Click here to listen to the Fast Ood Rocker's tribute to the Kylie-Doctor Who team-up

It is almost exactly a year ago – December 2006. We’re at a party in London to celebrate the Doctor Who Christmas special premiere. There is an ebullient sense of anything being possible – not least because we are at a social occasion at which both the Daleks and the Tardis are present, right next to the table of free wine.

At some point during the party, two men leaning on a Dalek start a conversation. They are Edward Russell, Doctor Who’s suave brand manager, and Will Baker – Russell’s friend, and, slightly more infamously, Kylie Minogue’s stylist/photographer/“gay husband”.

Baker is a huge Doctor Who fan. Russell has previously fixed it for Baker to visit the Doctor Who set, go into the Tardis, feel the tentacles of the Ood, etc. Now, at the party, Russell muses on how Baker might try to pay him back for these favours.

“You could get Kylie to do a role in Doctor Who,” Russell suggests, perhaps not wholly seriously. Baker is enthused by the idea. What’s more, he thinks Kylie will be. After a few more glasses of white wine, the two of them canter tipsily up to the writer Russell T. Davies, the man in charge of Doctor Who, and outline their proposal. “How intriiiii-guing,” Davies says, stroking his chin.

The next day, a phone call is placed. Three days later, in an extremely covert operation, Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner, the executive producer, meet Kylie in London.

Two months further on, the first rumours of Kylie’s involvement with the Christmas special appear in the tabloids. Everyone denies everything.

May 2007

The first tone meeting. This is what tone meetings are: everyone is gathered together in an almost wholly airless room at the BBC in Cardiff. We have the heads of make-up, costume, photography, lighting, practical effects, publicity, prosthetics, personnel and representatives from an independent special effects company, the Mill. Everyone is gathered around a gigantic conference table. Here, tea is drunk, a box of sad-looking doughnuts is attacked, and industry chitchat is made. Then, one by one, every head of department explains, very cheerfully, why the show can’t actually be made.

It starts well. Russell T. Davies, writer and executive producer, arrives with Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson, the producer. These are Doctor Who’s Three Musketeers – the three who relaunched the show, four years ago, after it had languished for 16 years in a semi-mocked abeyance.

Their working chemistry is complex, but boils down to Davies – tall, joyous and exuberant – coming up with vaultingly ambitious ideas for the show, that Gardner – small, Welsh and fiery, with explosive hair – fights tooth and nail in a series of dull meetings to achieve, while constantly, lovingly prodding Davies to make it better. “Make me cry here,” she’ll say, during a script meeting. Collinson, meanwhile, affects an airy, wry disconnection from the whole process.

“Welcome to the Christmas special!” Davies says, opening the meeting. There is a big pause. Everyone considers the fat script on the table in front of them. “There are a lot of shots, aren’t there?” Davies says, finally. This is greeted with stoic, wartime laughter. “A lot of shots” is the least of it. As a TV production, Doctor Who is unprecedented. There is an almost wholly new cast and new set every week, and many episodes have as many special effects and prosthetics as a Hollywood movie. The scale, ambition and logistics are the stuff of small coronary failures. And yet, this is a children’s TV show, shot in Wales, by the BBC.

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