david darlington

Rona Munro: "You're Killing My Lesbian Subtext...!!"

If you were feeling uncharitable, you could describe Rona Munro as 'the woman who killed Doctor Who' – for, as writer of Survival, the last serial broadcast in the show's first 26 year run, she undeniably undertook the unenviable task of bringing it to an untimely and premature, if thankfully impermanent, end. Me, as someone who loves Survival more that should really be legal, I prefer to think of her as the writer who strove to enable the show to go out at maximum power, all guns blazing. In the years since, she's done a lot of respected and award-winning work in the theatre and for the cinema, but not so much on television – and, more perplexingly, she's hardly ever spoken on the record about her brief, bright-burning stint on Doctor Who… until now!

Doctor Who seems to stand alone in terms of your writing career – you've not done much mainstream television in that respect. How did you get into writing, and how did you then get from writing to writing Doctor Who?

I got into writing really through theatre, and that was way back in the 1980s. And then I suppose I got into Doctor Who through doing Casualty… or was it the other way round? It was the other way round! I did the Doctor Who first, didn't I? So… how did the Doctor Who come about? I know! The BBC set up a little workshop week for people… I'd done quite a lot of radio at that point as well as theatre, and they put together a whole bunch of us, and the idea was that we'd go on this training week about writing for telly. I think Andrew Cartmel, who was then the Doctor Who script editor, was along at that, and I think I just grabbed his trouser leg and said I'd kill to write for Doctor Who.

So had you been a fan of the show before that?

God, yeah! I remember the first ever ones. Everyone has their clichés about hiding behind the sofa, but I did that, you know. I must have been about three or four, and I don't remember what the plot was, but I remember – it was William Hartnell, wasn't it? And they were going through some kind of tunnel or something, which aged them. And they had to carry something incredibly heavy, and as they were going they were getting older and older, and the human people with him were ageing and ageing and fell over dead. And I found that utterly terrifying – that terrified me more than the Daleks, it was one of those intimation of mortality. I think that was the first one, or it was pretty early on…

As you were talking I twigged which one it was – it was a thing called The Daleks Master Plan, a very long story, twelve episodes long, that went everywhere in the universe. One that doesn't exist any more!

Really? Well, it's in there [taps head]! That sequence is embedded, it's hard-wired in my head…

What sort of stuff had you been doing before Doctor Who, though – I did a little bit of research and discovered that you worked on [BBC comedy sketch show] A Kick Up The Eighties…

Oh God, yes I did. I co-wrote comedy with a guy called Jerry Chester – we started doing that in university, and then doing shows at the Edinburgh Festival, because you could put on a show for tuppence-ha'penny then, and people would come and see just about anything, it wasn't the big, slick commercial machine that it is now. And we did that, I think, at three Festivals, and then we did A Kick Up The Eighties and something else of that stable…

Were you just part of a huge team on that? You tend to think of a huge room full of writers sitting round a table…

It wasn't even that, it was us sitting in our wee student bedsit bashing out sketches, and sending them in, and if you were lucky you were one of the ones that was used that week.

Give us one of your gags! Or can you not even remember them…? I remember the show but not any individual moments from it.

Can't remember the sketches at all – they had a topical element as well, so they probably wouldn't even mean anything now.

What about your theatre work – what sort of subject matter were you covering, and in what sort of styles?

Not self-consciously any style – the first professionally produced work I had was two that came in the same year. One was a thing called Hardware for Scottish Television, and one was a stage play called Fugue at the Traverse theatre, and I think those were in 1981, 82. Hardware was kind of an analysis of… er, oh dear.

Is this going to be very pretentious?

Oh God, yes! It was at that time – and it didn't seem self-conscious or clunky, but the kind of sexual politics was the thing, and I suppose we were all examining that, and I was particularly. I got very involved with 'Women Live', which was an arts organisation at the time which was funded by the GLC, and at one point actually had national funding - though of course when the GLC went, it all went. And that was really about promoting women in the arts, and it was through that really that I got my first gig, which was a play called The Salesman – and from that, going on, I got Fugue and Hardware. Hardware was about everyone's ideas of pre-history – kind of like Survival in a way, the idea that there are savage… that people killing other people is what made us evolve as a species, whereas if you actually look at what anthropologists say, the emphasis is actually on the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You look at how hunter-gatherers live, and killing meat would just not sustain you – you'd simply die, you'd burn up so much energy trying to catch something and your success rate is so low that in fact what sustains you is walking around as a group, grabbing what you can, 'gathering' – so it was about co-operation, about working as a group, and your meat is your treat. So the idea that we evolved as a culture or a species by dunting other things on the head is… one I would question! And I questioned it in this play.

It seems that there is a very political undertone there – you mentioned GLC funding a moment ago, and this certainly sounds like the sort of thing that would have annoyed the Daily Mail a bit at the time.

I suppose. Again, when Scottish Television did this - these things don't seem to exist any more, do they? – it was to give breaks to first-time writers in telly. So they were very low-budget, and everyone knew that they were 'baby plays'.

Kind of like Play For Today on BBC1 used to be?

Yes, but nothing like as high-status, or as big a commitment behind it. And it was a one-off, I don't think they did it again! We killed that golden goose…

And what about the radio work, was that in the same sort of vein, or were you working for other series that had been established?

I was writing for a series called Kilbreck, which was a kind of Scottish version of The Archers. It ran for quite a few years, it was a guy called David Campbell at Radio Scotland who fought and fought to keep its funding going because they kept trying to axe it. Much like Doctor Who at the time I was working on it! But just as The Archers was set up to give farmers information about what they should be putting on their crops – it's hard for us to believe, but that's how it started – this was supposed to be doing the same thing with a health education message. I remember one of my first scripts, I had to do a whole story segment about thrush, and how to deal with it and how to identify it, within the context of a drama. Which was quite interesting! But the thing about Kilbreck was, there were four writers, and there were five episodes a week. And you would be responsible for a week, so you'd basically have your turn come round, and then it would be over and you'd have a bare three weeks to write another week's worth of episodes – and they were twenty minutes each, so that was a hell of a lot of script. And you had to produce it really fast – actually, that was a really good training for me, because I remember when I was doing the telly play, explicitly getting the advice from the producer of "Ddon't go down the route of writing for series and serials or writing for soap operas, because that will turn you into a hack writer". And you think, well, thanks, but I do kind of need to eat!. And Kilbreck came up, and I went for it, and I really feel, looking back, completely vindicated - because I think I learned my craft doing that.

It's easy to be aloof and say 'my art is my art', but if you haven't got the techniques, you're not going to be capable of producing your best work – you do need to learn how to write to order, almost…

Absolutely! And I think this idea that there's high art and popular art and that one is in some way superior to the other is just a load of absolute tosh – it's such an artificial definition created by academics and the 'quality' press, and it really makes me cross, actually. Makes me very cross.

So, when you grabbed Andrew Cartmel and said "I want to do Doctor Who"… what did he say?

He was really thrilled! I think, because of what we've just been talking about… obviously at the time, as you probably know, Doctor Who was absolutely struggling. The BBC would have killed it quite happily if it wasn't for the fanbase keeping it going, I think. So Andrew was quite beleaguered. And also we were at this workshop where we were all supposed to be coming from theatre, and I'd done a couple of stage plays at that time and one had won some awards, and I think some of the others had as well, and so to have someone come up to him all excited and saying 'Doctor Who!!!' – I think he was quite chuffed really.

So did you approach him with an idea – I want these big cats, I want these themes about misunderstandings of Darwinism, about how we evolved, about the animal inside of us all – or was that something the two of you chatted about endlessly for months?

I wish I could remember in more detail, but we did do a lot of talking, and I do know, looking back, that for all I'm going on about learning my craft and mastering plot, I think I was still way too sloppy on basic things which are really crucial, like the logic – I adore science fiction, I absolutely adore it, and I think one of the reasons I adore it is that I don't feel that I'm brilliant at achieving it. And I think one of the reasons I'm not brilliant at it is that you've got to have a consistent logic of whatever your concept it, whereas I tend to be a bit "Never mind about the logic, it would be cool if this happened". Yes – but why is that happening? And Andrew had to do quite a lot of work with me on that, and looking at Survival now, I still think I could have probably have been hammered a bit harder to simplify it.

Terry Nation, who invented the Daleks, I think came from the same side as you in that case – he would say "It's my planet and I can do whatever I like, volcanoes with ice coming out of them or whatever". But the other side of the argument is that if you're going to have volcanoes with ice coming out of them, someone has to explain how that works…

Exactly! And of course I have that thing about "How do the cheetah people get from their world to our world" – that whole thing about the cat coming through, the cat forming the portal… how do they get back the other way? I think – I wouldn't care to do it, but I'm sure studious people like yourself might have done it – if you nail down that whole logic of how they get to and fro… it might start to creak a little.

I'm not sure about that. You have two things happening – you have a catflap, albeit a catflap on a five-dimensional scale, and also the predators, the hunter-gatherers if you like, can only return home with their prey. And that seems to make sense – possibly not in a purely scientific way, but then it's Doctor Who and you can't really do detailed science to the nth degree anyway.

I think it's complicated because I wanted the little pussycat coming through – and the reason I wanted that was because it looked so cool, to have something so ordinary actually be the forerunner of incredible violence, of hideous things happening. But I think it was one level of logic too many, possibly.

I think you're being hard on yourself, but fair enough. So, at the time, Andrew had brought in quite a lot of new writers, and I get the impression he was almost trying to form a 'rep company' of his writers, the people he wanted to employ and that he felt comfortable working with. Did you get that feeling that you were working as part of a team in that way?

Yes, very much so, and he was great at that, at making us feel like we were working together really. I was coming down from Scotland at the time, and it was just a great chance to hang out with other writers in London. Very briefly, but it was still really nice - I really enjoyed that side of it.

Did you get to meet the lead actors, as well? Apparently quite a lot of the writers got the chance to meet Sylvester and Sophie and chat about what they wanted to do…

No I didn't, I think for two reasons. One was the expense of bringing me down, but more than that was that I was then heavily involved in politics at the time. There was a whole group of us going over to Nicaragua – it was the time when America was stealth-bombing and the spy-planes were going over, so the idea was that we were supposed to go over to coffee plantations and be a human shield. I did not have a clue, by the way! I had no idea – I just thought, let's do that, it'll be exciting. So I was kind of committed to doing that at the same time that they were filming. It's weird, as well – and I was thinking about this as I was coming in to meet you – I had an instinct that I kind of wanted to let it go completely. I think that was partly my nerves, feeling that I was a bit of a spare cog, just a wee writer, you know? And partly I was already… the design was not going the way we had hoped, and stuff like that. And I just thought I didn't want to go along and be upset, really. Because the Cheetah People shouldn't have looked like that.

What should they have looked like?

It should have just had cheetah eyes and a very faint pigmentation round of cheetah spots, and big canine teeth. And in fact, I think the actors that were cast, from what I was told, were doing all this wonderful expressive facial work, and then these 'Puss In Boots' things were dropped on them – and so then you can't see what they're doing under there. Particularly Karra and Ace, there were whole amazing scenes between them and for me, that was supposed to be my lesbian subtext – and you can't see it!

Oh, you can..!

Oh good! There's a lot of stuff about moonwater and things…

Now that one didn't even occur to me… but in preparing this interview I checked with a few mates in case I was forgetting anything obvious I should ask, and three straight men came back to me straight away saying "Ask her about the lesbian subtext!".

Oh yeah, definitely. And I couldn't kick up a fuss, either – if I'd said "Hang on a minute, you're killing my lesbian subtext", they'd probably have screamed…

Why did you think that Doctor Who was the place for a lesbian subtext?

Anywhere is the place for a lesbian subtext! And again, it was the eighties, and we were all really conscious that there were certain elements missing from mainstream culture and, as far as possible, if you got a chance to chuck them in there, you were duty-bound to do it. The same as having an Asian character – it looks a bit clunky now, but at the time you actually had to fight for those things, and you could only do it – Alan Plater told me this trick later, and I'd inadvertently done it – he told me that basically if you say "This character's Asian" they won't let you have that character, but if you give a character an Asian name, a name they can't assume won't be anything else, then they'll get you an Asian actor, or a black actor, or whatever. And what's that? Fifteen years ago? Seventeen years?

It's easy to forget, I suppose – this was the period when EastEnders was still getting in trouble for having gay characters in. It seems like the dark ages…

It does – and the fact that things like that were even noticeable…

Yes – whereas these days there seem to be half a dozen gay characters in Coronation Street at any given moment…

…and they're in The Archers now! And middle England is not happy about that.

I'm sure middle England is not happy about a great many things! Coming back to what you were saying about the anthropological side of things, that's all very much to the fore in Survival, it's all about how we have baser instincts and we shouldn't be giving in to them. It's actually quite thematically heavy for Doctor Who – on television, at that stage, it was just starting to put ideas like that in. Were you aware that this was quite unusual as you were doing it, or did you think 'this is how it should be'.

I suppose that didn't occur to me – and I suppose also that the episodes of Doctor Who that had stuck with me had been like that. And I was a huge Trekkie. Was I a Trekkie by then? When did Next Generation start?

1987 – it had been going for a couple of years…

Yeah – and I think they really pushed that up a notch in terms of having big metaphorical episodes, and I loved all that.

Not always the subtlest things in the world…

No – especially the early ones. But I loved all that, and I also think that I had come from this background of slightly worthy, potentially pretentious kind of pieces of theatre that were supposed to be 'saying something'. So it was automatic, that that was what you were supposed to do, really.

So by the time it actually hit the screen, were you still feeling disappointed with what was there, or had you adjusted to it?

Still disappointed, yeah – at two levels. It was nice, actually, not to have been involved in the shoot, because then when I saw it, the things that worked well in it were lovely surprises, and the things I didn't like I already knew about. So that was okay really. But there are really just two areas of disappointment. One is the design - and I'm sure it's some poor soul whose name I don't even know who I'm slagging hideously by saying that – and the other is some of my own plotting. I wished I'd had more time to write it. Oh, and the other thing I really, really regret is that of course we didn't know we were writing the last series. We hoped we weren't – and also we didn't know what order they were going in, so I didn't know that it was potentially the last Doctor Who ever, and thank God it's not. Had I known that, obviously I'd have written that third episode differently. And in fact, the very last section is written by Andrew - that little dialogue is all Andrew, because I was out of the country when he realised this was going to be the last one and he had to tie it off.

What would you have done differently, in that case? I actually quite like the fact that there's nothing obviously 'final' about it, apart from possibly in terms of what it does with Ace, bringing her back to her origins – but other than that it's a Doctor Who story that's not hugely, universe-threateningly portentous, it's just a story, a good one, that finishes well and then it stops… and I quite like that.

And it's probably good now that it has been revived, and if I had provided them with an epic ending it might have been harder to revive it! You're probably right, but at the time I felt that I had let the fans down a bit. And the other one that gets me - and oh, I'm so ashamed of it! – how does the Doctor survive the collision on the motorbike? He goes up in the air, does he? What happened there?

Are you blaming yourself for that?

I am blaming myself for that, I am!

Because I think that bit is potentially a little bit eggy, but you get away with it because the line's very good – the Master laughs and runs off, and the Doctor says "Oh, very good, very amusing" and Sylv delivers it well. So it could have been quite silly, but they managed to ride the slight stickiness of it…

I think my fond hope was that some wonderful piece of special effects was going to go in there which suggested whatever it was that the Doctor had done, possibly involving a quick leap through a catflap – but in the script, there was a hole…

To be fair, you were neither the first nor the last person to make the mistake of assuming that they can do more with special effects than they can… were you always aware that you were going to be writing for the Master, and did you know of his history?

I did! I was given the Master at an early stage and I was thrilled, because I think in terms of Doctor Who's adversaries, because he's got a character… do you know what I mean? Daleks are fine, everyone's got their favourite monster, but the thing about the Master is that he's the Doctor's equal, his nemesis, and his dark twin, in a way, and that's all, in character terms, so rich. So I was really happy to have that, actually. There were the two actors who did it – what was the first guy's name?

Roger Delgado…

He was fabulous! And whatshisface, Anthony Ainley, was good as well – but Roger Delgado terrified the bejesus out of me as a child.

It's interesting that a lot of people who had gone off the Master for a while liked him in Survival, because he actually got to kill some people in that one! It was nice to see him really getting to be the bad guy because he had become a little bit silly and inconsequential after a while…

Yeah, a bit pantomime villain.

Whereas in Survival he was a vicious bastard, which worked quite well. Something most writers were doing at that time, and you did yourself, was novelise your script…

Yes, it was just automatic – you were just told you could do it.

Had you done anything like that before?

No. And again, I don't think that book's too hot. What happened with that was, I think I was quite pregnant while doing it, and I had to do it really fast, so I don't quite know how well that turned out…

It's interesting because the Doctor Who books range went on to become something else entirely, a range of original novels that could be detailed and complex – so going back to read something like Survival these days, it can look quite thin, which it probably didn't at the time. It's only in retrospect that you realised there's not as much meat to those books as there might have seemed.

And I think the remit we were given was very much 'novelise what was on the screen' – it was kind of a missed opportunity to add lots of backstory and character detail that might have been quite fun.

I did notice, though, that when flicking through it again, that a couple of details had been changed, and I wondered if what you were doing there was filling in things that you'd had to drop for time reasons, or if because you weren't happy with how they were done.

I do remember trying to have a better stab at the motorcyle crash, but I didn't really achieve it – one of the things that stuck with me was when the novelisation was reviewed, this guy was kind of saying "I would have forgiven her, any excuse, she could have made up anything – but it's just the same, it's a big bang and he's kind of okay…". And I thought: Guilty!

The worst kind of review – where you go "Yep! Got that wrong!". But I noticed, for instance, that the Julian Holloway character was a policeman rather than a TA guy.

Yeah, they'd made me change that because 'children shouldn't see the police in any way negative'. But I thought… he's not a negative character, he's a bit inept…

He's a buffoon, really, he's not a bad guy…

Yeah – and they camped him up a bit, and made him much broader a buffoon than he should have been. But that was the reason, that you can't show the police in a negative light.

And also, toward the end it's quite noticeable that you kill off a lot more people in the book than you did on television – on TV Derek, the young boy, just runs off home, but in the book you follow him and kill him off, and then you kill off the shopkeepers, Len and Harvey. Why did you do all that?

Because otherwise… where's the power? Again, I'd had to bring my body count down in the script… Stephen Greenhorn always says "Oh God – she's going to the dark side again!" - I think I've got a tendency, to make it credible to myself, I need to just… push it a little bit.

I was wondering if the script might have been toned down partly because it was the last story – reading the book, there's a lot less hope at the end than there is in the TV show, there's an added darkness coming from you doing that…

Yes! [laughs] I like writing happy endings, I just find them hard!

They're much harder to pull off, aren't they? Something else in the book that isn't in the TV show, is that you had Ace set fire to everything at the end…

Did I!?

Yes! All the motorcycles, and the dead bodies that were sprawled around the place – Ace got a can of petrol and set the lot of it on fire!

Oh yes, it was my Valhalla moment!

There's obviously something very cathartic going on there – but was any of that ever in the script?

Oh, I think so, yeah – it's interesting because I had forgotten all that, but they were the things where I was told 'You can't do that'! But that was kind of my Viking funeral…

…but when I just looked at it, I was curious as to whether you thought you'd have got any of that on screen…

Burning teenagers and a can of petrol [laughs]! Yes, I really was that naïve… I was clueless! It was, what, my second piece of writing for telly, I think – so, no, I didn't have a clue.

Something that's so obvious I've almost forgotten to ask is that there have been very very few women writers on Doctor Who – did you feel that you were being treated differently inside the BBC because of that, or that you brought anything to Doctor Who that would be appreciably different from how the blokes were doing it?

I didn't really, no, to be honest. I think I was much more aware of that in theatre, but that's probably because when you do new writing in theatre, everyone focuses on who the writer is. And I think still, very strongly, there's this perception of 'It's by a woman writer' and therefore the critics, at least – I don't think audiences give two damns – the critics will have a certain stance when they look at it. I mean, Doctor Who was mercifully free from that. I've since been asked quite often to speak on various documentaries or radio things on the very fact that I am a woman who has written science fiction – because they are so few and far between. And like I said, I still feel that while it's something I aspire to do well…

…it's not your comfort zone?

It's not. But that's why I really want to do it!

There are a lot of women fantasy writers, but not SF…

Yes, and if you look at Survival it is kind of 'fantasy'. Two things I'm doing at the minute are veering more into 'hard science' – looked at naturalistically, but with hard science themes to them. And maybe that will give me a bit more of the kind of muscles I need to write science fiction. I'm doing one commission for the Traverse which is about zoologists in China, and another one for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, about neurologists – but they're both at very early stages.

And you have to put in a lot of research?

Yeah! Which is always the fun bit…

…or the deeply boring bit, as I assume you mean? Or do you actually enjoy it?

I love it! It's the lovely bit!

Steven Moffat says there's nothing he hates more than having to read a book before he can start writing a script…

Really?! I love that bit, because I would do anything rather than have to sit down and write the script…

Ah - suddenly I understand!

I'll do my ironing, anything! But I'll say "I'm working now - I'm reading a popular science book about neurology, I'm working very hard". With my feet up on my sofa! I actually love writing dialogue, that's fine – what I think is the horrible bit is plot structure. Getting which plot you could do – you could do that, or you could do this… working out the right plot structure and getting it effective, that's the one where you sweat blood, and I put off that moment as long as I can.

To go back to Doctor Who for a moment – you had a parallel running about the hunt, and Ange having the 'hunt saboteurs' collecting tin. You were almost introducing a subversive, left-wing, perhaps even anarchist agenda or undercurrent into the show. Was there any resistance to doing that, in what was perceived as a lightweight kids' show?

I think because there wasn't from [director] Alan [Wareing] and there wasn't from Andrew - and they were operating on the assumption that no-one else was going to notice, which was probably true! – I think it was clever enough that it wasn't obvious agit-prop. It's good you noticed that, actually!

And has Doctor Who been in any way important, in terms of your career? Or is it just one small job you did years ago? Do people think of you as someone who wrote Doctor Who?

They don't, no – apart from the very loyal fanbase, which has had alarming aspects as well as positive ones. Mainly positive. I think in some ways, because it is science fiction, because it is popular culture, and because of course for most of my career it was dead… there was almost a feeling around of 'Don't put that on your CV in the programme for the theatre show', slightly. And I think for me what it's always been is the one thing… when you're getting your hair cut, or you're in the dentists, or you're stuck on the tube and you end up talking to someone, and they find out you're a writer – Doctor Who was the one thing they would always know. Even all those years it was dead, it was still the one thing they would always know, no matter what age they were. And I think in that sense it's been a way of telling the world – most of the world – that I'm a writer. That 'most of the world' that doesn't come to the theatre, they know Doctor Who and Casualty.

But even then, don't you find that with Casualty, if you tell people you wrote a script for it, people will be less inclined to ask "Oh, which one?". Isn't a bit more generic?

I think they did early on, but you're right, yeah…

When it was more political? Actually, I suppose when you wrote for it, it was still only three or four years old – you forget about that because it's become such a fixture.

And Charlie's still there, which is unbelievable. Very good actor, actually. I suppose it was his choice and it must be a choice he's happy with it. It seems such a long time to choose to do one thing…

I can't understand would go into acting to do the same thing every day…

Exactly! You're being the same person…

And to me, that's the antithesis of the job! I suppose after a fashion, a regular paycheque will make up for a lot of things. To get back to Survival… what you wrote ended up being the last one for quite some time. Had there been another series immediately afterwards, would you have been happy to do another one? You weren't put off enough by how Survival ended up?

Oh yes. I think – it felt like we were a beleaguered team, it didn't feel like you were being treated badly by people you were working with, it more felt like the entire project was being treated badly by the BBC itself. And that's a very different atmosphere. I think we all knew quite early on in the process that it probably was going to be the last one, so…

That aura, though, had been hanging over the show for several years – fans wouldn't have been surprised to have heard it was ending the year before, or the year before that – but still, when it didn't come back for a 27^th series, there was a tiny hint of surprise that they didn't manage to squeeze mayb one more year out of it. Had you gone on to do another story, do you have any idea what sort of idea you would like to have done? Or did that simply never occur to you?

No…er… no!

Fair enough – I was just curious that you might have had an idea floating that you might have pitched had Andrew asked you for another one.

Oh God – if I had, I'd be pitching it now!

I'll come back to that, believe me! Your story wasn't even always called Survival, was it? It was called Catflap at one point…

Yes, it was – I'm crap at titles. I can't remember who changed it. I think I was asked to change it, and I can't remember who came up with 'Survival', whether it was me or Andrew. I think it was me, having been pushed – but if it's Andrew's credit, I won't take it off him!

It's one of those stories where the title is repeated quite a lot in the dialogue, which doesn't happen all that often in Doctor Who – I thought maybe you'd had the title imposed, so you put it in the script.

I don't think so – it might have been the other way round. But like, I say – I don't know. I might be grabbing Andrew's credit…

It's so odd that it seems so long ago that you've forgotten details like that – to me, Survival still seems current! I was reading fanzine updates, and remember the name change happening… I mentioned the Virgin book series of Doctor Who, the New Adventures. A lot of people who'd been writing the show toward the end got involved in that through having novelised their own stories – were you ever invited to do that?

I was, I think – Andrew had moved on to Casualty quite soon after that and I'd gone with him, because I wrote Casualty after that. And that was a whole other thing to get to grips with – and I was having my baby, and also it was at that time that Ken Loach approached me to write the film Ladybird, Ladybird. So with those three things, it was a pretty huge workload on all levels, so I think it just wasn't an option really.

Is it something you would have liked to have done, if things had fallen into place? Because it would have been very different kind of work for you…

I think probably not – and probably because it would have been all the restrictions of the format, with none of the bonuses. Because you'd still have to be true to what Doctor Who was, but you couldn't reach that mass audience. And actually the money was a bit crap… so it probably didn't tempt me as much as doing a feature film, you know.

How did you come to Ken Loach's attention? I can't imagine he was sitting watching Doctor Who…

No – I was doing a play at Hampstead Theatre called Bold Girls about women in west Belfast, and he saw that – and it was on the back of that he asked me… in fact, Palace Pictures were trying to get a soap opera off the ground, something to rival Brookside, and Ken was going to direct and Alan Plater was going to be one of the writers – it was a cracking team.

Yeah, that's aiming high, isn't it?

It was! It was supposed to be set round the car industry, the death of the car industry in the midlands. And we all went and did all the research, specimin scripts and everying and then Palace Pictures went bust. And it was while we were travelling around doing the research that he asked me do Ladybird. I'm now working with his son, who was in college I think when I was working with Ken. I'm working with Jim Loach at the moment, who's a director as well. Balls of steel! He's very good news, Jim…

Ladybird, Ladybird is very unlike Doctor Who, but actually – given that it's all about strong women trying to cope in a tough, council estate environment, you can actually vaguely see a thread there that ran through your Doctor Who as well – it's very much based in the real world.

I would agree with you, yeah – I suppose that's coming to what I said, because obviously any kind of critic or academic commentator would put those things in a completely different box, and would probably consider Ladybird, Ladybird to be high art and Doctor Who to be something trashy. But I don't think there's any difference – I think Doctor Who in some senses had to have a simpler level of human emotion, because you can't – for a kids audience - really push the darkness too far.

The kids do like a bit of darkness, though… it's probably bleakness they couldn't cope with…

Exactly!

But it was noticeable at the time – Survival was probably the first Doctor Who in a very long time that was largely set on a council estate, the first Doctor Who story in a very long time to have 'working-class' characters in…

I know, and actually funny enough that wasn't what they meant when they gave me the setting, and that was partly to do with my ignorance of London. I think Ace was supposed to come from a sort of boring middle-class suburb – but because I wasn't living in London, I heard the words 'estate' and 'London', and imagined something much more urban and desperate than they actually meant. Because Perivale is not that bad, is it?

No, and it's way out in Middlesex, really, you wouldn't really think of it as London - it's much more suburban than urban.

Exactly – so I'd kind of written everything a little more extreme and dangerous and threatening – and then you've got these nice little leafy streets! But yeah, I suppose…

So it was Doctor Who invading the kids' own world for the first time in quite a long time, and something I think it could have done a lot more of – and it's very noticeable, and has been commented on by many people, that when Doctor Who came back a couple of years ago, it was much more like Survival than it was like an awful lot of earlier stuff. You had the kid from the council estate, stuck in a boring life that she needs to escape from – it's not just blokes in silly costumes with stupid names, it's very grounded. Did you watch Doctor Who when it came back, and, if so, did you make that connection yourself?

Oh God, yeah – I mean, I didn't see much of the first series, and then I started watching properly, I think, with David Tennant, though I did see some of the first series as well. But it's weird, isn't it – I don't know how you felt, but I know that I was watching with a 'Don't you dare mess this up!' kind of feeling. So you came away with 'Oh, it's going to be alright'. This is going to be one of those really offensive things to say, to a lot of people – but to me it's like comparing original Star Trek to Next Generation, because I do love both… but I really love Next Generation, because it was the people who'd loved it as kids now making it as adults. And Doctor Who is the same thing. It's more thematically complicated, and it's just so much better done – you look at that last series I worked on, everything about the sets, and the time they've had to rehearse, all the production values are so low. And to see it done with love behind it is a joyous thing, isn't it?

Absolutely – but I was wondering if you had seen elements of what you had brought to Doctor Who, thriving in the modern incarnation…

No – I wouldn't have presumed! I'd love to believe that's true, but…

I don't even know if it was an intentional thing, or just that minds were thinking along the same lines as you were – but you couldn't do Doctor Who now without grounding it like that, because no-one would watch it. If it was a fantasy show entirely about spaceships and costumes and effects, it would be on BBC2 – it wouldn't get that slot. So it needs to be in a world that people will recognise, and then take you somewhere. I know you've worked with Stephen Greenhorn, writer of The Lazarus Experiment, who introduced us. What did you say when he said "Guess what I'm doing next?"…

His version of this is that he loves the idea that it really annoys me hugely! So he'll drop the fact that he's written Doctor Who in to conversation at any opportunity. But I can't even remember when he told me actually! Stephen's fab, and the thing he does – he's just consummately brilliant at it – is the plotting thing. He does it with such ease, so I think I thought he was a really good person to do it. But I think it was more that it was one of those things that he always would say to me, 'You've done Doctor Who!!' and now he's 'But I'm doing it now!!'. Yeah, whatever, Stephen! But he will still needle me with it, and I can't protest…

You've actually worked with Stephen on a collaborative project, Gilt, which strikes me as an unusual thing to do in theatre. How did that come about?

7:84 Scotland just decided that they wanted to use three writers, working collaboratively. There was myself, Isabel Wright and Stephen – and it was good fun, actually. We had, I think, two workshopping weeks with actors with a gap in between, and we kind of found the concept through doing that, really. And it was sort of about greed in contemporary Scottish society. A little bit diffuse, but that was sort of what it was supposed to be…

I suppose if you have three different writers, it's not going to be the most focused thing in the world – three minds are never going to be precisely compatible, so you have to assume from the ground up that that's going to happen anyway…

But as an example of what Stephen can give me a hard time about, about the darkness – we had two days of lovely little character scenes, Izzy and Stephen had been feeding in these nice little character scenes, people sitting in a cafe chatting about fathers being estranged from sons, and husbands and wives having problems, all beautifully written, beautifully crafted scenes that I could only aspire to. And so when it comes to mine, the waiter in the café goes to the freezer and lifts the lid to get the ice cream out… and there's a dead body in there! And that was just me going "For God's sake, let's get some darkness in there! We need blood and entrails!"

So you just bled nastiness all over their lovely script? Marvellous! Something a few writers on Doctor Who have mentioned is the Paines Plough theatre company, which seems to loom quite large in the story of recent Doctor Who, quite a few of the writers have had some connection with it… and until quite recently, I was quite ignorant of them. Why do you think they're quite so prominent?

Well, of course who they are has changed over time – who Stephen worked with and who I worked with when I first worked for them and who I'm working for now are completely different. When Stephen worked with them a couple of years ago, it would have been Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany who are now running the National Theatre of Scotland. I'm working with Roxana Silbert, who was at the Traverse in Scotland. And when I first started working with them, seventeen or so years ago, it was a woman called Pip Broughton, who went on to produce or direct telly, I don't know what she's doing now actually. But the thing about them as a company – as they've had their ups and downs and their quality blips – is because they're a new writing company, and a touring new writing company, a big part of their work has always been writers early in their career. They've always had quite raw, new stuff to put out there. And I think particularly under Vicky and John and now under Roxana, they do an awful lot of development work with writers, so that's probably why a lot of the new talent coming through has had contact with them. And they kind of do it a very exciting way, you know – it's about writers finding their voice, about finding approval if you know what I mean. I think – this is a real generalisation, and I should stress this is a personal opinion and it's based on gut instinct rather than anything I can substantiate in a lot of detail – I would say, for instance, that in a place like this [The National Theatre Bar], there's still a sense that when you come in as a young writer with a script, that you're getting it wrong, and you'll be gently led to a place where you'll be getting it right. Whereas Paines Plough, I think – and some of the Traverse work has been like this as well – will sort of assume that you could well be getting it right in a way that nobody's thought of, yet – and what you need is support to find out what you want to do, which is a different thing altogether.

Is it about being self-critical, as well?

I think it's more about the experience of seeing yourself as well – no writer is ever going to be anything other than self-critical, endlessly, on a daily basis. But what you need is to actually get it out there and look at it and see what's working and what isn't, in an environment where you feel empowered, and where you don't feel that if you get it wrong they'll never commission you. So many of the commissioning theatres operate that way… and you've got the same thing in telly – in telly you've got the worst scenario in some ways, which is that you have to do it all in the 'treatment'. When I started off writing telly, treatments were as vague as they were for theatre - you knew they were vaguely interested in you as a writer, and you kind of went "burble, burble, I want to write something like this", and they would commission it or not…

So a 'treatment' would be a vocal thing in a pub or café, as much as being written down?

Almost – it was about being able to vaguely waffle about the things you were interested in. But now, you'd think you were working for Disney or something – the treatments are selling documents. And you spend months and months and years refining your treatment, to finally get to write your script. I'm loath to talk about this because it's fallen through so often but I'm pretty sure it's happening now at least to script stage – I'm doing another time travel thing. It's a sort of one-off, feature-length idea I've had for ages – years, literally about four or five years – and the treatment has gone round and round and round, gone through all these different identities and changes. You can imagine, being a time travel story, as soon as someone questions the logic, you're like "Don't question the fucking logic of time travel! Don't you know anything about the genre!? Would you like me to show you why no time travel story ever, ever conforms to any logic you could defend!?!". But it's finally, finally at least had the go-ahead to go to script stage with Granada. And at the last meeting we had, God love them – because it was one of those ones where you kind of go in, and they're asking "Well, how it will that work…?", and you start going [high pitched squeal] aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!". So the woman said "I suppose that's the sort of thing you can only demonstrate by writing it…". And you're like, "Yes! YES!!!". I don't remember it being that tough when I first started off – I really don't….

Doctor Who is my area of most detailed knowledge on the subject, and the writers who have worked on the new show have all spoken to me about how many drafts and stages everything goes through. The commissioning process I don't think is difficult, although I suspect that's because Russell's grabbed hold of it and said "No, I'm in charge of this" – but there's still an awful lot of work has to be put into it after that. Whereas, an awful lot of Doctor Who scripts in the seventies and eighties are the second draft, put on screen…

Absolutely, yes!

…which just wouldn't happen now!

And with the script editor just doing last-minute rewrites because the writer wasn't there, or wasn't experienced enough, or was just going "You need what?"

…and "You need it when?!"

Exactly! And there are plusses and minuses in both approaches. One of the things I loved about Russell getting Doctor Who on again, was the courage of it – even now I think if someone came in and pitched something like Doctor Who I think they'd get "Ooh, no, I don't know…" – to push that through must have needed enormous energy, and that's just extraordinary. Because in telly I think everyone's so nervous, and you get this feeling that everyone's chasing this shrinking audience, and they chase it by playing to the audience they already have – and you think "Well, that ain't going to work! Especially since that audience is getting older and older and older, you know…". Sorry, I'm off on a rant again…

Yeah – you're not going to get people back to television by giving them a less refined version of the thing they're already not watching. And Doctor Who, not only is it that it needed the courage and the energy, it seems to have been a good thing in a way in that it seems to have knocked a few bricks out of place – there are now things 'a bit like Doctor Who' being pitched and commissioned getting to hang on to its coat-tails. None of them are as good, but they just wouldn't have happened five years ago – so even if they're not quite as interesting pieces of work as Doctor Who, at least there's something new there that wouldn't have existed without it…

Torchwood as a concept has got good legs – and a great cast. I didn't see Sarah Jane – but Sarah Jane as a character… that episode [School Reunion], for someone who had seen her first time round, was brilliant. Her whole mid-life crisis being your mid-life crisis as you watch, is just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Made my cry my eyes out!

I'm just too young to really get that! I don't have her character as that childhood imprint…

But it was more that Doctor Who didn't love her any more and he'd got a younger replacement… "I did used to love you, but I'm off now". Oooooooooh! Awful, but brilliant! They must have been aware of that subtext, must have been.

This is interesting, because I've usually only heard a bloke's perspective on it, saying "Oh, yeah, he did do that, didn't he…?", whereas the women are more thinking "Look at what he did to me!". Suddenly I feel guilty and it wasn't even me! Anyway… tell me about the MsFits!

MsFits are Scotland's only touring feminist theatre company! And it's been going – was it before I was writing for Doctor Who? Yes, because we've just had our 21^st anniversary. It was me and an actress called Fiona Knowles – this was at the time of Women Live, and we were sitting in a pub talking about the type of comedy sketch show we'd like to see on stage. You could put comedy sketch shows on stage then, there were all these kind of arenas and benefits, people doing theatre all over the shop when you could do that kind of thing. And we wanted to do one that had a feminist agenda. I think it's the one bit of my work where I have always had an explicit agenda, and the interesting thing about it is how much more complicated that's got over time. I used to perform it with Fiona, and then after [Rona's son] Danny was born I dropped out of that side of it, and she does it as a one-woman show. The shows, I suppose, still have the same agenda in that sense, but they've become more and more complicated and subtle in how they demonstrate that. And they still pack 'em in, which is good!

Why have you kept it going? Is it because it's a success?

Also because all that stuff we did in the 1980s when we thought we were going to change the world, "Maggie Out" and the miners' strike and Solidarity and Nicaragua… I don't look back and go "Well, we were all so wrong" – I think we were right, it's just… we did use words like 'struggle', and I don't know how else to express it. And I think what you learn is the naivete of that idea you are a warrior in the struggle. Get you, middle-class missy! But at the same time, I still feel that informs what I do, and that's still the reason I should be doing it. And the MsFits is the overt bit of that. I would never stop doing the MsFits as long as we were getting an audience for it…

Are there parts of that fight that have kind of been won, though? We mentioned earlier that when you were writing Survival, EastEnders couldn't just have gay characters in, or if they had a black character in there had to be an issue involved. Twenty years on, the world is by no means perfect, but something does seem to have been achieved…

Exactly – and the thing you have to think of now is how to take it further, how do you have a gay character where it's not an issue? How do you have the love story that's just a love story, and the fact that they're gay is neither here nor there? And I think we're kind of getting there as well…

Yeah, that's probably where it is at the moment – there will still be an element of… I was going to say 'the audience', but it's probably more that the people who are pointedly not watching it who will object.

I do think we're living in a kind of bubble in London as well – particularly on things like race issues, there is a kind of general tolerance here, whereas you go out to somewhere like Norfolk and realise the world still doesn't necessarily agree with you. I suppose to me it's always been about just putting in real human characters that an audience is going to identify with, and the process of making people identify with characters who they might have been hostile to or consider 'other' and 'different' is, in itself, a political act – I suppose that's how my own politics have developed is in realising that. It's not about saying "You should think this! Look how bad you are for not thinking this!" – it about saying "I've just completely put you in the skin of this person that you have all this attitude towards", and that is the most political thing you can do. I suppose in a very convoluted way I'm just saying "If you just write incredibly good drama, you're being political!". And it's about whose stories you choose to tell… it's like a wee wedge, once you get it in there, other things can follow.

So would you be interested in doing Doctor Who again if the opportunity arose? Are you sitting trying to come up with an idea..?

Er… that's being pro-active, isn't it? That's probably what I should do. That's very interesting, because I haven't realised until you said that, but I suppose I've been sitting back saying "Why don't you ask me what I'm interested in writing?". Which is unbelievably arrogant! You're right, I should think of an idea and pitch it…

Well, you've met Russell, haven't you?

Well, I've read Russell's version of this because Stephen showed me it, in the back of the mag [DWM]. And it was a huge relief to me, because my perception of it was… I'm at the ICM party at the Edinburgh Festival, and I'm with this lovely producer, Cheryl, who is going "Okay – we need to introduce you to lots of people". So she introduced me to Steven [Moffat] and to Russell [T. Davies] – and so I'm thinking these are people Cheryl thinks I should meet. It never occurred to me that there was a Doctor Who context to this. And they both went "Ah! Survival!!". And I did that awful thing of thinking "Oh no – how do you know about Survival?". It never occurred to me that they were actually producer and writer on Doctor Who. And I went on to this great long rant about how I wrote that but it was years ago and how I'd like to do another one but I don't suppose they're ever going to phone me… and then Steven said "Oh, well, we should get on to your agent". And I sort of went, "…yes.". One of those moments when the penny dropped really slowly. And I think I was ranting on about much the same stuff as I was doing to you, because I thought they were fans. "Oh, I'm so glad you like it, but the motorbike crash is really crap and I never got the plotting right and they looked like 'Puss In Boots'…". And then the penny dropped. And I was quite pissed! And then they vanished very abruptly – so my perception was that I was absolutely pissed and rambled at them and they fled. So when I read Russell's account of it I thought "Great – he thinks he was really pissed and rambled a lot!"

So that's fine – nobody was hurt, no casualties! And you've got an "in" now and you all have an embarrassing anecdote to share… the other development recently is that Survival has come out on DVD. Have you paid that DVD any attention? It seems you didn't have time to be involved, but have you even looked at it?

I haven't, no – I got my free copies a couple of weeks ago, but no I haven't. It's such a long time ago, it's a weird thing if you look at a piece of work that's that old, it's such an intense burst of nostalgia for that time, and sometimes I think you need to brace yourself for that. Because what you're bracing yourself for is the fact that twenty-odd years have gone by, and sometimes one doesn't like to be reminded of that! I'm sure I will, but I haven't managed to do it yet…

The original show is all cheap, but when it's good it transcends that – and I think Survival is a case of that. The cat costumes aren't as good as they could be, but I didn't see the script or know what the original intention was, so to me as a viewer it didn't matter so much. Something that annoyed me about the DVD was listening to the commentary; any time one of the Cheetah People appears they're all complaining about the costume. And I think "Yeah, make that point once – don't keep making it over and over…"

Well, I'd have been doing the same. I'd have irritated the hell out of you!

But okay, those costumes are not brilliant – but if you keep repeating that, you're just going to draw undue attention to them. And I think they look quite good in the distance, they look fine on horseback, they sound great and there are people acting inside them, so it all works, kind of despite itself.

It's probably just those who saw it in rehearsal and saw some really talented actors doing a lot of 'eye work', the power that brought to it, and seeing that stripped away…

But on Doctor Who, 'twas ever thus – anyone playing a monster is under latex and fur - it's going to happen. It's a shame, but you have to live with it.

Yeah – get over it!

You've done a lot of theatre work and some movies and what have you – do you have one thing that you think of yourself as being, or do you just do whatever comes up?

It's quite interesting, because people who know you from one area put you in one box, people who know your from another put you in another – and I suppose that's what I've been saying, that I just don't accept 'boxes', really…

Do you have goals or objectives for what you're doing, or do you just write, and see what happens?

I definitely have goals and objectives, in terms of where I want to push myself as an 'artist', to be pretentious. And also when you're writing for telly you've usually got an agenda you have to make. But I suppose it's about trying to do something better than you did it last time, really… and something you haven't done before. I think it's as simple as that. And the other one is to actually be accessible to any audience, or the widest possible audience I can. I know I keep banging on about it, but I think a lot of the stuff that's considered 'difficult' or 'arty' or whatever, if a general audience is exposed to it, they're fine with it. I think a lot of the time, there's a perception of 'art' in our culture that tells people 'that's not for you and that's not for you' – but if they actually get into it, they go "Oh wow", if it's good. If it's good, then it works for everybody. And I suppose that's my biggest 'bottom line', is that I'm not interested in writing things that only appeal to five or six academics writing theses on the development of theatre or whatever, or the development of film. It's never the development of telly, is it? Because that itself is 'corrupt culture'…

Does that mean you'd cheerfully write for EastEnders and Coronation Street?

Yeah! I mean, I probably wouldn't now, because the thing you have to do then is be a team player and I'm rusty on that – and I probably would find that slightly restrictive. I think there's enough vanity and ego to this idea that you've got your own voice – and I kind of think that's what I've sort of cracked. So you'd kind of have to squash that to be able to fit in. And I'm not saying one's better or worse, I'm not even saying I'm particularly proud of that, but I know I'd find it hard now, to be a team player.

And I suppose also, nobody who's making a soap wants an episode that's 'authored', do they? It's going to put your audience off, if it looks as if someone's worked too hard on it…

Exactly! And it's not only that – with those sort of things you invest in the characters as being 'yours', and if someone else says "They're mine this week", you think, "Sod off – they're mine!". It's a little jolt and your suspension of disbelief is shattered because someone has gone all arty with your characters – I think that would be quite insulting, actually, and on that basis I should steer clear…

So if someone said "On you go – write a six-part TV series" – what would you do? Would you need more parameters than that?

No – in fact I'm pitching something at the moment, to whoever will fund it – which would be a six part TV series. And if it gets green-lit, I will be emailing you and asking "Please can I talk to you about this" – because I think the Doctor Who fanbase is the audience I would be aiming it at. But I have to be pretentiously secretive about it – it's one of those 'strong concept' things I'm sitting on at the moment… but that would be my dream, actually, if I could get something like that going. To actually 'author' a strong concept, more in the graphic novel, science fiction, fantasy arena, that's my dream really.

Is this a long-held feeling, or have you been inspired by the fact that there are a lot of things like that going on on television, in the aftermath of Doctor Who?

I think it's been a long-held ambition of mine – I think the thing is that until I'd really learned how to do it… like I said, I can do dialogue, I can do lots of poetic stuff that makes people see pictures, but plot… you know, that's the hardest thing for any writer. Some people really have the knack of it, but I've really had to work and work to learn how to do 'plot' effectively. I think I've got there – but I would, wouldn't I? I hope I have…

Since Doctor Who – or even possibly before Doctor Who – what would you say is the thing you've done that you're proudest of?

Oh. [Long pause] I was very proud of the stage play Iron, which came out in 2001. It's probably been the most successful stage play I've done, it's gone all over the world and it's still going on in all sorts of places. I just think I cracked something with that, in terms of like what you said of going outside your comfort zone and pushing things. Because my comfort zone is writing very poetically, and writing quite 'fantastically' in a way – and that was very spare, and very much all the action is in the subtext of the dialogue, and I cracked something in doing that and I'm really proud of that. In the same way I'm really proud of the play that's going on at the Edinburgh Festival – I think I've got make banter right, which is one of the hardest things - particularly as a woman, when you rarely get to hear it.

Male banter being entirely based on insulting each other…?

Exactly! And you sort of know that, but it's so much subtler than that, isn't it – because you demonstrate affection through insulting each other, and you are competitive – sorry to generalise about you! - but there's a competitiveness in the insult as well, and it can be hostile or it can be deeply, deeply loving. And it's getting which, and getting it right… because this is set in the world of mountaineers as well, which is something I could never do because I have no head for heights, so it fascinates me. So in terms of theatre work, I think it's that. In terms of film and telly… that's interesting. That is interesting. [Another long pause] I've not got a lot made – there's an awful lot that's written that never gets bloody made! And I have this thing where I completely forget chunks of my own stuff. I was very proud of Rehab… I think in terms of a kind of 'authored-voice' piece of telly, I don't think I've had one. That's something I kind of aspire to…

That's what your current projects are, in fact?

Yeah! I mean, in terms of film, the thing I'm proudest of has got to be Ladybird, Ladybird, really. I really love Aimee and Jaguar as well, but because that was written in English and translated into German, it feels like a shared writing credit in a way. And Ladybird was my first feature – I didn't realise that what I was doing was hard, so I just did it, you know? Whereas now I think "Bloody hell..!". I think I was lucky, in that there wasn't a script editor, there wasn't script interference from the producer, and it was kind of me and Ken Loach – and because Ken's instincts are so sound, he's so experienced and so clear about what he needs, I just learned vast amounts without realising I was getting an education, if you know what I mean. And it's only since then, when you see people starting to muck about with your script… someone who has a clear vision about what is and isn't working about a script is rare – really, really rare. I think there's a terrific shortage of good script editing in television drama, and I think that clearly the current series of Doctor Who does have it – but there are various other shows where it's like they don't even know what they want. Everyone's flailing around, going "How do we keep getting a salary?", and it's partly just people doing it for the wrong reasons. You want people who have a natural passion for what they're doing, and then you can say "this isn't right" or "this isn't working" or whatever, but coming from that place of shared passion. I think we could do with more of that, really…

And why do you think Doctor Who has it, when other things don't?

I think it's Russell. As I say, I don't know the guy – I didn't even recognise him at a party – but he must have a passion for it, a passion for whatever it is that he loves about it, and there's a team around that, and that passion comes spilling out of the screen, and that's why it's working. If there was that around every drama series that anyone tried to put on, there would be some cracking drama on telly…

If the call was made to you to get involved in Doctor Who, would you like to be given a shopping list of parameters and concepts to include, or would you like to conjure up your own idea?

Either – I'm not proud! I think one of the interesting things about this conversation has been one of those 'D'oh!' moments – if I want to do it, I have to think of an idea, don't I? What am I doing, sitting – I've just realised I'm sitting waiting for the phone to ring, and how unbelievably stuck-up is that! In my defence, I hadn't actually twigged that that is what I was doing… I think, if I was to do it again, I think I would want to write the absolute best Doctor Who episode I was capable of. Because I feel with Survival, I didn't know what I was doing, enough – and, again, the atmosphere at the BBC was so unsupportive. More than anything else, I would want to write the one that made the hair stand up on the back of my own neck. I don't know what that would be… but you've given me food for thought. I need to go away and think about that!

Just to finish off – what sort of other work, prose, TV, movie, whatever, inspired you to start in writing or subsequently in your career as a writer? What have you seen or read that's made you think "That's what I want to do" - that has been instrumental in that way…?

Oh, God - I'll think of eight zillion things after you've gone…

Well, my mate Simon asked me to mention the Moomins…

Oh yes! Yes! I'm a huge fan of the Moomins. Have you read the Moomins?

I'm only familiar with the TV cartoon thing. Is that wrong?

Oh God. Urgh. That is not the Moomins. The Moomins are adult, really – they are such poignant little haikus of emotion, it just happens to these little characters in Finland. No, the Moomins are fabulous. Moomins, very much! Funnily enough, I was just thinking the other day of one of the single dramas – oh, I'm going to forget the director's name… I hope it's science fantasy enough for you to know. There's a film called Penda's Fen, that had the guy from Timeslip in it, years later – he was the lead in it. Oh, and it's by a really famous British director [we both later remember that it's David Rudkin!]… he's one of these directors that had a reputation in the seventies, and he kind of… stopped. I think he's still working, but because his work was so kind of 'out there', it kind of fell out of fashion. But extraordinary pieces of work… Penda's Fen, again, I haven't seen for about fifteen years. I first saw it when I was about sixteen, so what's that – about thirty years ago. Argh! So whether it holds up I don't know… but in my memory it was unbelievably brilliant.

What grabbed you about it?

It was a mix. The storytelling of it was incredibly visual – which was kind of what this director did – but absolutely fantastic and surreal, but pointedly fantastic and surreal, just choosing to tell the story in that form without commenting on it. So you have all these dream images that tell you about this character's emotional journey, and he was using Elgar's music as well. It kind of about a guy who's living in  rural middle England, is in the TA, and his father's a vicar, and he plays the organ in the church, and is absolutely po-faced. He's verging on fundamentalist Christian – "We must defend the empire, even though there's nothing left" – so that dates it a bit, but his thinking is that everything should be very, very proper. And in the course of one adolescent summer, he discovers that in fact he's not the son of the vicar, he's adopted, that his parents were – it's not clear, but I think they were - Nazis. That he's gay, that the beautiful English countryside that he thinks represents 'Jerusalem', is in fact being taken over with nuclear bunkers and chemical dumping. And it's all done with this swelling Elgar music and these images – it's almost like he's having these waking fantasies. I saw it in the summer of '76 when we had this freak heatwave, even in Aberdeen, and it's a hot summer landscape, this setting. And I was just turning sixteen… and I think I still want to achieve a piece of TV drama that does to others what that did to me… and then there's Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sorry! It's true!

Fair enough  - it was a landmark show for its time…

It's the quality of the acting – Patrick Stewart. I did a thing for the RSC last year, and I was all like, Please can I have Patrick Stewart in it? "Yeah, in your dreams!". The one with the Borg, he's fabulous in, First Contact.

Next Gen at the time was great, yeah – though I think Star Trek as a whole got slightly diluted by going on for so long. Possibly like Doctor Who, in fact, by the end – "You've been making this for too long and the viewers have lost the fondness for it". By the time it stuttered to a halt, nobody cared…

Oh God, I did! It probably says something about me, but at that time I was a single mother, getting about two hours' sleep a night, living in one room in West Hampstead. And the only thing that kept me going was Star Trek: The Next Generation! I was buying them on video as soon as they were released, and watching them and watching them. And when the very last one was on, I remember sitting in front of the telly sobbing! And then putting on Voyager and going "Oh. Okay…".

The one I really like was Deep Space Nine…

Yeah, I liked Deep Space Nine, latterly. Much darker.

They seemed to try to turn it into Next Generation eventually – giving them a spaceship and so on, trying to turn it into something it wasn't.

There was that time when Next Generation had stopped… had Voyager not started yet?

I don't think those quite crossed over, no… but I always liked the way DS9 had an identity of its own, and I was forever wishing they would stop messing with it. And then when you got to Voyager and Enterprise…

Oh, don't let's talk about Enterprise. I lasted all of Voyager, just on my Star Trek hunger, and then when Enterprise came, I tried. I really tried. But halfway through series two, I thought "You know what? I've given you enough…"

I did that too – during fourth or fifth series Voyager. Too much!

And they were repeating all the best plots, as well.

It's bizarre to think, though, that Star Trek in all those various forms lasted about sixteen years uninterrupted…

Doctor Who's got it beat, though, now, hasn't it?

Oh yeah… anything else inspirational that springs to mind? I know it's one of those questions that's so open ended.

Blade Runner – just in terms of… again, it's way outside… it's a zone I want to prove I could get to. If I could write something like Blade Runner… there's been so much that imitates it since, but when you rewatch it now, it doesn't date. Something about the style of the costume, a bit – but even then, they were doing that kind of retro, forties, thing, so it sustains. The fact that they've got this kind of messed-up climate – it all kind of still hangs together.

You do forget, watching it, that it was made nearly thirty years ago. When it came out, I watched it with a mate and his family, and I was the only person in the room that liked it. They thought it was boring. Nooooooooooo! It was hypnotic, is what it was.

And actually, I had a wee breast cancer scare. It all turned out to be fine, but the day I got the diagnosis that there was something dodgy and they'd need to do something about it… you can imagine, I was in this absolute state. And we were supposed to go and see Blade Runner that night. And I completely forgot that there was anything else going on in my life! And that was the version with the clunky voice-over…

I still do love it, too. Looking forward to the third version!

Me too! [Laughs] And my son's going "You're not going to buy it again, are you?". Yeah!

So am I. There's no point denying it. If I pretend otherwise, I'm only kidding myself!

I've got to mention Star Wars as well – the experience, I think, again, of its time and what it meant for you emotionally at that age, and the fact that there were three parts. The Empire Strikes Back is the only one that is in any way a decent movie, but the whole journey… and I had the experience of having watched the originals years before when I was a student, and when they re-released it, Danny, my wee boy, must have been about eight, and I thought "I've got to take him to see this!" – and he was already at the 'rolling the eyes at me' stage! But I took him to see Star Wars, and he came out of the cinema… finally I had something where I could say "See! See! Told you it was brilliant!". And we were going down West End Lane doing the 'light sabres' thing. I ended up working with Pernilla August on a film that never got made. And that was at a time when The Phantom Menace was out. Over which we'll draw a veil, because it was a terrible film! But when The Phantom Menace got its screening in Leicester Square, Pernilla rang me up and said "Oh darling, I'm in this thing, do you want to come?". I'm thinking it's a cast and crew screening, and saying "Oh yeah – can I bring Danny?". And she said yes, and put the phone down, and then about ten minutes later she rang back and said "Darling… I think you have to wear special clothes".

She makes it sound like you need overalls or something…

…so I kind of twigged that maybe we'd need to dress up. So I ran into John Lewis with Danny, and I just grabbed the first thing that fitted me. Danny got this little-boy posh shirt. But I've still not twigged yet that this might be a big event… but then there's this red carpet, and we're walking up this red carpet… and people clapped! And Danny hadn't had time to get his tea, because Pernilla had rung me about four in the afternoon, so Danny's walking along eating his sandwiches and his crisps, and these people started applauding him. "Good on you, son!".

And they haven't the faintest idea who either of you are!

No! It was the most fabulous experience… so we saw the whole film sitting behind Prince Charles. Again, it's not a great film, but the experience of being there was so good. And we went to the cast and crew party afterwards, and the guy who played Darth Maul, bless him – I can't remember his name…

Er. Ray something, yeah…

…he was so good, actually! Because he was there as himself, obviously – and then Danny's looking around and he sees him. 'It's Darth Maul!'. And the guy looked at Danny as himself, and thought, 'Ah! Child!', and gave him this evil stare and started advancing on him menacingly. And I thought, bless you – because Danny's never forgotten that. "Remember when I had to fight Darth Maul…?".

I saw that with the kids at the Doctor Who concert in Cardiff last year – there were monsters wandering through the audience, and it was a great thing to do.

It's like you were saying – they like the darkness, they like being scared…

…as long as there's a bit of security there, yeah.

But with Star Wars, again – we've seen so much since that imitates it and eclipses it and is so much more powerful… but it's one where you had to be there. And for me, the cool thing was being able to give that to my own son, years later.

It's kind of happening with Doctor Who now – it was noticeable even before the show came back, that conventions suddenly seemed to acquire a lot of kids attending them, and it was people had been fans hitting their thirties and having kids of that sort of age getting into the show as well. And that has exploded in the last two years, obviously – it's the kids' own favourite again. And it's great! For years it was just a geek thing – by the end of the original show, that's kind of all it was on television, which was a shame, because it had come out of its lull – and by the very end, was a great programme again… but no-one was watching.

Yeah, that was the BBC perception of it, unfortunately. But again, what doest hat word mean, 'geek'. Is it people that are passionate about a particular genre? Why are you pejorative about it? You don't do it to detective stories, and how many bloody detectives are there? I still think that all the television channels underestimate the hunger for science fiction, and I think that's to do with their prejudice. And I think it they actually commissioned a pile more, of all different types reflecting what you get in science fiction novels, they would get a big surprise, actually.

Quite possibly. Is the prejudice partly fuelled by knowledge of how expensive science fiction is?

It depends how you do it, doesn't it? I think if you commit to a concept… I suppose that's kind of what I'm trying to develop at the moment, is the idea of something that is science fiction or science fantasy, but is not going to cost a million bucks. Because it doesn't have to be about effects or sets or costumes or props, does it…?

So you've got a gap right in front of you. Go and fill it!

I'll do my best!

The 'geek' thing is interesting these days – the whole concept, if perhaps not the word itself, has been grabbed and reclaimed. That's what Tarantino is, that's what Kevin Smith it… and Russell, probably! "I might be a geek, but I'm a geek who can do this, and do it this well, and I'm now this powerful – so what are you going to say about it?". And I think that's marvellous…

Oh! Just you saying that reminds me – the first Matrix movie. The other two, well… but the first Matrix, oh my God…

Don't get it. Looks great, sounds great… didn't sell itself to me. A little too self-important for me!

Oh, you could see where they were going to go! Whereas I was just overwhelmed by Keanu Reeves and the whole… yeah, the acting. And those effects that we hadn't seen before – though now, it's "Please, could you stop doing that?".

That 'bullet time' thing? If I see it once more, I'll be using bullets of my own… it's interesting that all the SF things you're talking about are the real mainstream blockbusters, the flashy-bangy things. They're not subtle…

And it's not what I write, is it?

Presumably there must be something inside you that would be capable of doing it, though – if you're a good writer and you've absorbed all this stuff…

I don't know. You look at the making of Blade Runner and it's clear that it was almost a happy accident, it sounds like a chaotic process – which is why there is a 'version three' coming out. So… who made that film? Who made the thing that we're all responding to? It's almost like it happened by default, and maybe it's just that the original concept, the short story, was so strong. I don't think, even if I were even to achieve something like that – and it's very unlikely anyone would give me the opportunity to write something with that huge a budget – I would have started down a road twenty years ago that I'm still not even on, yet. And even if you did, it wouldn't be 'your film' at the end of the day. Those films are just immense machines, aren't they? Immense… but I suppose to be responsible for that core thing, the thing that makes it work, would be extremely cool… I think what Ridley Scott does brilliantly as a director is that he gets the maximum from every single scene. Every single scene gets pushed to its emotional max, whatever that is. And he does it with his other movies as well, but they're more or less successful depending on how strong the narrative is that they're supplying him with. And the very fact that the very narrative of Blade Runner has been re-structured several times - but yet we still love it – there's something in that whole 'What is human? What is love?' thing that I think is what makes it. And that amazing speech that Rutger Hauer has, which is about mortality, really, isn't it – 'All those moments lost like tears in rain' – it's about the human condition, isn't it? You can't get bigger than that…

Interview conducted June 2007. Thanks | Rona Munro | Stephen Greenhorn. Last update on November 1, 2009