SWF: The Moff on the New Who
International Screenwriters Festival: 29th October 2009
There’s a very different relationship between new Doctor Who show runner (although is he really? Kate Harwood absolutely insisted that the BBC has no show runners, only ‘lead writers’, as they can’t afford to pay them enough to justify the title) Steven Moffat and the UK’s best-known DW journo, Ben Cook. Ben’s close friendship with Russell T Davies turned out a terrific book The Writer’s Tale (a must-read tome for those interested in the realities of the commercial scriptwriting process), which will soon spawn a sequel, covering the writing and broadcast of Series 4. They banter. They laugh. A lot.
Steven, however, came across as almost a little spiky to start with, testing Ben’s journalistic skills with a fair dollop of opening sarcasm. But then again, Ben opened with the most hotly contested – and apparently misplaced – Doctor Who rumour on the net: will Steven’s Who be darker than Russell’s?
“Why? Because Coupling was so dark. So was Press Gang,” was the sarcastic reply – and that just about says it all, really. What Steven Moffat actually does best is funny – but isn’t it funny how easily that can be forgotten? “I’d argue that Russell is the one who does dark. Look at Midnight. I never wrote anything that dark,” Steven continued – and thereafter began to relax into an extremely entertaining interview.
Interestingly though for a writer credited with penning some of the new Who’s most creepy episodes, Moffat says he doesn’t watch or read much in the way of horror – the film The Ring terrified him and that was enough. “I think people write Doctor Who the way they remember it,” he explained, and that rich history is where he draws his inspiration from for the modern series.
The subject matter ranged from whether he avoids location shoots because of Who fans (“don’t be daft,”) to why he chose another young doctor (“what can you do? You get ready for months of auditions and the right man is the third one through the door, two and a half hours in. If the right man had been fifty, the Doctor would be fifty,”) to whether Doctor Who is easy to write (an emphatic No).
In fact, despite being the man entrusted with the hottest property on British television, Steven is just as prone to self-doubt, procrastination and sheet panic as the next writer. It’s just that when he’s not writing, he’s not writing the new Who, so it’s hard to feel terribly sorry for him. But he described writing as “horribly hard, appallingly difficult” and confesses that he often can’t find the end of a story when he’s half way through writing it.
Anyone hoping for spoilers from this session will have been disappointed – it was instead ex-Doctor Who Producer Phil Collinson, earlier in the afternoon, who cheerfully said he’d popped onto set and hullo, there was River Song standing around with a cup of tea. Steven was far more discreet. But what came strongly across – as it always does with Russell T Davies – is his sheer love of Doctor Who. Is he worried about being the man who ‘breaks’ Doctor Who? No, and neither is anyone else. But the writing aside, he’s got the job of a lifetime and he’s having a hell of a lot of fun bringing a new host of outrageous, bizarre and frightening adventures to our screens in 2010.