“Possibly the best behind-the-scenes Doctor Who book ever written…”

PICK OF THE MONTH!

>> The Writer’s Tale
Written by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook
Foreword by Philip Pullman RRP £30.00

The Writer’s Tale covers a year of email conversations on the writing and production of Series Four of Doctor Who between head writer and executive producer Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook, journalist and regular contributor to Doctor Who Magazine. As Davies says, 7.9 million of Doctor Who’s audience don’t care who writes the series - they just want it to be good. But to the fans, this is a huge area of interest. Where does Davies get his ideas from? Who can he rely on to be brutally honest with him? Who’ll stop him from going too far? Anyone? No-one? How much does he re-write other writers’ work? And what do they think about it?

Davies has been interviewed a hundred times, so the way in which he formulates a script is familiar. It bubbles around in his head for days, weeks, months, with the ideas coming to him in a crazy order. The end first. An exciting action sequence somewhere near the middle. A juicy bit of dialogue two-thirds of the way through. Davies never writes ‘treatments’ or ‘breakdowns’, except for Kylie Minogue and Voyage of the Damned. She’s a big enough star for Davies to make an exception. Everyone else makes do with what they’re told. Except that they don’t. Davies likes his ideas to exist in the ‘maybe’. Discussing them makes them feel too real. It cuts down possibilities. Limits his options.

What is less well-known and perhaps revealed for the first time (Cook’s about as close to the production of Doctor Who as you can get without being staff, and even he seems surprised by it) is how Davies never feels ready to start a script. It all comes pouring out in an email dated 3 April 2007, 2:34am. The panic. The torment. The cold ‘black cloud of fear and failure’ that keeps him looking at his computer but never touching it. Cook replies that everyone who writes feels a bit like that. (And he’s right. I delayed writing this review for a day or two because I know both of the authors will be reading this issue of DWM, and because this is an important book - possibly the best behind-the-scenes Doctor Who book ever written - I didn’t want to muck it up.) But Davies’ inability to start is completely crippling. The email is clearly Davies hoping to break the pattern, to exorcise the demons. It doesn’t work. To write well, he has to be in a blind panic - and he hates it.

It’s this kind of honesty that makes the book unputdownable. Asked whether you have to be a bastard to succeed in the industry, Davies replies that he thinks he might be, explaining that he’s just opted for The Fire of Pompeii script over a World War II one that Mark Gatiss has been working on for over a year: ‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘I didn’t care. And this isn’t some stranger, this is Mark! Lovely, brilliant Mark!’ Later, he’s upfront about how annoyed he is that, to make other scripts work, he’s having to rob ideas he was going to use for his own series finale.

Cook has chosen a choice year for his correspondence. From the fun stuff - Kylie, Catherine Tate and the return of Martha and Rose - to the more serious - press leaks, Tone Meetings, Series Five’s hiatus and Davies stepping down from the job - all is fascinatingly discussed. This is an essential purchase.

Vanessa Bishop