. No, you're not coming in. No, that's where I work. That's like an office somewhere else, but it's here. Otherwise, you don't get anything done.
• 3:15
  Yeah, I bet. I remember you telling a story about when you were first writing on Doctor Who and like you and I don't know if it was this opposite number one, but like, you know, the kids be coming in and people be coming in and be like, no, I'm going to go away. I'm working right now. I'm writing Doctor Who. Was that what it's like? People just come in and just. There's an assumption, not only especially young kids and why shouldn't they think, well, dad's just there. I'll go and say hello to dad. I really got to keep going.
• 3:38
  If you work at home, I mean, everyone's learned now what working at home is after COVID. Up until that point, working at home was sort of regarded as having a day off. And you'd have to say, no, I really, really do from eight in the morning till seven at night. I am at my desk. I am working. And that, you know, you've got to have that discipline.
• 3:59
  So what would you say your sort of average day looks like as a writer? So you start at eight, finish at seven? Well, generally, I mean, about eight. I mean, Sue and I do our puzzles in the morning. We do the New York Times puzzles in the morning. And then I've got her tea. Then I'll go down about eight o'clock and start. And I'll just keep going until she comes home from work, really, which will usually be about seven.
• 4:26
  back in the day that was just nanny time when the nanny was here looking after the kids so i could uh i could get on with whatever i was writing but yeah and you found like so in your sort of days uh writing so you'll start in the morning and then would you do like a few hours like stretch like what kind of what's your sort of general process oh well i regard all the time between eight and seven i suppose as my principal working time doesn't mean i i mean sometimes i can't think of anything to write sometimes you don't have a really very productive day but
• 4:56
  it's set aside for that. Just like, just for the staring out the window and waiting for the ideas to kind of come. Or whatever happens, yeah. Yeah. And if it's, you know, I mean, last year I was working very hard. I'm working pretty hard this year, but I was going to get number 10 done and work into a reasonably tied deadline. I can't claim it was the same as when I was doing Doctor Who and Sherlock, where it was an ongoing nightmare just trying to get all the stuff done. Mm-hmm.
• 5:18
  but you know it was I worked hard and well last year so I was making full use of my days yeah I remember you saying once that like when you were doing coupling that like one of the key things was like looking out the window and trying to make yourself laugh well yeah I mean that applies to any writing any comedy yeah that is what you're doing there isn't anything else I mean if you don't laugh when you think of it there is absolutely zero chance that anyone will ever laugh when they hear it if you laugh when you think of it
• 5:46
  There is also a considerably good chance that no one else will laugh at all. But there is, you know, the minimum condition is if you didn't laugh when you thought of it, no one else is going to indulge you. Yeah. I guess that same thing applies to any kind of genre. Like if you write a horror story and you're not creeped out about what you're writing. Yeah. I mean, these are things, I mean, horror is quite like comedy, really, in that it's set up and pay off. It's just a different kind of pay off.
• 6:13
  Harder to work out in drama sometimes. You know, is that interesting? Is that twist interesting? Am I still engaged? And I can have a bad habit of trying to cram too many clever lines into a scene.
• 6:29
  because I'm unsure whether the intrinsic drama is interesting enough. I mean, my Twitch is always comedy. I just think, oh, God, they're just talking now. Why hasn't nobody made a joke? And I have justly been criticised for that, for my sitcom reflex, for my tendency to cram as many gags in. And my only pathetic response is, I haven't been out of work for 40 years, so what do you know? LAUGHTER
• 6:56
  Well, hey, I hear you, but at the same time, if the gags are funny, then I mean... If they're funny, that's fine. But I mean, sometimes people say... People claim, you know, there's too many funny bits. And I reply, you can never be too sexy, too pretty, or too funny. That doesn't happen. No one ever came home from a date and said, a bit too sexy, rather amusing.
• 7:19
  I went off that person entirely. Doesn't happen, does it? Right? Funny is good. No one's ever graded anything on, oh, it was great. You know what was great about it? It wasn't funny. No. No. Not once. It's like no one ever came out of the theatre saying, I wish that had been a bit longer. You know? No. Or a movie. Dear God, why didn't they go the full three hours? Oh, stop it, you lot in the movies.
• 7:49
  Well, this all kind of tees me up quite nicely for sort of a question I ask a lot of people on the pod, a lot of sort of writers, directors, actors, what have you. Like, what makes a good person in that profession? I mean, you just reel off some great sort of qualities there, like what might make a good writer? I mean, what to you, I guess, as a general question? One thing they never talk about in all those interminable books about three-act structure is,
• 8:10
  I can save you some money. Beginning, middle, end. You done? Right. And all those interminable books, and they're such rubbish books about this, they never mention the word entertainment. This is the minimum condition of anything you write.
• 8:26
  Not theme, which some poor sods ask me about. And not subtext. Oh, do me a favour. It's entertainment. That's all you're doing. When people come home at night to watch a TV show or go to the cinema to watch a movie or the theatre...
• 8:42
  That's all they're going for. They're not going there for your thoughts on things. They're not wanting to decode the inner mystery of it. They want you to provide approximately 90 minutes of entertainment so they can go to a restaurant and have a nice time. That's it. That's it.
• 8:58
  So what makes a good writer is if you're entertaining. If you're anything beyond that, if you have deep philosophical insights, that's fine, so long as it doesn't get in the way of being entertaining, because that's all you're there for. That's how you are buying anyone's time. They're not really going to you for wisdom. Well, not any wise people, anyway. The minimum condition is understand that's what you are doing. You should always be thinking...
• 9:27
  What's the next interesting thing that could happen? What would be exciting now?
• 9:33
  I have a thing I'm always saying to writers, which is, and it applies to whether you're writing a text, a movie, a letter to your mom, an excuse to your wife, doesn't matter what you're writing. The simple rule is every sentence has to make you want to read the next sentence. All the words should lean forward. That's what you're doing. You're trying not to bore people.
• 9:58
  which is a good minimum condition. When, you know, when people are sending scripts in, there's a big slush pile somewhere of scripts. Some poor bugger has got to sit and read, right? And they don't want to, because no one would. And...
• 10:17
  You will make friends with them for life if your screenplay is interesting. If it's exciting, if you keep wanting to turn the page to find out what happens next, that's how it works. None of the other stuff you were told is really all that useful to you. Beyond, well, there's the three-hours structure. Beginning, middle, end, how can you make a whole sodding book out of that? Yeah.
• 10:44
  So, well, people are. People are industries. People have... Yeah, there are good books, and I can tell you what the good books are. William Goldman's books, Adventure in the Screen Trade, and Which Lie Did I Tell? Brilliant. Russell's book where he wrote with Benjamin Cook about writing a doctorate. Brilliant. Stephen King's book called On Writing, which is largely about novel writing, but storytelling is all storytelling. And Alan Apeborn's book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking. These are great books about writing.
• 11:14
  If you're reading a book about writing, which many people have, and it's boring you. Well, people do. And they say it's quite a boring book, but I got through it. They say, why are you taking advice about writing from someone who bored you? That's like going home with someone you don't fancy.
• 11:30
  absolutely so don't make it homework basically no it's not homework it's entertainment yeah it's entertainment and so for you then i mean because when i was going back and sort of looking at your career they run up to this chat i mean like i say so much great work the breadth of it but also like
• 11:45
  So I guess sort of the fact that you grew up in the west of Scotland in Paisley and then, you know, went to Glasgow for university and growing up in the 60s and 70s in that time in the west of Scotland, because we had Peter Capaldi on the podcast a while ago, who grew up in a similar time and a similar place. The same time, the same place. Same place, yeah.
• 12:01
  And he talks about how sort of invigorating and vibrant it was. I mean, what was it like? How do you think that shaped you as a person growing up in the West of Scotland? Well, okay, the world around Peter Capaldi is always invigorating and exciting because he has the tremendous advantage over normal people being Peter Capaldi. He just walks into rooms and he's Peter Capaldi. I'm not. I don't walk out. I don't find the world invigorating and exciting. People are yawning. West of Scotland, yeah, I mean, I liked it there. I mean, I was...
• 12:31
  mercilessly bullied throughout my entire school career so i didn't like that very much um i have uh i mean i had a you know came from a lovely family so that was all nice but no uh i don't know that i felt i'd never managed to muster any form of patriotism about anything really and and peter would
• 12:52
  not agree with me i'm sure okay that's where i live then good and do you think like that time that specific place because we all obviously all always draw from like our childhoods and where we came from our roots i mean do you think how do you think that sort of time and place i guess helped shape you as a writer would you say do you think it did shape as a writer i think it's very hard for me to know because i don't know what i'd have been like otherwise there is the uh
• 13:16
  which I think is pretty quite good for a comedy writer, the West of Scotland gabble. You gabble a little bit extra fast because you think people will fall asleep or leave. David Tennant does it too. He's from Paisley. And just... Talk a little bit faster. Just because you're frightened. But they might stop listening. And I think that's quite good for a comedy. And...
• 13:40
  West of Scotland accent's pretty good for funny. It's a good dry accent. And it's good for one-liners, I would suggest. So maybe that. But other than that, I don't know. I can't tell. I mean, I was quite often influenced by what I saw on the telly.
• 13:58
  I mean, an awful lot. People never admit that. What inspired you to write this? A thing I saw on telly. It's not a very good answer. I thought I'd like to do a film like that. But it's the truth. People like Quentin Tarantino is a genius, absolutely generational talent. He watches all those movies and makes movies like those. I think the medium creates itself quite a lot of the time.
• 14:24
  And how do you think the medium creates itself in regards to you and your work? In terms of the influences and what you were loving? Well, things I liked. I mean, when I was sort of at the beginning of my television career, I loved the sitcom Cheers. I adored that. I loved the old show MASH. Those very fast shows were very, very witty, did a lot of plot in a very short space of time. Those shows were brilliant at that. Tiny amount of time, huge amount of plot.
• 14:52
  um so when i was doing press gagging all those years uh years ago that was the kind of show i wanted to make wanted to be fast and sassy and lots of funny gags and not waste any time well your writing has always had that quality of like stuff you're one of the my favorite things about your work is your sense of structure which is a really i think for a lot it can be a really complicated fiddly thing i mean you just broke but you just broke it down pretty there like beginning middle end but then you the way you sort of wrap things around the end sometimes
• 15:22
  Well, you know, watch good stuff. You'll see it done all the time. I mean, Cheers did it. Yes, Minister and yes, Prime Minister. I started to notice, ah, the B plot always resolves the A plot. That's interesting. That's a good play. So something else is going on, sneaks in and sorts out the main plot. That's brilliant. I saw, this will be the most highfalutin reference on me. I saw the play The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, which...
• 15:51
  plays with structure and repeated scenes and fake-out scenes magnificently. So it's half this fantastic intellectual puzzle, and it sounds a bit like a sitcom. It really does. It's half Stoppardian brilliance, half sitcom. I adored it for that.
• 16:10
  There's a sequel to that. Many, many years later, I wrote the play The Unfriend, and it was on in the theater. And so I was asked by some journo, what are your favorite plays? And I thought, oh, I love The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard. It's sort of...
• 16:26
  half uh half series play half sitcom uh god i hope tom stoppard doesn't ever read this a few days later i arrived at the uh theater and it was handed that and written note from tom stoppard saying uh i did read it i laughed an awful lot love sherlock love to mark gaitis
• 16:47
  And I thought, oh, wow. Got a handwritten note from Tom Stoppard. A legend. Yeah, yeah, absolute legend. Absolutely. I mean, it's funny because when you mentioned the unfriend, because when I came, because I saw the unfriend when it was in its run at the Criterion, and like, yeah, I say that that sort of structure and comic timing and a sense of bringing these elements together, like the B plot and the A plot,
• 17:07
  I mean, there's a sequence. I remember there's a sequence of that with Reese Smith where he has a moment of physical comedy with a toilet brush. That whole sequence. I mean, it's very, I mean, people who've seen The Unfriend will get it, but like those beats and linking that, I guess, cause you talk about structure and how that is something you can play with. I mean, with something like coupling, cause when we had Jack Dunport on the podcast recently, he was talking about the, what you would, you would be doing with the structure of episodes like split where the whole episode is in split screen. Yeah. And you know, and it was a nightmare. Yeah. Yeah.
• 17:33
  Well, you were saying it was a bit of a nightmare. I mean, what are your memories of making of that show? And I guess that specific episode. I don't know. I don't know that it was my favorite. I thought we pushed the push what we could do quite hard there. And some of the timing was off because it was done live. It was done or as live in front of the audience. I mean, I think it was a decent one. I didn't think it was an absolute barnstormer.
• 17:56
  I think I remember we got tremendously, we got universally good reviews for it when it went out. We didn't always get universally good reviews for a coupling at all. But that one, I think everyone just appreciated the massive effort we'd gone to. But then a week later, all the same reviewers were saying, well, thank God it's not in split screen this week. Okay, I was very kind of you to be so nice last week.
• 18:22
  Yeah, well Jack was talking about that on the show He was saying how, well one thing he said Was that when he came out, because he'd never done live Like sitcom comedy before, and how it is Kind of, it is very much a thing of the past these days Sadly, yes And the way you played with that, and the way that you come out And then obviously there's a warm up man, and he would sort of Every time he took a bow, he would be nervous, he was like Could be shit, was what he said, quote as a quote And he, but he said It was so much fun working on that show It was a lovely, lovely show to work on The cast were all really Intimidated
• 18:50
  really fun people because it's not like making other television where most of making television is really quite boring. Everyone says that but it's really quite boring.
• 19:01
  once you've seen the scene and then you do it again and again and again and again you do it all day until you're screaming with monotony but you do a sitcom you have a read through, a couple of days rehearsal a dress sort of technical run and then
• 19:22
  you're into a studio night and then you have a wrap party once a week. You have drinks after the show once a week. It was Wednesday for us on coupling. We'd all go and get, you know, absolutely very merry in the bar afterwards because you had this big stressful night. Are we going to get laughs? Are we? And all that, you know, so...
• 19:42
  Yeah, you said it was a bit of a high-wire act, sort of navigating that, because you're playing to the audience, but you can make mistakes. It's not like theatre, but you can make mistakes. But, you know, there's a price. You're going to have to play that scene again in front of an audience who have already seen it and are desperate for you to get to the next bit. So, you know, it's, yeah. And I really enjoyed my time in sitcom. I would happily do one again.
• 20:03
  well it's a particular era of your of your work which to me is fascinating because when you wrapped Coupling next year you were doing Doctor Who Doctor Who that was your first episode the next year you went from doing the sitcom to then doing science fiction your favourite show as a kid Doctor Who so did that when you look back at that moment that era in a sense did it feel a bit like that did it feel like okay I wasn't I wasn't quite sure we had finished it was a weird one I mean the show I mean we'd lost Jeff which was a grievous loss even Richard Mylon was brilliant and underrated but
• 20:33
  We'd lost sort of the voice of the show in a way. And we went, we got green light for another series. And I just, it never occurred to me that you say no to a green light. And I remember I had a drink with Sarah Alexander and she'd say, okay, if you say so, but...
• 20:52
  what are we doing? What's it about anymore? And I sort of thought about it. I thought, she's right. It's not about that anymore. It's about new parents. You know, Patrick and Sally are together. This is a different show. This is not what it was. The game's up. And maybe it is time to stop. So I handed back the green light.
• 21:14
  Well that's a skill in that There's a talent in that I don't know I've always demonstrated it But There we go Well in that case Certainly In that case But it took Sarah to say She basically said I will do it But Are we still Are we still Really telling that story
• 21:32
  as you mentioned it like when Richard left the show I mean obviously because Jeff was such a sort of popular character but love it like what what was that like when he chose to leave well it's pretty hellish for us yeah listen I love Richard Coyle we got on very very well I mean I was a bit cross with him for a while but really he's a he's a wonderful man and a wonderful actor so no issues there at all
• 21:54
  Um, but I was crossed with him then because I didn't mind. I say, oh, you're leaving. That's fine. We'll, we'll give you a great last episode. We'll do it as the episode one of the new series and it'll be your finale. But he wouldn't come back and do that. And that means he disappeared between episodes. And that is terrible for a show. Doesn't matter. You can lose anybody. You can lose anybody, but you've got to see them go. Hmm.
• 22:22
  In truth, the show was slightly moving on from Jeff. That's maybe one of the reasons that Richard Coyle was thinking that way. It was becoming, it was actually more the Patrick and Sally show by then. But you can't just drop somebody through a trap door. They've got to make their magnificent way out the door and everyone's got to cry and wave. And you've got to give them an ending so lovely. You don't want to see them again. You enjoyed the way they left.
• 22:49
  i mean do you then get to do that do you remember your plans for what that would have been i do i do well there's a great sort of um text piece you did i think that some years after coupling where like jeff there's like it's close but there's a you do it you paint an image of jeff like somewhere in the bahamas or something oh yeah so yeah heat dissolving underwear yeah he's having a great time and suddenly like all of his exes arrive out of it it's like oh god it's just somebody online asked me what happened to them next time i thought oh well i'll just do it then so i wrote it
• 23:15
  Well, as I say, so after coupling wrapped up, you then sort of moved more or less, it seems to me like quite quickly into Doctor Who. Yeah, well, the next job I did was the empty child. Yeah. Yeah. Which, I mean, we were talking about it in the office before we came in, but plenty of sleepless nights from that episode. So thank you very much for that. I mean, I know many people can say the same. I mean, you know, terrifying, but hilarious, cynical measure that episode, actually. It was your first episode. I mean, I know I'm sure it's a question you've got asked before, but just at what point did the Doctor Who job come along for you and how did it feel when you knew you'd landed it?
• 23:44
  Well, it was initially the first thing that happened was Russell got the job. I heard that the show was coming back, which is big news for me as a fan. I was thrilled it was coming back.
• 23:57
  disappointed it wasn't me but then i heard it was russ and i thought oh blimey that's that's good that's a good choice you'll be fantastic i didn't know him that well but i got hold of his email address and emailed him to congratulate him say i know you are going to be a brilliant job you do a brilliant job on this i was really just making sure he had my email address uh and he replied very quickly saying i'm down for six if it goes to more than six i i will be chasing you
• 24:21
  And I didn't know if he was just being polite. So I waited and I didn't really expect anything. And then I actually remember exactly when it was for a particular reason. The 10th of December 2003. I was just getting on my dinner jacket to go to the British Comedy Awards. And I got a message from my agent saying, do you want to write a Doctor Who two-part? And I said, do I? Do I?
• 24:51
  and I went off to the British Comedy Awards where I met Peter Davison for the first time. He's quite a good friend now. And we won for Copling. So it was a great day. Yeah, it's a good night. It was a really great day. I was so thrilled. And so, and then when would Russell... So how did The M.T. Childs come about specifically, I guess? Would Russell... Did Russell pitch you the idea, or did you come to it with it? It's published online somewhere, exactly what he gave me. It was a two-parter, episodes nine and ten.
• 25:22
  Set in World War II, there's a mysterious child wandering around the battlefields, not the battlefields, the London Blitz, and there's kids living rough in their London Blitz and stealing food from the tables, and there's a character called Captain Jax.
• 25:39
  Hartness, J-A-X, who turns out to be from the future. Something like that. I think that's what I got. And I worked on it from that, yeah. And the gas mask, that came from, I want to say it came from a history book, right? The image of a child. Well, I realized that for the very first time in my life, I was going to have to do some research. So I did some research, went to a museum and I saw, and I was thinking, if the moment I put a monster in this,
• 26:09
  the monster will pull focus from the setting. If I put a big robot in this, you'll just look at the robot. Wouldn't matter where it was. The robot becomes the show or the monster becomes the show. So I thought, is there anything in the iconography of World War II that can be the monster?
• 26:27
  That way, it's all about World War II, even though it's about a sci-fi monster. And I saw a kid in a gas mask, and I thought, that's frightening. Look at it. I mean, the fundamental Doctor Who thing are the big blank eyes. So I thought, that's what I'll do, a child in a gas mask, the empty child.
• 26:43
  And I, you, my mummy came my mummy. When did that come from, come from that, that phrase? And in the first episode or the first one I submitted, he just says mummy all the time. But when I realized what the payoff was going to be, that it was going to be, are you my mummy? Yes, I am. I thought, right, I'll go back and change it to, are you my mummy? Which was, which.
• 27:08
  I thought it was great. But then we went to the read-through, which was possibly the worst read-through I'd ever attended of anything. Chris and Billy were incredibly tired and just marking it in. John Barrowman hadn't decided which accent he was going to use, so he used all of them. And the script girl read in The Empty Child, which was like, are you my mummy? Are you my mummy? Are you...
• 27:41
  And I was dying, dying. I was like, please, can this please be over? And then they pulled me up to the meeting room afterwards and said, the empty child says, are you my mummy too often? And mainly because I was in pain and I wanted to hurt people, said, no, he doesn't.
• 28:02
  And I said, no, that's exactly right. Kids will be saying that in playgrounds. You get that right. It'll be done right. And I was so belligerent. They agreed. I said, okay. I didn't actually believe any of this. I was just, I just wanted to hit people because I'd had a bad evening. Then I had to go and tell Sue on the phone. Do you know what the one show I can't write is? It's bloody Doctor Who. I can't write Doctor Who. That's a bit of a turn up for the books. This is so embarrassing. It's rubbish. It's going to be terrible. It's going to be awful.
• 28:31
  No, of course it wasn't. What can I say? And the Playgrounds of Britain had Are You My Mummy all over the place. So it was a huge storming success. But I didn't know that. I thought I'd screwed up.
• 28:47
  Well, I hear that's quite a common theme when sometimes when you sort of, on those projects where you don't quite know 100% if it's going to work, but there's an element of risk there that is exciting. And kind of maybe actually those are the ones where you actually get... Maybe it is. I mean, I was aware as I started it,
• 29:03
  Because I had been so full of the idea. I was going to write Doctor Who. I was finally going to write this show that I'd grown up with. I was so excited about it. And then it occurred to me as I sat there typing on my actual typewriter. And I've never written anything like this. I don't write things like this. I've never done anything remotely resembling this. What am I doing? I'm a comedy writer. Which is why there are an awful lot of good jokes in it.
• 29:24
  And then I sort of settled down and got on with it. But I was quite, it suddenly hit me that I had zero experience of this kind of plotting and this kind of storytelling. It seems odd now.
• 29:38
  When I look at my career through inevitably the wrong end of the telescope, but the fact that it's just basically all anyone ever talks to me about is Doctor Who, which is fine, I don't mind. I'm probably Sherlock as well. It seems odd for me to say, but I had no idea how this worked. I was making it up as I went. How do I get the Doctor to talk about that? How does a cliffhanger work? What is this? How do I get out of the cliffhanger? Everything was new. Everything was brand new.
• 30:05
  I can't imagine the atmosphere that must have generated the excitement of like we've got this show back on the air and we love it and we want to do it right. It was properly exciting we thought, you know, we were all aware Russell more than the rest of us, he was constantly thinking this might be the one and only this could be the one and only, this could crash and burn who the hell says this is going to be a success but we'll get to do it once and that's enough so yeah yeah
• 30:32
  I thought it was a surefire hit, I have to say, because I saw enough as the film quite a lot before The Empty Child came up, and I was looking at it and thought, no, this is... He's great. She's great, too. And my God, you can't stop looking at her. And I just thought, wow, this is absolutely a surefire hit. And I'd said for years, just do Doctor Who right. Don't get clever with it. Just do Doctor Who right.
• 31:01
  folk will show up. They won't if you don't, but if you do it right, they will be there. And they did. Yes, they did. In Spain. Yeah, absolutely magnificently, yeah. It was so exciting. So exciting. Yeah, and you feel that excitement in the show and particularly in the scripts that you wrote. I mean, the energy there, the invention, the excitement. I mean, and when I look at those episodes you did during Russell's initial tenure, so yeah, Empty Child, Go in the Fireplace, Blink, of course, Science in the Library, you know, brilliant stories. And like...
• 31:29
  So much thought has gone into them, so much structure, so much time to me. It seems it's gone into getting those as close as we can get to just bang on. And I did want to ask, like, how long, because I know you do want to adopt a episode every season to every year. Like, how long would you on average spend on those stories, do you remember, like those initial episodes? I mean, it's broadly, very broadly, somewhere between a month and six weeks to write a Doctor Who, I think. Let's call it five weeks.
• 31:57
  a single episode would take reliably that. I mean, I've written them in much shorter times and much longer times for various reasons. But that would be reasonable. If someone said to me, right now you've got to get a Doctor Who in in five weeks' time, I'd go over there and be pretty sure it would be in in five weeks' time.
• 32:20
  and so that was the case on those sort of early yeah yeah i think i was late i think i was quite late on that one um because they complained about me being late uh but they didn't complain when it went
• 32:36
  No, for sure. And one of the most celebrated episodes of that run, and I think probably of your whole time on the show, is, of course, Blink. Yes. Which, I mean, over your shoulder there, it's the Hugo Award for Blink. Yeah. I mean, terrific episode, terrific piece of television. But I want to say, that episode originally was not supposed to happen, right? I mean, you originally, you were teed up throughout the Dalek two-parter in Series 3. Well, they asked me to. They asked me to write the Dalek two-parter, and I was very, very excited to do the Dalek two-parter. Yeah.
• 33:02
  But I looked at my schedule and I was doing Jekyll at the time. I said, I'm never going to make it. I'm never, ever going to be able to do that. So I very shamefacedly said, look, I'm really sorry, but I can't. And I said, look, as compensation, as compensation for jerking you around,
• 33:23
  I'll do the Dr. Light this year, the one that nobody likes. That one. I'll do it, right? Russell, you don't have to do that. I'll do it. Russell has rarely responded to an email so quickly. I don't think I'd finished pressing send. He said, yes, yes, you do it. You do it. You do it. And I said, okay.
• 33:42
  And then I felt rather deflated. I thought, ah, I'm doing the one with David. That'll be popular. But I'd already written this short story called What I Did in My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow. I thought, right. Right.
• 33:58
  Um, that's good. I'll use that basic structure, make her a bit older, but I'll need a monster. And I'd already had this idea of the story set in a big library and, and the, in the big library, there were going to be these weeping angel statues that moved around. I thought, well, I'll just borrow that and put the weeping angels into blink. Oh, it wasn't called blink then. It was called, uh, Sally Sparrow and the weeping angels is what it was called. Um, and yeah.
• 34:29
  Yeah, it became that. And it was, well, I mean, I had no idea. I had no idea what was going to happen with Blink. None. Julie Gardner, who many years later I understood might be the principal brains buying doctor, actually said, when I'd hand it, I said, that's the best one you've done. It might be the best one we've got. And I said, no, it's not. It's not got the bloody doctor in it, has it?
• 34:59
  women they don't understand um but she was the best one i'd done very clearly uh and it was a massive hit um and uh what was great was on this one saturday night blink went out and then for the next six weekends jekyll went out and i saw blink goes out and it's a massive hit literally everyone's talking about it
• 35:20
  I really remember that. They really were like, ha, ha, this is a great springboard for Jekyll, for six weeks of Jekyll. And six weeks of Jekyll later, people were endlessly talking about Blink, right? They just, Jekyll sank without trace. I thought, oh, yeah. LAUGHTER It's always good to have a flop immediately after a big success. LAUGHTER Reminds her who you are. LAUGHTER
• 35:47
  Well, it's interesting, I mean, with Russell, because when we had Murray Gold on the podcast, he was talking about Russell. And so I asked him about what it was like working as the composer on the show with you and Russell separately, show writers. And he was talking about both of your sort of approaches and what you like as writers. And he was saying that Russell is very, Russell, like very open heartedly, like loves humanity. Like he's this big hearted sort of love and energy for humanity that is also kind of at times quite unflinching. But you look at stuff he's done, like I guess like Tiptoe more recently or go back to Dot 2, like Midnight. It's very honest about how...
• 36:16
  people can be great and terrible. And he was saying how you also kind of, you have a love for humanity as well. He characterized it, but in a different kind of way. And I was wondering, like, I want to ask like, what do you think your relationship to humanity is represented in the work you've done like Dot 2, but also I guess Sherlock, Dracula, coupling, what have you? Well, I mean,
• 36:36
  I think we're astonishing. I don't know how to think otherwise. No, but I actually do. Or what we've done is amazing. If you keep in mind that what we are is competitive, hungry, angry, rutting monkeys. We are, that's exactly what we are. How did we do all this?
• 37:01
  You know, every time everyone says when someone falls from grace and it turns out they're a bit of a monster, really, or they did something bad. You know, when some famous author has done something dodgy, right? Yeah. As if that doesn't happen to every single famous author. And people always say to me, oh, how...
• 37:23
  how can I ever look at their work again? I don't see you looking at it the wrong way around. Don't think, how can this wonderful work come from such a base human thing? Isn't it bloody amazing that human beings, despite their fundamentally gross and terrible, competitive, warlike nature, can produce things of great beauty and wisdom? We have created a civilization, in the West at least, that is a cage for ourselves,
• 37:51
  Because we know how bestial we are and how competitive and awful and selfish we can be. We've created ideas to aspire to, whether they're heroes or gods or whatever, that allow us to be far better than you would think we could be.
• 38:11
  Now, you look at a cathedral built because someone believes in God. Never mind you don't believe in God. That doesn't matter. They had this idea to aspire like that. Instead of going out and killing someone and raping their wife, they thought, okay, I'm going to build something that will strike awe into people's hearts and minds because it is so beautiful and so powerful. So, no, I think humanity is extraordinary. The fact that it is often based...
• 38:42
  and terrible is not surprising. Of course we are. We're competing with every other animal, right? We eat some of them, eat quite a lot. Of course we're terrible. That's to be expected. What is not to be expected are symphonies and poems and plays and literature and beyond that science and beyond that law, right?
• 39:05
  Just the whole idea of, you know what us luck are like? We're all kind of awful, aren't we? Well, it'd be quite good if we weren't. Wouldn't it be quite good? Do we all agree, even though we kind of like being awful, what do we do? Let's make some rules and let's stick to them. And let's make up stories that make us want to be better. Not just for us to be better, but make us want to be better. Now, that story could be about an imaginary god in the sky, or it could be about Doctor Who.
• 39:30
  You know, but it makes you want to be better. I don't know where that aspiration could possibly have come from. That idea of hurling yourself at the sky instead of rolling around in the mud. How did that happen? How did we decide that moon up there is going to go there? What? What? So, no, I think humanity is extraordinary.
• 39:56
  And we should be elevated and excited every time we do something amazing and forgiving every time we do something awful. Because awfulness is our essential nature. It's the aspiration that is the ongoing miracle. And it's led us to where we are now.
• 40:14
  It has. Yeah. These lovely lives we live, will we never have to be hungry and we probably die of old age? Yeah. Fingers crossed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. And so that thing of, I guess in that sense, like having, because I know what you mean, like I often find it quite moving how someone can be, as you said, going back to what you said at the start, like someone can do something awful and obviously demonstrably and be flawed, but also the fact they can produce something like, you know, I mean, like Woody Allen can obviously be a controversial figure, but then he can still do Crimes and Misdemeanors or,
• 40:44
  The way to look at it is, isn't it marvelous what people can do? And isn't it to be expected the bad things they also do? That's inevitable. No one is above that. We're all kind of dreadful.
• 40:57
  And the sort of puritanical pretense that there's someone out there who isn't basically kind of awful is silly. It doesn't help you. It doesn't say, oh, I'm a good person and I'll never be tempted to do bad things. You wait.
• 41:14
  And so it's all about having empathy, I guess, with that side. Well, you'll find in most philosophies and the nicer religions that forgiveness is terribly important. You can't survive without it. Imagine trying to get through your life without being forgiven. Bloody hell, that's impossible. And people who are not forgiving don't trust them. There's a reason. There's a reason they're out to get other people.
• 41:41
  Hmm. They'd like to distract attention from themselves. Well, it seems to me like we've talked to even a little bit about it to different people on the podcast lately, that we do seem to live more and more in a less empathetic, less kind society. I mean, do you think there's anything to that?
• 41:55
  No, I think we always did. And we always said that. We always said, oh, it's all about wokeness now. Well, if you've forgotten political correctness, I mean, it's been going forever, this. This battle has been going. It's not an unreasonable battle. It's not unreasonable that some people are saying we must be great all the time and remember your privilege. No, that's not a completely unreasonable thing. Of course it goes toxic. Literally nothing doesn't.
• 42:21
  but it's not an unreasonable battle to have. And other people say, no, you can make a joke about anything. Then I always want to say,
• 42:30
  I love Ricky Gervais' work, but he makes a lot of fun of the modern Puritans. But I always want to say, yeah, you'd lose about three quarters of your act if they weren't there, though. So, careful what you wish for, mate. So if there wasn't a puritanical streak in literally everybody, we wouldn't have anything to take the piss out of, right? So we need it. And the thing is, it does run through everybody. We all think, well, I'm the one.
• 42:59
  who's never like that. Yeah, you are. I believe in freedom of speech unless it's somebody else talking, which is, broadly speaking, the view of everybody in the human race. Freedom of speech is for me. It's not for you people who disagree with me. So we're all kind of the same. We're all Puritans and we're all sinners. We're all just kind of the same in different degrees. And anyone who ever sets themselves up
• 43:21
  Well, I'm a great ally and I stand with set your watch, set the countdown and find out what they've been up to. Because nobody ever says that. Honestly, for real, who wasn't guilty. I mean, who says it? I'm sent. Who says that? Well, come on. I'm not listing the names here. But, you know, come on. We know.
• 43:52
  I mean, what you said there about like the aspirational side of humanity and the kind of fact that we are base, but also we are aspirational. I mean, do you think then that is the importance of why we need things like Doctor Who and stuff like Sherlock Holmes and these great heroic stories, these great figures that can show us something that we can be that is better? Well, that's why they occur.
• 44:15
  that's not the importance of them that's why they happen they happen we've always had stories whether it's myths or gods or religion or superhero comics we've always had stories about that they are a naturally occurring thing it's not that what we do in doctor who's or any other show is in any way important i really really really
• 44:37
  don't like the idea that anybody thinks that people who work in television are going to lead the way to the promised land we couldn't get there unless someone booked us a car and got us a train ticket right there's absolutely no question that we are useless at all of that
• 44:53
  But it's a naturally occurring phenomenon that we constantly imagine ourselves being better. Imagine if you were better. What would you be like if you were a better person? So he makes up stories or religious figures or fantasies in our heads or angels. But what an extraordinary thing that we do that. We do it throughout history. We're constantly...
• 45:20
  throwing ourselves at the sky and saying, we could be better than this. Why? I don't know. Fish don't do that. Fish just swim around eating plankton. But we aspire to something great. And I think that's special, remarkable, and I don't know where it could possibly come from. I agree. And we fail a lot. We fail a lot. Of course, we mainly fail, especially me.
• 45:45
  but you're a writer who's really sort of made this explicit i think this idea in his work i mean particularly i mean just i mean zoning in a lot too because i mean there's a lot of it but like you the one who's first voiced the idea of the doctor is a title it's an aspiration never cruel never cowardly it's something that he aspires to yeah and so that's something that i think you've made explicit i mean i think it's something that's always been there but like that and never cruel never cowardly comes from turning sticks but uh yes um
• 46:10
  The idea is, because I had a slight argument with Russell, because Russell says if he's never cruel, never cowardly, he's boring. And I say, but he is cruel and he is cowardly, but he tries not to be. And when he succeeds in not being that, he's the Doctor.
• 46:25
  He's this fictional entity he's created that he'd rather be like. But we know because we've watched the show. He's frequently petty and selfy. I rather like that about the Doctor. He's an absolute egotist. He's a man of the people, but the people better get him tea when he wants it. He thinks he's better literally than everybody.
• 46:46
  You know, he's an absolute tyrant. I love that about the Doctor. He's a properly flawed hero. In fact, he's so flawed as a hero, I'm not sure he counts as one. It's just that he's the best kind of story because he's the lackadaisical passerby who becomes the last man standing. He says, oh, yeah, but I should probably help. I really want to go to a fairground. And there's a steam engine being invented. I really want to see...
• 47:13
  Those people are in trouble. I should help out. I'll just be five minutes. Be five minutes. Or maybe ten. Okay. A year. Right. And that's the best kind of story. Because he's a selfish wanderer. Just trying to entertain himself and fill his days.
• 47:31
  And then he throws himself into action because injustice moves him. He's not on a mission. He was trying not to be on a mission. If you told him all the evil in the universe had been defeated and it was pure ice cream from now on, he'd be very, very happy.
• 47:46
  Well, yeah, I mean, because injecting that kind of attitude to the character in the show, I mean, because when I look back at some of the key episodes you've done, I guess, for that, I mean, I guess in some ways you could say Heaven Sent is about that, getting under the skin of that character, because that's an episode we talked about a lot with Peter.
• 48:01
  when he came on and Peter had some very interesting recollections of the making of that and how it all came together because it's such a sort of because that's another episode I guess similar to Blink that has kind of taken on a life of its own and become beloved by not just the fan base but beyond I mean people really hold that one up as being ah this is this is a top shelf one you know it's a top shelf episode of Dot 2
• 48:19
  And it's such a powerful story about grief and about death and about willpower. I mean, where did that story come from for you personally? Because, of course, you wrote it. Like, where did it come from? Because, of course, you wrote it. Like, where did it come from? Where did it come from? I mean, I think it was at the beginning slightly more practical. There's a really dull story about where it came from.
• 48:39
  was that Jenna Coleman agreed to do another series of Doctor Who very, very late in the day. Peter and I were at her for a long while to come back and do another run. We didn't want to lose her. But by the time she came back, she could only do nine of the 12. I am getting to your question. She'd only do nine of the 12. And I thought, how am I going to write her out of three episodes without anyone noticing?
• 49:05
  Well, one, I just thought, okay, one, the trick I get to do once is she's literally not in it, the woman who lived. And then I wasn't quite sure where in the blocks her other two, another absence would be. So I said to Toby, when you're writing year one, we'll be discussed the plot already. She doesn't go with the doctor to the other location. That means for as long as we're on location there, she's not filming. That's about two weeks.
• 49:32
  And in my one, the Dalek two-parter, I stuck her inside a Dalek so that she had a full participation in the episode, but quite often in a tin can. So you didn't see it. She had loads of time off there as well. But I didn't know where that was going to work. But I needed one more. And so how could I make her absolutely yet another episode not obvious? And the answer was, well, what if he's only Peter Capella?
• 49:57
  then you don't think about the fact Jenna's not in it. I mean, she is a tiny bit in it, but you don't think that Jenna's missing this. You think, well, literally, the rest of the universe is missing. It's just Peter.
• 50:08
  Um, so that, that was one angle that came from me trying to conceal her absence. Um, and I think quite successfully because no one's really picked up on it. Uh, and the other one, uh, was I'd just written the big old daft old speech, the war speech in the Zygon one, uh, with a bit of harness scores. And, um, and I thought, God, yeah.
• 50:33
  You could spend an episode listening to that man have a rant. Maybe we should. Maybe we should just do that. He has a rant at some walls. There you go. It's Capaldi's solo. And was there a part of you, because as we were saying about the empty child, maybe there was an element of risk and like, are you my mummy? That had never really been done before on Doctor 2, I think I want to say. We've had the Doctor just front and centre.
• 50:58
  for the episode the whole episode i mean there's a little bit of jenna in there there's the veils in there but like was there any part of you that felt nervous that peter could pull it off
• 51:05
  No, I didn't think there was any danger with Peter not pulling it off. In fact, I think most of the actors who played the Doctor could do it because one thing that's not often celebrated enough is just how good a set of actors this early evening children's action adventure has had in his lead. I mean, that's extraordinary who's been playing that part. Really, world-class talents. Peter is particularly arresting. He's very hard to cut away from that phase.
• 51:33
  Yeah, I mean, he's got one of the great faces, permanently suffering and then funny. So I just thought he was, I just thought he'd be good. I didn't feel much. I mean, by that stage, I would have been doing it for years and taking all sorts of stupid risks. And partly, I wanted to take a stupid risk once a year. Because when Brian Minchin took over as my co-exec, who came along at the same time as Peter Capaldi,
• 52:00
  He asked me a very, very good question. He asked me, what do you miss about not being the showrunner?
• 52:05
  And I said, well, I miss doing the mental one in the middle. I miss doing the absolutely mad one in the middle of the run. Because that's what Russell told me my job was. He says, you're coming in and you're just breaking all the rules and doing what you like. That's your job. And I said, I miss that. And he said, well, why don't you just do one? One a year. That you will commission yourself to write a mad one.
• 52:30
  And so I did. So I did. It was Listen, Heaven Sent and Extremis were the ones. But I also had a tremendously accomplished backup from Jamie Matheson coming in and also doing Mad Ones. So there was extra Mad. Thank you, Jamie. It certainly was. I mean, his episodes are terrific as well. Great writer, yeah.
• 52:49
  Yeah. And that kind of element of lunacy a little bit, which, as you said, that risk taking is something that you really particularly feel in heaven set, that sense of taking a chance on an idea. But also, as I say, it's such a sort of profound study for me in 45 minutes of grief and of death and about like in dealing with how the doctor deals with these human and just fundamental concepts. I mean, I guess all come to us at some time. And that was what I responded to.
• 53:14
  about it. I mean, was that, and as you say, in that series, that episode kind of explodes outward with all, it's loaded with all this. Well, I mean, it was, I was thinking that grief wasn't something that we'd really, or done properly in Doctor Who. I'd always thought, I in particular, perhaps, maybe everyone had sort of skirted past it, like, Adric's dead, let's check the cricket results, which is exactly what happens in Time Flight. And...
• 53:44
  What is it? Amy and Rory spent no time at all grieving for their, not for their child. They didn't lose their child. Their child just grew up, but they never got to bring up their child. And I never found a way to say, well, how many men I read an episode of Doctor Who about that? It's about chasing the monsters, for goodness sake. I mean, explain that one to an eight-year-old. So I thought one of the, but it didn't feel very satisfactory to me. It didn't feel satisfactory to me, though. I just didn't do it.
• 54:12
  So I thought, okay, well, how would you do Grief and Doctor Who? And I said, well, the only way you can do it is you make Grief the monster. In a sort of operatic way, you make, in a sort of Buffy the Vampire Slayer way. In a Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the stories were always sort of metaphors for what you were going through at school. You know? Yeah, yeah. The boyfriend who turns bad the moment you sleep with her. It's the age-old story.
• 54:41
  And so in a way, I was trying to do that. I say, oh, the doctor deals with grief, but it's obviously, it's a slow moving monster in a big castle. When I put it that way, I'm less convinced. But it worked. And as I say, the episode, so it's taken on a life of its own and it's really sort of connected with a lot of people. I want it, I feel like, you know, people really come back to it a lot and revisit it and discover all these sort of details about it. And it's loaded with details, the structure of it, the, you know, the snake eating its tail structure of it, the doctor dying and being reborn.
• 55:08
  When it came to just the technical act of just putting that on the page, just banging that out on the page, do you remember the writing of that? It was a difficult one to write, a difficult one to film, a difficult one to act, a difficult one to design, a difficult one at every level, because you don't have any of your normal toolbox. You know, other voices, people to bounce off, someone to talk to so you can do the exposition. Literally none of those things were there.
• 55:36
  It was an odd, odd show. But, you know, I was pretty excited about it. And I was reasonably confident. Oh, no, hang on, I'm saying that. I remember I was really confident when I wrote it. I was reasonably confident when we made it. And then about five minutes before it went out on air, I thought, what the name of God have I just done? It's arthouse doctor who literally no one was been writing in asking for that. Could it be a little bit more arty? Yeah.
• 56:02
  Well, you and the rest of your primary school class will be delighted to know.
• 56:08
  So I might arrive saying there's spaceships next week. Yeah. There's Time Lords and spaceships together. All that good stuff. Yeah, it'll be cool stuff. Don't worry. Yeah. Well, actually, it's funny because I actually read that story. I talked about Peter and Murray when they came on was both the Cannabale House vibe to it. And Murray actually said that like when he was doing the music, like, because he said, you're like a huge Beethoven fan. He said, is that fair to say? Beethoven's fourth is like particularly like a big sort of touchstone. For me, it was Beethoven's seventh. The second Beethoven's seventh, the Allegretta.
• 56:37
  is an incredibly moving piece of music. If you've never heard it, it will make you think of Heaven Sent. It is incredibly moving. One of those rare bits of classical music where you get it first time. You don't have to listen to it more than once. You just listen to it once you get it. Oh, wow, that's something else. If you go and listen to it, you will think that.
• 56:57
  If you listen to it when you're sad, you might shoot yourself. But it's good. And was that track feeding into the writing? Yes, I think it was. You were listening to that on that one. And oddly enough, what Murray wrote, The Shepherd's Boy, the beautiful, it's not the same, but it's reminiscent of.
• 57:15
  that one. My son, who's a brilliant pianist, he's always playing things where he just combines different tunes and he's always combining Shepard's Boy with the Allegretto with the Sherlock theme music. Okay. Thanks for this major tribute. That's a medley.
• 57:42
  Do you often listen to music when you write? No, not very much, no. Like most blokes, I turn the music off to concentrate. I'm exactly the same. I'll just listen to the music if I listen to the music. Yeah, yeah. I feel like some writers, they have to crank it up and really just envelop themselves in it. But yeah, I just find that too. If I'm doing something, I'm focusing on what I'm doing.
• 58:01
  And then with the thing about Doctor Who is that I think, especially at the moment, in the last couple of weeks, it has been back in the headlines. I mean, obviously, you know, it's huge. Very good. Yeah. Well, I know you've been asked about this before, but it is an interesting period, it seems, for the show. And Murray was even talking about this when he came on, about how the future of the show maybe is a little bit in question. You know, well, so long as everybody is talking about the future of the show, do you know what the show has? The future.
• 58:26
  No one cares about Doctor Who anymore, screams 14 headlines. Do you read your own work back, you pellets? Dear God. People are circling already trying to get hold of that. I used to be fine.
• 58:44
  it might take a moment but if it's an entirely new team which I think it will be they need a moment they need a moment to sit back and say okay what's it going to be this time who's it going to be this time what sort of show is it going to be they need a moment don't go rushing into that and meanwhile you've got oh I've talked to him
• 59:04
  All of it on your iPhone. You can sit and watch anything that we haven't accidentally lost and you'll be fine. Just watch it all end to end and give them time to get them going. But it will be back and it will be good.
• 59:19
  Yeah. Absolutely confident. That's not insider knowledge. I just know how stuff works. And a show that's talked about as endlessly as that isn't going anywhere. Yeah. I promise you. Well, I certainly hope so. I mean, because when, as you say, so you think it needs a moment like you guys had bringing it back in 2005, like it was off the air for many years and then it came back. I don't mean 16 years. He didn't need 16 years. That was nuts. That was nuts. Yeah.
• 59:46
  It was just crazy. It was so cheap back in the day, it made money. It was so cheap. They made it for nothing. There was no real reason for them not to make it. I think rights got tied up in all sorts of nutty ways. So no, it won't be off like that. It won't be like that.
• 1:00:02
  But the idea of coming back with renewed energy and like, OK, what? It's more just different people thinking about it in a different way. I mean, the the thing about Doctor Who is that it's ancient. It's ancient. It's like it's like the pyramids or something in terms of television. It's this old, old text.
• 1:00:24
  It's an ancient machine, but every single piece of it is new. It's an old thing made out of new things. It's always a new Doctor. It's always a new companion. It's always a new TARDIS set. It's always a new writer, a new producer, a new director. Every piece of it you're looking at is new. Mm-hmm.
• 1:00:44
  If you can be old and new at the same time, then you have all the advantage of myth and all the novelty of invention at once, right? Now, it's the thing I always say about casting the doctor. He can be old, he can be young, but if he's old, he's got to be young on the inside, and if he's young, he's got to be old on the inside. You see what I mean? It's old and new, young and old, all the time. So it needs that churn of new people coming in and doing new things.
• 1:01:12
  and interesting and exciting things and it all kind of ending up being exactly the same because it is yeah still doctor who yeah a box falls out of sky a man falls out a box so there's something very wrong here blows everything up and runs all the way to another planet right i mean that's it i mean come on it's not over complicated
• 1:01:29
  but something that peter said when we spoke to him was that he said and he meant i think he meant it quite facetiously but also with some serious he was saying that like the worst thing about dot two is that everyone's got an opinion and like everybody everyone's got an opinion from the fans to the people making it working on you know the people who love it or hate it or whatever everyone's got an opinion and i mean what's interesting that in the last couple weeks like so many opinions yes i mean so many opinions and the um
• 1:01:55
  The interesting thing about that is everyone's got an opinion except anyone who knows a thing about it, which is quite intriguing to me that I have never been, as a writer, more lectured in how things work by people who have never done my job than I am right now. And it's very rare for me to say, OK, just settle down for a moment.
• 1:02:15
  What do you do for a living? That's what I do for a living. And here's the awards cabinet. I think I know how I do it. Okay. Stop lecturing me. I don't do that very often. But sometimes you just go nuts. And you see these poor souls on YouTube or whatever ranting away about something.
• 1:02:33
  You don't... I don't mean this in a critical way, I mean, a straightforward, accurate way. You don't know what you're talking about. You just don't know. The way I don't know about golf. But I have not started a YouTube channel, although I might, explaining where golfers are going wrong. Well, you see, what they need to do is hit their little ball with the club. Right. Well done, you.
• 1:02:59
  Golfers all over the world smacking their foreheads and stagging around in surprise at my insight.
• 1:03:07
  Well, that was what was quite nice when Richard Osman came out on his podcast at the Rest of Entertainment recently, and he was saying how, because obviously he's worked at the BBC, and he has an understanding of how TV works. And so he came out and he's saying, look, the whole idea of putting a show out to tender, obviously it happens a lot, you know, the weather. As Russell was saying, like, the weather got put out to tender, you know, Casualty, all these big shows. And then, like, that was always the, it sounds like that was always the idea he was saying. Like, with Dot 2, like, the idea was that it would have some time off, and, like, maybe it would perhaps someone, another production company would come in,
• 1:03:37
  Well, I can't see if Bad Wolf were going to stop and Russell was going to stop. There's inevitably going to be a moment. It wasn't the same back in the day. I could take over sort of seamlessly from Russell because I was already there. You know, and so the two of us were in position as showrunners for quite a long while overlapping. Yeah.
• 1:03:57
  It's bound, it's inevitably going to be different now. But we don't live in a time where series come back annually. That's not, that's a relatively rare idea now. I think that's just fine. I think that's just fine. The other problem with Doctor Who has now is I'm always prating on about how much Doctor Who is available to you on your iPhone. I think it's Doctor Who, modern Doctor Who, today's Doctor Who,
• 1:04:24
  has to compete with the entire history of the show. You were thinking, oh, will I watch Doctor Who now? Or will I watch one with David Tennant? Now I'll go for Tom Baker today. Oh, maybe Peter Davis. You've got the whole thing there.
• 1:04:35
  You didn't used to have that. You used to have today's episode and then wait a week. That's what you used to have. Simpler times. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So what do you think? Because I say Doctor Who, where it goes next, who works on it next is sometime down the line. I mean, why do you think we still need Doctor Who? I mean, we've touched on it a bit before about, I guess, sometimes the aspirational quality of the characters. I mean, I don't know. I don't know that people need Doctor Who. I think people want Doctor Who. That's a different thing. Yeah.
• 1:05:01
  As I say, the aspirational thing is that's just natural. That's just what we do. Lots of stories are like that. Doctor Who's a great one. But do we need it? Well, no, we need food. We need air to breathe. We need water. And sometimes we need stories. Something like Doctor Who, it's gone beyond being a story. Some things do happen.
• 1:05:26
  like King Arthur or Robin Hood or James Bond or Sherlock Holmes, some things, and who knows why, are just eternal. They will just keep coming back. Long after I'm gone and even you're gone, there will be new Doctor Who stories. And there'll be new stories about Merlin too. Some stories just keep going. And the trick with those stories is not to get too clever with them because you don't know why it works.
• 1:05:57
  Nobody knows why it works. You know, some things that work about it, but you don't know why. There's a great quote I use, but literally nobody else on the planet uses. So I'll use it now and explain it. Therefore, I can use it with some clarity next time, which is maybe it was the chandeliers. Huh. Isn't that a great quote? I can tell you're immediately aflame with interest. The original run of My Fair Lady, which was a massive, massive hit on Broadway, My Fair Lady,
• 1:06:27
  Alan Jay Larner, the lyricist and show writer, said, okay, okay, I'm making a rule right now that every production of My Fair Lady from No One has to be identical to this one. Identical. Nothing can change. Not the set, not the costumes, nothing. It must be identical. And someone said, why? And he said, because we know it is a hit, but we don't know why it's a hit.
• 1:06:53
  Maybe it was the chandeliers. Now, that's what you've got to think about things like Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes. You don't know why it's important. Tell you what, you can't change that police box. I don't know why. You can't take the sucker off the Dalek. Why? Why? Why does that work? Neither. Neither. I have created a huge improvement on the human hand. I cannot wait to see. I have a sucker. I mean, what? What?
• 1:07:23
  What were they thinking? He's asking. I mean, yeah, if you change some of those things, it's not Dot Dot Who. It's not My Fair Lady. Maybe here's the chandeliers. That's a good quote. It's one I always think about. Be careful. You're trying to be clever. The thing about the format of Doctor Who, about the format of Jades Bond, about the format of Sherlock Holmes, is the format is cleverer than you are and cleverer than anyone who's ever going to write it. So do as you're told.
• 1:07:54
  Well, I mean, I think it would be remiss at this point not to mention Sherlock. At least in passing. It's because it is another great piece of work that you've done. You in collaboration with Mark Gatiss and, of course, Steve Thompson on the first three series. And that show, I mean, it's been nearly 10 years now since it's gone for the air, which is kind of scary. Yeah, it was about 10 years ago we finished filming it. Yeah. I mean, when you look back at that show now, I mean, what's your relationship with it now? Oh, man. Just I'd quite like to do it again, really.
• 1:08:20
  I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It was an extraordinary time. Because I was doing that exactly the same time as I did Doctor Who. The two things were literally exactly the same time. I went from normal television life to being the guy, or one of the guys in charge of Doctor Who and one of the guys in charge of Showback, going, what the hell happened there? It was like being hit by a very nice bus. And it was just...
• 1:08:48
  It was a maniac time. I never, ever stopped working or stopped worrying or stopped fretting. I loved that show. I think I look at it now and I watch it and I think all of it is excellent. I just think it's really, really well made, beautifully acted, dare I say it, beautifully written, short-term. It's cracking. And I'm massively, massively proud of it. And I miss it. I do miss it.
• 1:09:14
  Is this something that you'd ever revisit? Yeah, if I can persuade everybody else. I've said revisit it. What can you ever say that you've run out of Sherlock Holmes stories? There are 60 originals. We've done, what is it, 13 or 14? I can never remember. By mixing different elements of some of them. But, you know, there's loads more you could do with Sherlock Holmes. I'd quite like to revisit it simply because they would know that our two leads be...
• 1:09:40
  the normal age for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. We did younger ones. They're normally presented as about 50, which is not completely accurate to the books, but, you know, Rathbone and Bruce were about 50. Brett and his Watsons were about 50 when they did it. So we did, we were conscious that we were doing the beginning of the story, consciously doing younger ones. I'd quite like to see them as their more middle-aged, settled versions.
• 1:10:03
  I think there'll be a lot there. I mean, I've, Hey, there's gold in that mine, you know, so I don't, I don't, I don't think it's used up actually, but no. Yeah. Cause, cause when I, cause actually way back in the early days of the pod, we had Paul McGuigan on the director. Yes. He worked for many times, brilliant director on Sherlock and Dracula, and Inside the Man, you know, fantastic director. And again, it's someone who's such a style to him, such a sort of approach to how he uses the camera. And he was saying that when he was doing Sherlock, he,
• 1:10:29
  Like, because the scripts were so, you know, creative, it inspired him. It had to inspire him to be, to get extra creative. And that's when the idea of, rather than cut away to phones, it's text. Yeah, brilliant idea. What an idea, yeah. Yeah, which outside of like a few little fringe projects in there was pretty much brand new. I mean, it was a new, people haven't really seen that before. I mean, do you remember like when you were putting together a look at the show with Paul and obviously with Mark? Yes, I do. Because I remember very specifically how it happened. Because we did The Great Game first. Mm-hmm.
• 1:10:57
  And A Study in Pink was going to be last. And he said, I've got so many cutaways of phones, it's going to be boring. I'm just going to do the lettering on screen. And I thought, ooh, that doesn't sound very good, I said brilliantly. But then I was walking past the cutting room and I popped in to see what was going on. I thought, oh, that looks amazing.
• 1:11:17
  I was writing at the time the dead pink lady scene in A Study in Pink. I just thought, what if you just got a permanent heads-up display? So I did some more stuff with it. And then Charlie, the editor, really ramped that up with lots of crazy things with the lettering and so on. And it became our signature thing, but absolutely came from Paul, yeah.
• 1:11:39
  Yeah, and then you were writing to that. Then I was writing it in, as was Mark. We're actually saying when you've got the thing. But initially, it was just the text. So many texts in the great game. We hadn't thought about it much in a minute. God, it's nothing but shots of phones, which are very, very boring because you've got to hold them long enough for everybody to read it, which means that Sherlock Holmes is a slow reader.
• 1:12:02
  EG's and then the action resumes. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now that invention is still something that I think, I think so much took something from that as well. It was one of the shows that not only was it so brilliant you put together, but it is influence. I think it still pervades. And then, and actually, I mean, I have to mention this as well, because it's such a, another interesting chapter around the same time as Sherlock was, was Tintin. I mean, so far the only movie you've worked on 2010. So around. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I, I, I quit Tintin.
• 1:12:28
  to go on to Doctor Who. So I ran away from L.A. to Cardiff. It had never been done. I don't believe... I don't believe I started much of a wave.
• 1:12:43
  But I told Kathy and Stephen, look, I've been offered Doctor Who. And Charlotte was coming along at last. And they'd been a writer's strike and I'd been delayed on working. I said, I'll do one more draft and I'll go. And so brilliantly, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright came in to take over for me. But it was a very amiable takeover. We were together for a while talking about what we were doing. Yeah.
• 1:13:10
  And Steven Spielberg phoned my house. He did. And said, well, I think it's hard to see you go, but we always need more Doctor Who in the world. I said, okay. So he was a fan. So he was happy. He knew. I think Steven Spielberg, I can't claim to know well. He's a fan of everything geeky. It would be astonishing if he missed Doctor Who. Yeah.
• 1:13:30
  Absolutely. I remember reading up on it, and apparently when he first got you on board, him and Peter Jackson, the quote I saw was that he love-bombed. I think that's extreme. I think I was just offered the job, and I thought, what, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson want me to write a film? Okay, I'll do that. Why not? I don't know how much love-bombing was involved.
• 1:13:55
  Were you a fan of Tintin as well? I didn't know. I loved it when I was a kid. I didn't know it that well. And I went and read them all and tried to find, you know, combine two of the stories, which is roughly what we did. And, yeah, it was good. I was the villain in that case. Normally when you go and do a job in L.A., the producers are the villain. But I left them early and I felt quite bad about it. But, you know, I had the Doctor Who job coming up.
• 1:14:22
  And I wasn't going to say no. And Peter Jackson's obviously a huge Whovian as well. Yes, he's very much. Oh, yeah, he's got, he's proper. I used to have to, I'd forgotten this though, just this very second there. It was back in the days before things were transmitted through the air with special Wi-Fi gnomes or however it works. I would, once the Doctor would say, I'd make a disc for Peter Jackson and send it to him by mail. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:14:51
  So you were pen pals? Yeah, we were pen pals for a while, just so we could get his Doctor Who fakes. Wow. I mean, how did he get it? Because I know that he was a fan. He wanted you on board because he was a fan of the whitewriters. Yeah, absolutely. But this was after I'd left. I was working on other things, but he was saying it takes ages to get them to, by rowing boat to New Zealand or whatever we used in the pre-online era. So I said, oh, I'll post them to you. I'll bring a couple to a see you later.
• 1:15:20
  Nice. I mean, what does it look like when you're sitting in a room in LA with Spielberg and Peter Jackson and those guys? It looks very, very ordinary. Very, very ordinary. The fun part was, before I went to LA, I did spend that much time in LA on the project, actually, but was we'd have regular meetings by what we would now call Zoom.
• 1:15:41
  But it was so primitive. A man came round the house and built something on top of the television. He had to be there all the time. And I would sit in front of the television and their camera would be pointing at me. I think this was amazing. I'd see them on my screen. Just what we normally do with no technology at all. But the trouble was because of the times on differences in New Zealand, LA and Britain, I'd be having my meeting with Stephen and Pisa at about 10 o'clock at night, which I didn't like at all.
• 1:16:10
  And I'd always just be sitting there with my wine glass just out of sight. I'd say, let me just consult my notes.
• 1:16:19
  And then, because as you say, you came on board first before Edgar and Joe Cornish came on. Yeah. And you wrote a draft. Several drafts. I think I did several drafts. And then you left to go work on Dot 2. I mean, when you look at the finished film, because when I watch it back, there is that playfulness in there and that quirks. There's a fair amount of what I did in this, and there's a fair amount of new stuff too. I mean, I couldn't swear.
• 1:16:43
  to which bits were mine the general structure is mine and there's a few lines that are fairly obviously made but uh uh but yeah i mean i felt as though i felt vaguely involved it's the most thing ever hoped for from a hollywood movie for sure i mean and so so far it's like your your main contribution to cinema if you like i mean i just would you ever go back i mean i mean you know would you ever go back to working in film
• 1:17:06
  Well, the trouble, I have got a film, actually, which we're hopefully making next year. It's got funding and so on, so I think we're probably all right. It's difficult now for me because I've been in charge of my own world forever, right? And going back to having to do what anyone tells me might be really difficult, so I don't know. I wouldn't go and do somebody else's movie. I wouldn't say, would you come and screenplay this for us? I wouldn't do that because I've become a megalomaniac and I wouldn't fit in.
• 1:17:35
  Well, I mean, I have to ask, as you mentioned, is there anything you can say about a film? Sounds exciting. I think not at the moment, but it's funny. Gosh. It is actually based on an idea someone brought to me. And it's based on a real thing that happened once. Kind of. Kind of. Or may or may not have happened. I don't really care.
• 1:17:59
  um so uh yeah and i i think it's i think it's quite good fantastic hey well i'm you know i'm here for it you know that's something you know fingers crossed it you know it happens i mean and then coming out of course uh your next project is is number 10 yes and i mean what can you tell us about that project what can we expect from number 10 politicians
• 1:18:18
  Well it's number 10 Downing Street It is a fictional government You never know Which party it is Very ostentatiously As in yes minister Yes prime minister You just never know You actually never know In the thick of it either It was fairly obvious But you never know Which party it is And it's
• 1:18:37
  I suppose relatively, and I wonder if this is me being tone deaf, but we'll see, sympathetic to the extraordinary jobs those people do. I mean, they are impossible. The job of Prime Minister is impossible. It's impossible. You cannot win. You can be the smartest guy in the country, and some of them have been.
• 1:18:57
  And you don't win. You could, for instance, be Gordon Brown. You could be Gordon Brown. And you could save the world from economic catastrophe, as he more or less did, more or less him, right? And lose the next election.
• 1:19:14
  What's he saying? Because he was rude to a lady? I mean, he shouldn't have been. But seriously, you can be Churchill. One of the most extraordinary war leaders the world has ever seen. Maybe the greatest ever and lose the next election. It's impossible, that job. Most of our prime ministers have been, as I actually say in the show, perfectly decent people. Some of them have been extraordinary high achievers. And they go into that job and they go through the big black door.
• 1:19:44
  and the civil service, in a very kindly way, say, okay, see everything you just said there? They got you here? I'll tell you what this job is about. Food on plates, water at a tap, keeping the lights on, stopping everybody killing each other. This is a machine that keeps people alive, and you are now in charge of it. And that machine goes wrong every single day, and every single day of your life, you are going to be trying to fix it.
• 1:20:10
  And if you read all the prime minister's stories, all of them, even the really expert ones, all of them say two years in, you realize you've done nothing except firefight and try and survive your ridiculous diary. So I wanted to write about what it's like to be that guy and to be the people around that guy. Now, we're sitting on this day on the day that Keir Starmer has resigned, roundly produced by.
• 1:20:37
  the geniuses we call journalists as just not very good at anything. I think there's evidence to suggest in his career he's quite a clever man. Apparently he's not a showbiz superstar. Well, Donald Trump is, so you can go there and be happy. No, it's, I mean, and I don't know, I don't know if he's a good prime minister or a bad prime minister, I'm not an expert, but...
• 1:20:55
  it is an extraordinary job and it hollows them out all of them you look at the difference between Tony Blair when he goes through the door and when he comes back out again
• 1:21:08
  You telling me they're not trying? So I wanted to write about that. Not, and it's not, it makes it sound like I'm writing a hymn of praise. I'm really not. It's quite vicious at times. But I think it's relatively balanced. And more than that, what an exciting house. What an exciting, what a way it is. I'm not kidding. Everybody who walks up to that big black door takes a selfie with it.
• 1:21:32
  So you don't hate it, do you? And inside it's this ridiculous knock-through with 17 staircases and toilets that aren't very good.
• 1:21:40
  And every other country in the world is run for a castle or a palace or a mighty building of some sort. And we are run from a little outbreak of Lego in the middle of Whitehall. You know, it's just this funny little street. It's Balamori with the nuclear codes. You know, it's what? What are we run from? And yet, and yet it works.
• 1:22:05
  I know everyone wants to be, wants to explain endlessly what a dreadful place this is. It's kind of not. If you just go and stick a pin in the map or stick a pin in a history book and figure out where you'd rather be, you'll start to realize what a miracle you live inside. It's not, as I say, that I'm writing this,
• 1:22:25
  pamphlet of praise to everybody, not at all. But I think there is somewhere between the hero worship of the brilliant West Wing, I love the West Wing, and between the outright cynicism of the brilliant thick of it that says, well, maybe it's a bit of both, you know? And maybe those people's lives are worth...
• 1:22:48
  putting into a fiction, making... Because some of the stories are so funny. Yes. So funny. That silly house, that knock through. Well, it's like so many things in life. It's neither one... It's a mixture of the two. It's a composite. It's not the thick of it. It's not the worst. It's going to be somewhere in the middle. It's somewhere in the... Yeah, but I wouldn't... I mean, it's not a compromise. It's just... I just think... I've read a lot of the books, and it's just a miracle to me.
• 1:23:18
  that such a place exists and has done so successfully. And I, I, I sometimes despair of our knee jerk cynicism. I think our cynicism is our protection. So long as we believe that everything goes wrong because everybody else is stupid.
• 1:23:37
  then we won't ever embrace the darker truth that maybe everything is just really hard. Yeah, because that requires a bit more emotional... It requires empathy. Yes. Which, as we were saying before we started rolling, I feel like you don't always see as much these days. Well, no, we're not very good with empathy or never have been with politicians. I don't know why. We treat politicians as if they're...
• 1:23:57
  overpaid and powerful they're underpaid and powerless is what they are we don't have powerful it's not like that they scrabble around looking for money to do anything I talk to loads of them you've got to understand it doesn't matter which kind of government it is forget all that
• 1:24:17
  When they say we don't have the money, it's because they don't have the money. No money. Yeah. None. And it's refreshing to hear this because I feel like I say, it's not been said enough. Like, you know, they're people too. They should be treated as such. And, you know, they're not, you know, they're not wealthy. They're not powerful. It's not like that. We shake our fists all the time.
• 1:24:43
  And I think we could do better than that. But let's see. Maybe I've said too much. Cut all that.
• 1:24:49
  Well, I think that's a fine note to wrap up on, Steve. I mean, you know, it's aspiring. You know, we can always just inspire more to be something greater than what we already are. But this has been an absolutely fantastic chat, conversation. You know, it's been great hearing you just take us down memory lane of working on some of the shows you've done. Of course, Dot 2, Sherlock, and then Number 10. I can't wait for it to come out. It sounds like we need some of that now in this sort of coming climate. We need more empathy. We need more, even for the people that we really don't want to give it to. So thanks so much for coming on the show. And I can't wait for the next one.
• 1:25:19
  Pleasure. Thank you very much.