“Probably the nearest we’ll get to a day-to-day diary of ‘How it happened, as it happened’…”
It’s difficult to imagine any other British television series that has been quite so thoroughly researched and documented as Doctor Who. From the publication of The Making of Doctor Who in 1972 to the most recent episode of BBC Three’s Doctor Who Confidential, an ever more knowledgeable and demanding audience has sought out every detail of the show’s production. Magazine and book publishers have been able to satisfy this craving thanks to both the scale of the prospective readership and the fact that some fans are willing to spend years tracking down those lost memos and department reports from the obsidian depths of the BBC’s administrative archives.
Of course, relatively little ‘behind the scenes’ coverage is written by those directly involved in the show’s production; and when it has, enough time has usually passed to smooth at least some of the sharper memories. Not so Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale. By collecting together a year’s worth of emailed correspondence between Russell T Davies (head writer and executive producer) and journalist Benjamin Cook (who has been ‘embedded’ into the production for several years, and is therefore as close as you can get to Doctor Who without being on the BBC’s payroll), this book is probably the nearest we’ll get to a day-to-day diary of ‘How it happened, as it happened’.
Cook’s initial interest was in exploring ‘the nuts and bolts’ of writing a Doctor Who script, and the book is infused with Davies’s view on the subject: from practical suggestions on how to emphasise the pace of a scene in the way you format the stage directions, to the honing of dialogue. Plus, of course, that vitally important lesson that every writer ultimately has to find their own way of writing.
Which is just as well. Unlike his contemporary Paul Abbott, who writes a first draft and then focuses on what the story is about - deciding what works and what doesn’t before starting a second draft - Davies’s approach is more intuitive. “I don’t often do treatments or breakdowns,” he warns Cook at the start. “There’s little physical evidence of the script process to show you. No notes. Nothing. I think, and think and think… and by the time I come to write, a lot has been decided.” That approach certainly seems to fit with Davies’s public persona, of the big man who exudes self-confidence from every pore.
The surprise of the book is the picture of Davies as a man so paralysed by the fear of not writing anything good that he will procrastinate for weeks about even starting a script. “That’s where this job is knackering and debilitating,” he writes. “Everything - and I mean every story written anywhere - is underscored by the constant murmur of: this is rubbish, I am rubbish, and this is due in on Tuesday!” Which may well explain why most of Davies’s longest emails are written in the darkest hours just before dawn.
The irony is that once he starts writing, all his anticipated problems magically sort themselves out; yet he’s unable to learn from this. “I can only conclude that I’ve lumbered myself with a painful system that works,” he explains during one particular long, dark email of the soul. “Is it like a superstition that I have to panic in order to write well? It drives me mad.” No wonder his Doctor Who successor Steven Moffat said: “If you still want to be a writer after reading this, then you probably will be.”
Paul F Cockburn
