The future starts here
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Monday September 24, 2007 18:26:40 GMT
Tonight, Jane Tranter [BBC One Controller of Fiction] and Julie Gardner
[executive producer] are having dinner with Steven Moffat. The future starts
here! Mind you, what if he says no?
From: Benjamin Cook
To: Russell T. Davies
Monday September 24, 2007 18:36:15 GMT
Of course he won't say no. He won't, will he? He'll say yes. Who'd say no?...
It's the best job in the world.
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Friday September 28, 2007 16:11:31 GMT
Steven just e-mailed me. He admitted, in an unguarded moment, that YES, HE'S
GOING TO DO DOCTOR WHO! So that's exciting.
Hacked off
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Saturday October 20, 2007 15:57:05 GMT
I'm interviewed in The Guardian today. Yet another interview in which I'm
portrayed as giggling, primping and lipsticked. In this one, I keep
squeezing the journalist's arm and practically burst into tears at one
point. What a load of b******s. As if. I've read so many of those camped-up
interviews now. I'm almost beginning to suspect it's true. That's sobering.
Mrs Who
Note: Steven Moffat, who will take control of Doctor Who in 2010, was
already lined up to write two episodes of the most recent series. This gave
him the chance to establish a significant new character.
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Saturday October 27, 2007 19:44:02 GMT
He's written 4.9 already, so I've read that. It's called Silence in the
Library, and it has a character in it who I'm just sure is the Doctor's wife
(!!!), but I don't like to ask.
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Saturday December 1, 2007 14:35:44 GMT
In the early hours of this morning, Steven Moffat delivered 4.10! [Episode
name: Forest of the Dead] At last! It's brilliant, of course. Such an
imagination, it's staggering. I'm not sure I understand it yet, but then I
read it at about 3am. We're trying to get Kate Winslet for River Song, who's
sort of the Doctor's wife.
Iceberg ahead
From: Benjamin Cook
To: Russell T. Davies
Wednesday December 19, 2007 11:20:01 GMT
As press launches go [for the Christmas 2007 special, Voyage of the Damned]
that wasn't too bad... was it?
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Wednesday December 19, 2007 23:01:36 GMT
I've been meaning to answer your e-mail about last night's launch, but I
couldn't face it.
I hated it. Hated it. I still feel sour... Next second, it's that parade of
cameras, GMTV, BBC Breakfast, BBC News, Newsround, and you find yourself
spouting The Lines, like a puppet. Worse, you slip into showbiz speak. I
find myself saying things like “There are lots of great surprises coming
up.” Who talks like that?! Real people don't talk like that! In the middle
of the line-up, I say hello to Russell Tovey [actor who plays Midshipman
Frame]. He's in front of GMTV. I'm with Newsround. We both look
embarrassed... Then it's the screening. We're hustled to our seats. “That's
Russell Tovey's boyfriend,” someone points out - and a whole fantasy night
dies in my mind... After the screening, we get speeches praising me. I would
rather die, I swear. I just wish they'd stop it. I don't recognise that
person at all. That's not modesty - I think I'm brilliant! - but I'm not the
person in those speeches. It just gets so awkward. Do you clap when everyone
claps you? I do, but then I feel stupid.
I'm imagining someone saying, “Look at that tosser clapping himself!” It's
very hard to stop a clap once you've started. Then it's the Q&A. I hate
the Q&A.
I hate any Q&A. I'm 44 and balding and putting on weight, in a cheap suit
because nothing else was clean and my alarm didn't go off; the last thing I
want to do is sit in front of 500 people... Then it's the party afterwards.
But I can't relax. It's all work. In three hours, I have half an apple juice
and half a Coke. I have to speak to everyone. That's my job. Signing
autographs for kids, which is nice, but then the MPs, the bloody MPs... The
one time I do get five minutes to myself, one of the sci-fi magazine men is
drunk and won't leave me alone, while I'm fending off his sly, smiling
insults (“That was a fun episode, wasn't it? Just fun!”), and then I find
myself with two gay boys who work as researchers in Parliament, and they're
gorgeous, but it turns out that they're with the Shadow Secretary of
Something. I'm thinking, would I sleep with a Tory?
But then they're telling me that they were 13 when Queer as Folk [Davies's
breakthrough drama first shown on Channel 4 in 199?] was on, and I realise
that I'm as old as George Bernard Shaw to them... then more bloody MPs, and
there's the nice man from The Guardian, all smiles and hellos, the same man
who wrote a Guardian blog last week describing Doctor Who as the Most
Overrated TV Show of the Year, but I'm smiling back, because they can write
what they like. And it goes on and on and on. When I say I hate it, I'm
really so unhappy - and smiling like an idiot. A hundred versions of me, and
every single one sounds like a fool.
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Friday December 21, 2007 02:02:51 GMT
Guess what else? We've cast Alex Kingston as River Song in Steven's
two-parter! ALEX KINGSTON! I bloody love her. Alex Kingston is the Doctor's
wife!
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Monday December 24, 2007 03:24:43 GMT
I didn't finish [the episode he is working on]. Damn and crap and b******s! I
don't think I've got time tomorrow. I haven't bought a single card or
present yet, and I have to go to Swansea tomorrow night. Christmas with my
blind dad. I sit and describe to him what's happening on TV. “The Host have
hooked arms with the Doctor, and they're flying him up, up, up through the
ship...” I have a laugh doing that. I make things up. “They're on fire!”
There's no budget when you're blind.
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Sunday January 13, 2008 01:43:22 GMT
Steven Moffat e-mailed me earlier and said, almost in passing...
“Another thing: I've started. I've written the first few pages of my first
episode. Couldn't stop myself. It was like incontinence. Well, hopefully not
completely like incontinence. But anyway.”
He's started! Oh my God, I'm old news.
Cybermen for Christmas
Note: his idea to cast J.K. Rowling in this year's Christmas special
came to nothing. Davies is working on his alternative story.
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Sunday January 27, 2008 09:00:23 GMT
Lordy God. Panic. I've been having a lot of thoughts - nothing coherent, not
yet - for ages, but the rush of scripts has been so great that I haven't had
time to tell you. Cybermen, Victoriana, a swordfight on the roof with
Cybershades (Cyberman heads in flowing black robes, like wraiths, sort of
creepy half-Cybermen), workhouse kids as slaves... That's all the normal
plot stuff. The real heart of it is the beginning: the Doctor arrives, hears
a damsel in distress, the Doctor steps forward to save her... when this
other man [to be played by David Morrissey] swings in, dashing, brilliant,
amazing, clever, witty, saves the day. The Doctor says, “Who are you?” The
man says, “I'm the Doctor!” Good scene. The Doctor becomes his companion. I
like that. Sweet. There will be a beautiful woman too, of course, but really
it's the Doctor paired with a new Doctor.
Hearing voices
From: Russell T. Davies
To: Benjamin Cook
Tuesday March 4, 2008 02:18:21 GMT
The best title for this episode would be The Two Doctors... but maybe not. The
New Doctor, perhaps? Or The Next Doctor? I quite like The Next Doctor. I'm
glad to have started, though worried by what's to come. I had a fair bit of
Cybermen-in-Victoriana worked out, but this two Doctors story, the real
story, is so strong that it's sort of knocking out everything else. That's
good. It shows that it's a strong concept. But it's kind of left me
clutching broken bits of story. Then again, a lot of that Cybermen stuff was
dark - graveyards and things - whereas this new stuff is fun and lively,
it's even going to get knockabout, and that's good for Christmas Day...
You ask how a writer finds their voice. Now, that's a question!... Gaining a
voice, whatever that is, comes with experience and practice - and the
writing, again, is indivisible from the person. Your voice tends to be
something that other people talk about, about you. It's not something that
you think about much yourself, and certainly not whilst writing. I never -
never - sit here thinking, what's my voice? You might as well ponder, who am
I? It is, in fact, exactly the same thing. You can wonder your whole life
and you'll never get an answer to that. After all these years of wondering,
I've never realised those last four sentences quite so clearly! This Great
Correspondence does me good.
So the voice exists simply because you exist. You find your voice by writing,
by experience. You can see voices in scripts, can't you? The difference
between Steven's and mine? And it's always such a reflection of the person.
I mean, look at Steven: he's all tough and Scottish, full of lethal gags (both
in life and in script), and quite a lustful man, I think, a writer clearly
driven by sex. More significantly, under that gruff exter- ior, a wonderful
and romantic man, who hates to give that away - except in his writing.
Again, again, again, scripts don't just live in Script World; they exist
alongside everything else that you love and hate in your whole, wide, mad,
lovely life. You copy from - or rather, are influenced by - everything...
It's so important to start writing, because then the process never, ever ends.
Finding your voice isn't the last stage, just another stage along the way.
You reach the top of that mountain, only to see a whole bloody, endless
range of mountains waiting beyond. You've a million more things to reach
for, a million more variations on your voice to articulate.
©Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook 2008.
Extracted from Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale, to be published by BBC Books on
September 25, RRP £30. Available from TimesBooksFirst for £27, free p&p.
0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
