Russell T Davies Time Out Interview

Russell T Davies was recently interviewed for the latest issue of Time Out Magazine. In the interview, Russell discusses how The Tenth Doctor may regenerate, if the world of Doctor Who is a biblical parallel, troubles with the bus from Planet of the Dead and much more. You can read two extracts from the interview below:

What are your particular highs and lows of working on the series?
'Everything’s a high! It’s all marvellous! I honestly don’t think we’ve made a bad episode. Some experiments might not work, but even the failures are glorious. This programme was dead. It was a joke. To see it now, doing so well, so alive and with kids loving it so much and clutching their Dalek toys… Cardiff is a bit of a "Doctor Who" tourism magnet now, so I get children walking up to me and saying how much they love or hate things. I sound sentimental, but it’s the greatest privilege in the world. It’s astonishing. Before we started on "Doctor Who" we had serious BBC research saying we’d never get the young audience back because they’ve got "Harry Potter", "Star Wars", Xboxes… I believed that research and fell into that Daily Mail trap of writing kids off as knife-carrying hoodies and demonising them, but this show talks creatively to children in masse and sparks their imagination. To see that is the greatest high, it’s revolutionised my opinion of children. I realised how cynical I’d been. The low point would be the workload, but it’s entirely of my own making. We were determined to make Wales a centre for TV production, and now they’re filming "Casualty" there, but that meant inventing "The Sarah Jane Adventures" and "Torchwood". That was maybe a bit mad, and I’ve neglected and ignored people as a result. All through my own fault. But I’d do the same again. They can wait – tough ****! Ha ha!'

Do you have any parting advice for Steven Moffat?
'We did have a big lunch, but what can I tell him about drama? He knows everything already. The only thing I could say was about BBC structures, keep your eye on that department, don’t believe a word she says, listen to everything he says, that sort of thing. But he doesn’t even need that, it’s all common sense. I had a list of about 500 things to tell him, but I launched into them then just stopped, and we just gossiped and had a laugh and talked about "Doctor Who". We had a nice talk about writers and who’d be good. We’ve been doing this for five years, and every system builds up its own eccentricities. It takes a cold eye to say: "What are you doing that for?" And we’d say, well we’ve been doing it that way since day one. So someone new will say, what a waste of time, just cut the middleman out and so on.'

The full interview with Russell T Davies can be read by clicking here at the official Time Out website. What do you think of this interview?