© BBC Pictures
There won't be a dry eye in the house this Saturday night as Doctor Who airs one of its most complex, dark and emotional episodes to date. 'The Girl Who Waited' has been written by Tom MacRae, who previously contributed two-part adventure 'Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel' to the show back in 2006.
We caught up with Tom, who is busy editing his new sitcom - Comedy Central's Threesome - to chat about 'The Girl Who Waited', Karen Gillan's "stellar" performance and the role that emotion and romance plays in Doctor Who.
WARNING: CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS
> Doctor Who Arthur Darvill talks 'The Girl Who Waited'
Your last Doctor Who story featured the Cybermen - were you pleased to tackle a wholly original episode this time round?
"I was, yeah. As much as I love the Cybermen, and indeed the Daleks or the Slitheen or anything else, my heart would've sunk if I'd been asked to do that. Bringing back massive, iconic monsters like that means no matter how wonderful, clever and inventive you are, you very much take a second seat to them.
"Whereas when you come up with your own stuff, it's you stamped all the way through it. It's really exciting to be able to take advantage of the wonderful variety of Doctor Who and say, 'Right, I can do anything this week. What's it going to be?'
"If you have Cybermen, you can't do [absolutely] anything, because they're Cybermen - they have to do certain things. It's fun to play with that and you'll see when they come back later this year that there's still plenty to do with them. It's a lovely straightjacket, but it is still a straightjacket. So I was thrilled to completely spread my wings and do something new."
You wrote an unproduced episode for series four too - what happened with that?
"Well, it was all sort of finished and ready to go. I spoke to Russell [T Davies] and he was very torn about the similarities between that and Gareth Roberts's Agatha Christie episode ['The Unicorn and the Wasp']. Although mine was finished first, I think Gareth's would have been filming first. So they had to rejig certain elements of the story in a slightly unexpected way, which meant that some of the more unique elements were being left on the cutting room floor. Russell looked at it, and decided [the two episodes] were too similar.
"Although personally it was really gutting, looking at the series and what my episode would have been, I think from an objective point of view he did make exactly the right call. It's just a shame it was me! It was a really nice script - I was really pleased with it and Russell and Julie [Gardner] were too. But 'Midnight' replaced it and was absolutely fantastic. If it had been a crap one, I would've been really pissed off, but it was one of the best ones that Russell ever did! If I gave nothing more to that year, I moved out of the way to let one of the best ever Doctor Who stories be written, which is not a bad thing."
Are there any big differences between working under Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat?
"The big difference is me. I was only about 25 when I started doing it, and I'd never done a big show before. It's really about what I've learnt. If I was to work with Russell again now, it would be different, just because I'm in a very different place as a writer. But I think the main difference between them is, Russell is very much about big, bombastic brush-strokes. It's a real thrill going through one of his stories and very emotionally elating.
"With Steven, those clockwork robots of his represent his brain, really. He's very much about the individual pieces clicking together. But that said, there's a huge crossover between the two, because 'Midnight' was very much a Moffat-y sort of script, and something like 'The Beast Below' was very much like a Russell script. So there's a big, shared common ground between them, and they're both fantastic. They have a slightly different approach, but both love the show and they're brilliant to work with. In that respect, it's not really very different at all."
There's a lot of buzz surrounding Karen Gillan's performance in 'The Girl Who Waited'...
"It's absolutely amazing. Karen had a voice coach and a movement coach, so she was able to lower her voice quite a lot to play the older Amy. She had a little bit of padding which changes how she moves, but mostly it's her and she just worked really hard. We had quite a long discussion at the start as to whether we should cast an older actress or do Karen in a prosthetic. It came down to what was actually more believable, and obviously in terms of the budget, if you have two actresses, you're not having to make every shot with both of them in an effects shot.
"As we talked about it, Karen got wind of what the story was and she petitioned very, very strongly to do both. She really wanted it to happen, and you see that in her work on it. This isn't another episode where X meets Y meets Z. This [episode] is incredibly special for Amy and part of that is the way Karen did it. It wouldn't have been nearly as good if she hadn't pulled out such a stellar performance. Also, Nick Hurran - who is the most amazing director - not only knew how to support and help Karen, but then shot it in the most beautiful, beautiful way."
The episode is very visually distinctive - are you pleased with how it's turned out?
"Well, without sounding bitter, it wasn't one of the expensive ones. We didn't have very much to do, so I just thought I'd make everything white and it hadn't really occurred to me how amazing that would look on screen. If you look at the sets, they're just big white boxes. They were so straight-forward. I remember walking onto set and it's very rare that the image you have in your head matches up [to the reality]. But I walked in and it was exactly what I had imagined. It was so sparse and simple, and looked like a model that had been blown up to full-scale. It gave a really interesting visual sense to it, so all credit to Nick and the designers for making that happen."
Matt Smith has compared the episode to a Stanley Kubrick film...
"When Matt said that, I thought, 'I don't really agree', but when I watched the final finished cut, I did get exactly what he meant, yeah. It does have that sort of feel to it. I didn't deliberately set out to do that. I don't know how much Nick or the design team did. I just thought [the setting] was a good way of dealing with the fact that we couldn't do an enormous amount of location shooting."
Did you enjoy writing a story that focuses more on the companions than the Doctor?
"Well, no-one really knows who the Doctor is, not the actors, not the production team, so there's only so far you can push his character. Whereas Amy and Rory actually have full back-stories, childhoods and courtships that we can talk about quite openly. So you're able to explore them as real people. The Doctor is always to a certain extent mythic and you can only go so far with him, but with Rory and Amy, you really can push them to incredible extremes and know that the show will still come back from that. It was lovely getting to look at them as real people."
There's been some debate about emotion and romance in Doctor Who and how much is too much - what are your thoughts?
"There's probably quite a big difference between Steven and Russell's [approach]. I think Steve is probably more of a romantic and is interested in relationships. Of course, Steve has a family and came from Coupling which was very much about him and his wife, and I think it's something that interests him more. But it's of interest to everyone.
"I think if it came to a point where the story of the week was that the Doctor turns up, falls in love and gets married, then yes, Doctor Who has gone too far into that territory. But at the moment, he turns up and there's monsters, chaos and scares - that's always there. If there's a bit of human emotion along the way, of which love is the most powerful, then I don't think anyone who's got any sort of grasp on how television works can complain that human stories have got human characters in them."
How does writing relationships in Doctor Who differ to writing relationships in your new show Threesome?
"Threesome is aimed at a much older audience - it has a threesome in the first episode, and it has swearing and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. You're writing about something real and about something that people understand, but with a slight comic spin on it. I think with Doctor Who, the nature of it being a family show is that you write a certain version of love and a certain version of romance, which is maybe more about scratching the surface of things.
"In Threesome, I was trying to look at how a very close friendship works and you're able to show [the characters] doing all those things that close friends do - in this case, having sex with each other! You make that the story, whereas in Doctor Who, you kind of have to hide that [aspect] from the story. It's nice to write about real things and in the same way, good sci-fi talks about real human dynamics. The lesson I learnt from Doctor Who is that you can't get too distracted by the spaceships, it has to be about the people driving the spaceships!"
Is it fun to be able to mix it up and write comedy one week, then sci-fi the next?
"It's not quite that simple, because Threesome is my show that I created and I'm a producer on. Even today, I spent the whole morning in the edit, so it's a massive commitment of time. It's not quite like flitting from one episode here to another episode there. With Doctor Who, I can do the one episode and wander off! But it is lovely being able to do all the different things. I write children's books as well - my new one, When I Woke Up I Was a Hippopotamus, has just come out - and I'm about to start work on a film.
"I think as a writer, it would be silly to ever typecast yourself. An actor only has the face they have, but as a writer, no-one knows who you are, so you can do anything. For me, that's a great pleasure. Steven and Russell are both very funny writers who have done a lot of comic stuff in the past, and yet they're brilliant at plotting these big sci-fi things. So I think if you're a good writer, you should be able to write anything, whether it's a whodunit or a soap. It would be less fun to not try and do a bit of it all."
Would you be interested in writing another episode of Doctor Who in the future?
"I can't really answer that question without giving anything anyway! Let's say we've had an ongoing discussion and I was at the theatre with [new Who executive producer] Caroline Skinner last night! Hopefully I'll be back, but as with all these things, you never know."
Doctor Who 'The Girl Who Waited' airs on Saturday at 7.15pm on BBC One and at 9/8c on BBC America. Tom MacRae's new comedy Threesome begins on Comedy Central later this year.
We caught up with Tom, who is busy editing his new sitcom - Comedy Central's Threesome - to chat about 'The Girl Who Waited', Karen Gillan's "stellar" performance and the role that emotion and romance plays in Doctor Who.
WARNING: CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS
> Doctor Who Arthur Darvill talks 'The Girl Who Waited'
Your last Doctor Who story featured the Cybermen - were you pleased to tackle a wholly original episode this time round?
"I was, yeah. As much as I love the Cybermen, and indeed the Daleks or the Slitheen or anything else, my heart would've sunk if I'd been asked to do that. Bringing back massive, iconic monsters like that means no matter how wonderful, clever and inventive you are, you very much take a second seat to them.
"Whereas when you come up with your own stuff, it's you stamped all the way through it. It's really exciting to be able to take advantage of the wonderful variety of Doctor Who and say, 'Right, I can do anything this week. What's it going to be?'
"If you have Cybermen, you can't do [absolutely] anything, because they're Cybermen - they have to do certain things. It's fun to play with that and you'll see when they come back later this year that there's still plenty to do with them. It's a lovely straightjacket, but it is still a straightjacket. So I was thrilled to completely spread my wings and do something new."
"Well, it was all sort of finished and ready to go. I spoke to Russell [T Davies] and he was very torn about the similarities between that and Gareth Roberts's Agatha Christie episode ['The Unicorn and the Wasp']. Although mine was finished first, I think Gareth's would have been filming first. So they had to rejig certain elements of the story in a slightly unexpected way, which meant that some of the more unique elements were being left on the cutting room floor. Russell looked at it, and decided [the two episodes] were too similar.
"Although personally it was really gutting, looking at the series and what my episode would have been, I think from an objective point of view he did make exactly the right call. It's just a shame it was me! It was a really nice script - I was really pleased with it and Russell and Julie [Gardner] were too. But 'Midnight' replaced it and was absolutely fantastic. If it had been a crap one, I would've been really pissed off, but it was one of the best ones that Russell ever did! If I gave nothing more to that year, I moved out of the way to let one of the best ever Doctor Who stories be written, which is not a bad thing."
Are there any big differences between working under Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat?
"The big difference is me. I was only about 25 when I started doing it, and I'd never done a big show before. It's really about what I've learnt. If I was to work with Russell again now, it would be different, just because I'm in a very different place as a writer. But I think the main difference between them is, Russell is very much about big, bombastic brush-strokes. It's a real thrill going through one of his stories and very emotionally elating.
"With Steven, those clockwork robots of his represent his brain, really. He's very much about the individual pieces clicking together. But that said, there's a huge crossover between the two, because 'Midnight' was very much a Moffat-y sort of script, and something like 'The Beast Below' was very much like a Russell script. So there's a big, shared common ground between them, and they're both fantastic. They have a slightly different approach, but both love the show and they're brilliant to work with. In that respect, it's not really very different at all."
"It's absolutely amazing. Karen had a voice coach and a movement coach, so she was able to lower her voice quite a lot to play the older Amy. She had a little bit of padding which changes how she moves, but mostly it's her and she just worked really hard. We had quite a long discussion at the start as to whether we should cast an older actress or do Karen in a prosthetic. It came down to what was actually more believable, and obviously in terms of the budget, if you have two actresses, you're not having to make every shot with both of them in an effects shot.
"As we talked about it, Karen got wind of what the story was and she petitioned very, very strongly to do both. She really wanted it to happen, and you see that in her work on it. This isn't another episode where X meets Y meets Z. This [episode] is incredibly special for Amy and part of that is the way Karen did it. It wouldn't have been nearly as good if she hadn't pulled out such a stellar performance. Also, Nick Hurran - who is the most amazing director - not only knew how to support and help Karen, but then shot it in the most beautiful, beautiful way."
The episode is very visually distinctive - are you pleased with how it's turned out?
"Well, without sounding bitter, it wasn't one of the expensive ones. We didn't have very much to do, so I just thought I'd make everything white and it hadn't really occurred to me how amazing that would look on screen. If you look at the sets, they're just big white boxes. They were so straight-forward. I remember walking onto set and it's very rare that the image you have in your head matches up [to the reality]. But I walked in and it was exactly what I had imagined. It was so sparse and simple, and looked like a model that had been blown up to full-scale. It gave a really interesting visual sense to it, so all credit to Nick and the designers for making that happen."
Matt Smith has compared the episode to a Stanley Kubrick film...
"When Matt said that, I thought, 'I don't really agree', but when I watched the final finished cut, I did get exactly what he meant, yeah. It does have that sort of feel to it. I didn't deliberately set out to do that. I don't know how much Nick or the design team did. I just thought [the setting] was a good way of dealing with the fact that we couldn't do an enormous amount of location shooting."
"Well, no-one really knows who the Doctor is, not the actors, not the production team, so there's only so far you can push his character. Whereas Amy and Rory actually have full back-stories, childhoods and courtships that we can talk about quite openly. So you're able to explore them as real people. The Doctor is always to a certain extent mythic and you can only go so far with him, but with Rory and Amy, you really can push them to incredible extremes and know that the show will still come back from that. It was lovely getting to look at them as real people."
There's been some debate about emotion and romance in Doctor Who and how much is too much - what are your thoughts?
"There's probably quite a big difference between Steven and Russell's [approach]. I think Steve is probably more of a romantic and is interested in relationships. Of course, Steve has a family and came from Coupling which was very much about him and his wife, and I think it's something that interests him more. But it's of interest to everyone.
"I think if it came to a point where the story of the week was that the Doctor turns up, falls in love and gets married, then yes, Doctor Who has gone too far into that territory. But at the moment, he turns up and there's monsters, chaos and scares - that's always there. If there's a bit of human emotion along the way, of which love is the most powerful, then I don't think anyone who's got any sort of grasp on how television works can complain that human stories have got human characters in them."
"Threesome is aimed at a much older audience - it has a threesome in the first episode, and it has swearing and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. You're writing about something real and about something that people understand, but with a slight comic spin on it. I think with Doctor Who, the nature of it being a family show is that you write a certain version of love and a certain version of romance, which is maybe more about scratching the surface of things.
"In Threesome, I was trying to look at how a very close friendship works and you're able to show [the characters] doing all those things that close friends do - in this case, having sex with each other! You make that the story, whereas in Doctor Who, you kind of have to hide that [aspect] from the story. It's nice to write about real things and in the same way, good sci-fi talks about real human dynamics. The lesson I learnt from Doctor Who is that you can't get too distracted by the spaceships, it has to be about the people driving the spaceships!"
Is it fun to be able to mix it up and write comedy one week, then sci-fi the next?
"It's not quite that simple, because Threesome is my show that I created and I'm a producer on. Even today, I spent the whole morning in the edit, so it's a massive commitment of time. It's not quite like flitting from one episode here to another episode there. With Doctor Who, I can do the one episode and wander off! But it is lovely being able to do all the different things. I write children's books as well - my new one, When I Woke Up I Was a Hippopotamus, has just come out - and I'm about to start work on a film.
Would you be interested in writing another episode of Doctor Who in the future?
"I can't really answer that question without giving anything anyway! Let's say we've had an ongoing discussion and I was at the theatre with [new Who executive producer] Caroline Skinner last night! Hopefully I'll be back, but as with all these things, you never know."
Doctor Who 'The Girl Who Waited' airs on Saturday at 7.15pm on BBC One and at 9/8c on BBC America. Tom MacRae's new comedy Threesome begins on Comedy Central later this year.
