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selenakIn short: well worth reading, especially if you’re interested in scriptwriting and the development stages from idea to filmed scene. In parts entertaining and witty, in parts doubtlessly infuriating or frustrating (feeling of choice depending on your temper and fannish loyalties), much like the man himself. In addition to the main text, it offers much content for its money in terms not just of many season 4 script excerpts but drawings (turns out Rusty is a very gifted cartoonist and amuses himself with drawing sketches of characters a lot). Since I think it’s a pity most of the attention so has gone to only two particular excerpts (RTD’s endless rewrites and frustrations with the 4.13 beach scene – which he never was quite content with - , and the outburst about the website Outpost Gallifrey and internet criticism vis a vis Helen Raynor’s Dalek episodes), you won’t find much about either in my post, so if you want to discuss these in particular, try other reviews.
In terms of structure, the book is a lengthy email correspondance between RTD and journalist Benjamin Cook, mainly about DW and scriptwriting, though they also discuss both RTD’s other shows (mainly Queer as Folk and The Second Coming) and shows and books they both are interested in or are fannish about, for example Life on Mars, Harry Potter (they both loved Deathly Hallows, which got published while s3 was broadcast and s4 got written; RTD’s favourite scene was the Molly versus Bellatrix showdown, and he quotes “Not my daughter, you bitch!” to Cook con brio, which automatically makes me wonder whether someone has written a Jackie Tyler and Molly Weasley comparison ) and a new tv show named Skins. (At the end of the book, there is a fan letter from RTD to that show’s creator.) There are also a few emails to and from Steven Moffat (including the one where he accepts the succession offer from Rusty), and it tickles me that RTD, though he occasionally calls him Steven, usually refers to him as “the Moff” just as fandom does. Mind you, partisans who either see Moffat as their avenger of fannish wrongs and rescuer of DW from Rusty’s clutches or conversely consider him as horrible doom to what they like about DW and reason to quit the show before season 5 ever aired are bound to find the love fest between the two and their mutual admiration society frustrating. Tough. My favourite RTD quote re: the Moff is:
You can see voices in scripts, can’t you? The difference between Steven’s and mine? And it’s always such a reflection on the person. I mean, look at Steven: he’s all tough and Scottish, full of lethal gags (both in real life and in script), and quite a lustful man, I think, a writer clearly driven by sex. More significantly, under that gruff exterior, a wonderful and romantic man, who hates to give that away – except in his writing.
(One more sidenote here, because it fits the Davies-Moffat theme: much as RTD was into his Doctor/Rose love story, he definitely isn’t OTP-ish about them. His reaction to being told by Moffat that Silence in the Library/ Forest of Shadows would feature “the Doctor’s wife” is basically “yay, awesome, tell me more!” and looking back, he has fond thoughts about Girl in the Fireplace and the Doctor/Reinette affair.)
The book starts just before s3 was starting to be broadcast, with s4 being mapped out. At this point, nobody had any idea Catherine Tate would be available for an entire season (though RTD was planning to bring Donna back for the s4 finale along with everyone else), so plans were made for a new companion. A journalist (“it worked for Sarah Jane”) named Penny Cartner, who should be as Donna-like as possible (including being a red-head, in the coloured sketch RTD did of her):
Thoughts I’ve had about Penny: a bit older, maybe 30 + (are we losing all the little girls in the audience?), smarter, sassier. All of us loved Catherine Tate and that sort of repartee with the Doctor. (…) We all liked Donna’s equal-status sparkiness, independence, sharpness.
Penny would be a northerner (“it’s my love of northern, and my ability to write that speech pattern; I actually miss it” – for the record, I don’t think he means Nine here but thinks of the Queer as Folk characters who are all Mancunians); RTD intended to give her the stargazing grandfather he had wanted to use for a companion for a long while. (The stargazing was later transferred to Donna’s father, and then when the actor died mid-shooting of Partners in Crime back to a grandfather, i.e. the hastily drafted Bernard Cribbins as Wilf.) At this point, the s4 storyline was already amazingly detailed, including “Turn Left” (for Penny, the other turn would have come just before she met the Doctor in 4.1.,), and there were already casting ideas bounced around – and then Jane Tranter met Catherine Tate who told her how much she had enjoyed doing The Runaway Bride and how much she’d love to play Donna again:
I bloody love the idea – oh I love Donna – so we asked Phil, who relished working with Catherine, and then we asked David, and he just adores Catherine, and now Julie is booking in a lunch to see her! But it’s madness. A woman that busy? With her own TV show? Making movies now? We’ll never get Catherine for a whole series. Still, we can but try. At the very least,we might be able to get her back for 4.12/4.13.
Thus Penny the Northerner ended up being the companion who wasn’t – causing RTD to comment on the irony of the Turn Left scenario for now Penny really doesn’t meet the Doctor - though RTD ended up writing her into Partners in Crime anyway, though not as a redhead. (The journalist who investigates Adipose Industries at the same time Donna does, remember?) There was also the fact to consider that this was still before Smith and Jones had even aired:
Mark the date in your diary: today, Catherine Tate officially said yes! Bloody hell. This is so brilliant. What a cast! But we’ve got to get it right. I’m worried about how other writers will handle Donna. Not Steven Moffat, obviously. But it needs such a delicate touch not to go too funny or too broad… says the man who, in The Runaway Bride, had her swing across the Flood Chamber and smack into the wall! And when do we tell people? Everything leaks. Freema hasn’t even debuted as Martha yet. This is going to get very complicated. Announce this too soon and it’ll mess up Freema/Martha. We’ve got to keep that début clean and successful, because Freema is so brilliant. She deserves a big launch. We can’t clutter it by announcing the next companion. I think Penny will have to live on as a disguise: we’ll ask people to write Penny as a placeholder name. (…) I’m so excited about seeing Donna again, and everything that she can do, the sheer energy she brings to it, so the opening of 4.1. is really taking shape. Oh, the moment that Donna sees the Doctor! The moment that he sees her! (…) A lot of knives will be out for Donna/Catherine, in that tabloid world. They always are, for successful women. I must, in the script, account for that “Doctor Who becomes comedy” backlash - give Catherine good, strong, emotional stuff to balance it.
As I recall, once s4 was broadcast, there were comparisons between Donna and Fifth Doctor companion Tegan, so I found it interesting that RTD picks quite a different Old Who companion to compare her to, along with several allusions in the episodes themselves, that the First Doctor era was very much on his mind at the time of writing and editing s4:
Donna Noble arrived today! She was glorious. We had the read-through for 4.2. and 4.7, Catherine sat right next to David, and she was dazzling! After all that Penny/Donna development, I just sat there and thought, this is EXACTLY what I wanted. All that work, all that thinking, all those e-mails to you, actually had a result. She’s an equal to the Doctor, a friend, a mate, a challenge. It struck me – this is how Barbara Wright would be written, if she were a 2007/8 character. That feels good. Catherine takes a funny line, makes it five times funnier, and aims it like a dart – which makes David raise his game. He throws back a javelin! I’m so happy. I realised how scared I’d been all this time, because you never really know if something is going to work.
In terms of script editing on DW, the two examples best illustrating on how this works on DW under Rusty’s regime are
a) James Moran’s original version of the Fires of Pompeii intro scene, with RTD’s rewrite posted after. There is literally no line identical, yet the content is entirely so. A short exercpt of the excerpt, so you see what I mean:
Moran’s original:
DONNA
And it’s safe? You’ve been here before?
DOCTOR:
Once, yes. Didn’t go very well, had to leave in a bit of a hurry… and I had nothing to do with Rome burning down, before you ask, that was entirely not my fault at all. Mostly. Anyway, it’s all been rebuilt now.
DONNA:
Simple yes would be fine. Hold on – I spoke to that man. You! Can you understand me?
She adresses another trader.
MARKET TRADER 2:
Course I can.
DONNA
Doctor! I’m speaking Latin! I must be one of those language geniuses. You know, like how Einstein was rubbish at school, but then it turned out –
DOCTOR:
No, that’s the TARDIS translation thingy, gets inside your head.
RTD’s rewrite:
DONNA:
I’m here, in Rome, Donna Noble, in Rome! Me. This is just weird. I mean, everyone here’s dead!
DOCTOR
I wouldn’t go telling them that.
DONNA
No, but… hold on a minute, that sign over there’s in English. You having me on, are we in Epcot?
DOCTOR
No, that’s the TARDIS translation circuits, just makes it look like English. Speech as well. You’re talking Latin, right now.
DONNA:
Seriously? I just said ‘seriously’ in Latin? But… what if I said something in actual Latin? Like, ‘veni, vidi vici’, my Dad says that when he comes back from the football.
(Welsh gag ensues, I’m cutting to)
DONNA
You’ve been here before, then?
DOCTOR
Ages ago. And before you ask, that fire had nothing to do with me, well, not very much, well, a little bit, well… But I never got the chance to look around properly!
b)
Email exchange between RTD and the Moff about the problem that both Forest and Turn Left present Donna in alternative worlds, and could feel repetitive when broadcast. RTD solved this by changing his own storyline so that Donna no longer marries and has children in Turn Left - which she originally did (telling Moffat he was better at writing children anyway) –, by changing the order of episodes put Midnight between Forest and Turn Left, so the parallel worlds wouldn’t come directly after another, and lasty, when still in doubt this was too much of a coincidence, decided to make a virtue of a necessity and let the Doctor point this out to Donna as an example of the not so coincidences around her.
The decision of how to write Donna out came amazingly late. At first, before Howard Attfield – the actor who played Donna’s father Geoff – died, there was a tentative idea of making one of Donna’s motives for joining the Doctor the way her father’s cancer was burdening her, and in the end she would return to her family with new strength. This was made impossible by the actual death of the actor, and for a quite a while, there wasn’t any real alternative idea. Though quite a lot of Journey’s End otherwise was mapped out.
I’m thinking about Donna, Martha, Rose, Jack, Sarah Jane and Mickey as a team, and the tagline: ONE OF THEM WILL DIE. I’d watch that! Trouble is, I don’t want to kill any of them. Rose Tyler was never created to die. None of them was. They were all created to show off Doctor Who’s central premise: the world and the universe is wonderful, ordinary people can do great things, and the human race survives. At a cost, yes, but a cost in the SUPPORTING characteers. I mean, really, imagine Martha’s death. Or Donna’s. Or even Jackie’s. It’s just wrong. Tonally, wrong. Maybe Mickey could die? ‘Nooooo!’ said Phil. But Mickey is the only one who seems killable, because he’s not quite central (…). But then I get shivers, because it’s always the black guy who cops it. Maybe that’s politically correct of me, but political correctness can be political AND correct. But how do I keep that tagline without delivering? Maybe one of them dies and Martha is on hand with a bit of CPR…? The repercussions of death are so complicated and wonderful to write, but really 4.12/4.13 is about fighting Daleks, not mourning. 4.13 has to have the happiest ending ever. I’m bringing them all back because I want to see six people standing around that six-sided TARDIS console, flying the Earth back home. It’s HAPPY. You can’t mess with that. Then again, I am perverse and more than capable of ignoring everything I’ve just said.
I’ve a great image of Sarah Jane surrounded by Daleks, all shouting “Exterminate!” That would be thrilling! (Yes, it’s fannish, but I reckon I’m allowed to be in my last proper episode.) And then Mickey dimension-jumps in, blasts them with his big gun, and says “No one kills a Smith!” Ha ha ha. Also, this thought blazed into my head the other day, as I was walking past Techniquest on the way to Tesco: DAVROS WOULD RECOGNISE SARAH JANE! How exciting! And Davros should be the Daleks’ slave, because I hate it when he comes in and takes control and reduces the Daleks to soldiers. You could even feel sorry for him.
If you’re wondering how we get from “the happiest ending ever” as a goal to what eventually does happen with Donna, it’s a long process, and there’ll be a quote from when he makes that decision later, but I think the real reason is inherent in how RTD writes, full stop. The man is adicted to mixing tragedy with comedy, and vice versa. All four season finales had loss as well as triumph in them, and his other work is not that different in this regard. At one point, when discussing Queer as Folk, he segues into a personal credo:
But I believe passionately that Comedy and Tragedy exist alongside each other. No way are they diametric opposites; they’re right next to each other, and they overlap in a thousand different ways. Queer as Folk episode 3 is like a thesis on that. There is a huge comedy sex scene, which results in a slapstick fall off a window ledge, intercut with the horniest threesome in the world, intercut with a drugs overdose in which a man dies. I chose to intercut Tragedy with Comedy and Sex. The whole world is compressed into that: the coexistence of all those things. (…) But I have to write like that. Funny, sad, all at once. That’s how life is. You can have a pratfall at a funeral. You can laugh so much that you choke to death. The Master is dark and genuinenly insane, and therefore can be funny as hell. Jackie Tyler makes us laugh, but I knew I’d uncover something sad at the heart of her. Her sadness over her absent daughter is there as early as Aliens of London, but you don’t really get to see it properly until Love & Monsters. Idiots will say, ‘Ah, that character is developing now’ – what, like you were going to play it all in the first 30 seconds?! – but that capacity was always there.
And so the happiest moment – the companions all together, flying the TARDIS, which was the image he started out with – demanded the saddest moment in recompense, Donna losing her memories.
One big advantage of the email correspondance format this book has is that Benjamin Cook gets to ask the questions from a writerly point of view as well. For example, how to write characters different from each other:
“I’m interested in your approaches to writing, say, Rose, Martha and Donna differ? Is it what different characters say or how they say it that defines them, makes them ‘come alive?’, makes them distinguishable?”
To which RTD replies:
That’s tricky. I don’t type DONNA and then tink now, how would she say this…? The fact that I’ve typed DONNA means already has something to say. You can worry too much about speech patterns, about imposing different styles on the words, one for Rose, one for Donna, one for Martha, one for Sarah Jane. They’re all women, on the side of good, in a sci-fi world, so their speeches aren’t going to be radically different. It’s not so much what they say, as why they say it and when. But I suppose there’s a basic characteristic that I bear in mind. An essence. Rose is open, honest, heartfelt, to the oint of being selfish, wonderfully selfish. Martha is clever, calm, but rarely says what she’s really thinking. Donna is blunt, precise, unfiltered, but with a big heart beneath all the banter. But we come back to what I was saying ages ago about turning characters. If Rose is selfish, then her finest moments will come when she is selfless. If Martha keeps quiet, then her moments of revelation – like her goodbye to the Doctor in Last of the Time Lords, or stuck with Milo and Cheen in Gridlock – make her fly. Donna is magnificently self-centred – not selfish, but she pivots everything around herself, as we all do – so when she opens up and hears the Ood song, or begs for the Caecilius family to be saved, then she’s wonderful.
More Donna praise, while he’s busy writing Turn Left:
Is 4.11 too adult? I’ve already taken out lines about the mass graves in the south of England. But I do like that creating a whole different world thing. It’s hard to do, but an enjoyable sort of hard. One minute, Donna and her family are normal people. The next, they’re impoverished and homeless, allin a few short scenes. I sort of believe it, that it could happen to any of us, all of us, in the blink of an eye. One day, I want to write a huge scale adult series with that happening. It’s good for Donna, too. I love writing her. There ‘s an indestructible core to her, like she’s always determinedly at a right –angle to events. I’d love to be like Donna.
Another question Cook asks is about agendas: “You embarked on The Second Coming, for instance, to advocate atheism? And wrote Queer as Folk to represent gay men and gay issues on tv? Do you do that on Doctor Who ever? Can you?”
RTD:
It’s tricky, that social/political/religious thing, because really that’s life, that’s people, that’s what you think about the world, and that’s why you want to write in the first place.(..) If you’re touching on big issues, you’ve got to keep turning these things, examning them, looking at the opposite of what you think. For example, as an atheist, I set out to include the “Old Rugged Cross” sequence in Gridlock to show how GOOD faith can be, regardless of the existence of God – how it can unite and form a community, and essentially offer hope. That was my intention, or my starting point, and yet the real me came bleeding through, because it transpires that hope stifles the travellers. It stops them acting. By uniting, they are passive. The Doctor is the unbeliever. The direct consequences of the travellers in the traffic jam singing that hymn is that the Doctor realises that no one is going to help them. There is no higher authority. That’s when he starts to break the rules of tha world by jumping from car to car. You could argue, therefore, that the travellers’ faith was misguided. It’s great discussing this with David Tennant, actually. We well into devil’s advocate: he argued for the car-drivers being wrong and passive, and I argued for their goodness. But I think he’s right. He got what the script is saying. But I didn’t write Gridlock thinking, this is my take on religion. My foremost thought, and my principle job, was to write an entertaining drama about cats and humans stuck on a motorway.
As for reasons why he from the start didn’t want to do more than four seasons (plus specials) and didn’t change his mind:
But then, the other night, I saw a repeat of that Longford, that Channel 4 drama about the Moors Morders, and it did me no good at all. I sunk into a proper old gloom. I didn’t even tell you about it because it was foul. Peter Morgan is such a fine writer, damn him. His longford script is so fine and subtle, so deceptively simple, heartbreaking and true, and I was so powerfully jealous. I thought, I’m sitting here typing ‘INT. SPACESHIP’. What am I doing with my career? The answer is, having a wonderful time, with absolute freedom, I know, I know. All the same, looking at Longford, the real tick and bat and pulse that goes on between people, the sheer epic quality of ordinary life, even the lives of Lords and murderers, made me ache. I’m not knocking Doctor Who here, or my love of it. This show SHOULD be different. But I do wonder (…) That’s why I turned down the opportunity to meet George Lucas the other day. The thought of more years typing ‘Int. Spaceship’ and playing with other people’s toys… I mean, no matter how much I love Doctor Who, it’s not mine. I didn’t create this show. Ah well. Lucas might not have liked me anyway. And I can always tell people that I turned him down.
So Turn Left and parts of the finale were written, and he still didn’t know how to write Donna out, when – insert sinister music here – inspiration struck:
The best news is – I’ve finally worked out how to write out Donna at the end of the series! This has been driving me mad. Quietly, desperately insane. There isn’t time to tell you all the stuff going on in my head, but sometimes I leave out the most awful fears, because I don’t even like admitting them to myself. It’s been churning in my head – HOW, HOW, HOW? She loves the Doctor, he loves her, she loves travelling with him, she chose to be with him and went to extraordinary lengths to find him again, and she has precious little to go back to, so how could she leave? She gets injured? Dies? Sylvia dies? Donna gets lost in time, and I pick her up for one of the Specials (we find her years later, on an alien world, citizen of the universe, older and wiser)? None of those ideas worked. They’re all crap. They’re all dull, actually. But then, tonight, I solved it. At 9.15 pm. It’s like it just went WHAM. Right now, I can’t wait to write it. Huge stuff.
When Cook eventually gets to see the script, he writes: “You cried when writing Donna’s goodbye, even though you knew what was coming, an dnow Phil is in tears – aren’t you worried that it might be too sad for some viewers, especially the younger ones?”
Quoth Rusty, at his most evil overlordish, in full Chris Boucher about to write Blake for Christmas vein: Not remotely. Not for a single second. I believe, huge, massively, that TV isn’t there to make you smile. Drama certainly isn’t. That ending is devastating. I hope it’s never forgotten. I hope people cry for years. In 70 years’ time, kids watching it now will be in old folks’ hom, saying “Oh, why” (…) There is this great misconception that the Slitheen are for kids and episodes like Human Nature and The Family of Blood are for adults. In fact, adults can enjoy daft green monsters, and kids can appreciate emotional, grown-up drama. Pixar understands that perfectly. JK Rowlings does. If kids are upset, then they’re feeling something, and kids feel things vividly. The death of a goldfish is like the end of the world. It’s keen, real and powerful for them. But that doesn’t make it something to be avoided. If they can reach that state through fiction, well, they’re actually experiencing something wonderful. And important.
So does he ever admit to being wrong? Well. Depends. Cook successfully talks him out of using the “What, what, what?!?” gag at the end of Journey’s End; he acknowledges quite a bit of Torchwood s1 criticsm – the wannabe adulthood of the swearing in his own season opener, and in the season in general, the fact the show hadn’t found its voice yet – and vows they’re working on it for s2; his fellow producers Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson have been lobbying to give Harriet Smith a pay-off for what happens in The Christmas Invasion, and he admits they are right, and accordingly writes her scenes in The Stolen Earth. And he sees his first version of the beach scenes “rubbish” and the later ones still not as satisfying, though “Billie sells it with her look of LUST”. But have those same points raised by, say, the internet, and he gets furious (“art isn’t a democracy”). As I said – entertaining and frustrating/infuriating man, that Russell T. Davies. But definitely not someone I’d have wanted to miss out of my fannish life.
Lastly: there is a big spoiler for the Christmas 2008 special in this book. Not for the plot, but for the premise, and the character David Morrissey plays. While I was not thrilled to be spoiled, I am now looking more forward to the special than ever.
In terms of structure, the book is a lengthy email correspondance between RTD and journalist Benjamin Cook, mainly about DW and scriptwriting, though they also discuss both RTD’s other shows (mainly Queer as Folk and The Second Coming) and shows and books they both are interested in or are fannish about, for example Life on Mars, Harry Potter (they both loved Deathly Hallows, which got published while s3 was broadcast and s4 got written; RTD’s favourite scene was the Molly versus Bellatrix showdown, and he quotes “Not my daughter, you bitch!” to Cook con brio, which automatically makes me wonder whether someone has written a Jackie Tyler and Molly Weasley comparison ) and a new tv show named Skins. (At the end of the book, there is a fan letter from RTD to that show’s creator.) There are also a few emails to and from Steven Moffat (including the one where he accepts the succession offer from Rusty), and it tickles me that RTD, though he occasionally calls him Steven, usually refers to him as “the Moff” just as fandom does. Mind you, partisans who either see Moffat as their avenger of fannish wrongs and rescuer of DW from Rusty’s clutches or conversely consider him as horrible doom to what they like about DW and reason to quit the show before season 5 ever aired are bound to find the love fest between the two and their mutual admiration society frustrating. Tough. My favourite RTD quote re: the Moff is:
You can see voices in scripts, can’t you? The difference between Steven’s and mine? And it’s always such a reflection on the person. I mean, look at Steven: he’s all tough and Scottish, full of lethal gags (both in real life and in script), and quite a lustful man, I think, a writer clearly driven by sex. More significantly, under that gruff exterior, a wonderful and romantic man, who hates to give that away – except in his writing.
(One more sidenote here, because it fits the Davies-Moffat theme: much as RTD was into his Doctor/Rose love story, he definitely isn’t OTP-ish about them. His reaction to being told by Moffat that Silence in the Library/ Forest of Shadows would feature “the Doctor’s wife” is basically “yay, awesome, tell me more!” and looking back, he has fond thoughts about Girl in the Fireplace and the Doctor/Reinette affair.)
The book starts just before s3 was starting to be broadcast, with s4 being mapped out. At this point, nobody had any idea Catherine Tate would be available for an entire season (though RTD was planning to bring Donna back for the s4 finale along with everyone else), so plans were made for a new companion. A journalist (“it worked for Sarah Jane”) named Penny Cartner, who should be as Donna-like as possible (including being a red-head, in the coloured sketch RTD did of her):
Thoughts I’ve had about Penny: a bit older, maybe 30 + (are we losing all the little girls in the audience?), smarter, sassier. All of us loved Catherine Tate and that sort of repartee with the Doctor. (…) We all liked Donna’s equal-status sparkiness, independence, sharpness.
Penny would be a northerner (“it’s my love of northern, and my ability to write that speech pattern; I actually miss it” – for the record, I don’t think he means Nine here but thinks of the Queer as Folk characters who are all Mancunians); RTD intended to give her the stargazing grandfather he had wanted to use for a companion for a long while. (The stargazing was later transferred to Donna’s father, and then when the actor died mid-shooting of Partners in Crime back to a grandfather, i.e. the hastily drafted Bernard Cribbins as Wilf.) At this point, the s4 storyline was already amazingly detailed, including “Turn Left” (for Penny, the other turn would have come just before she met the Doctor in 4.1.,), and there were already casting ideas bounced around – and then Jane Tranter met Catherine Tate who told her how much she had enjoyed doing The Runaway Bride and how much she’d love to play Donna again:
I bloody love the idea – oh I love Donna – so we asked Phil, who relished working with Catherine, and then we asked David, and he just adores Catherine, and now Julie is booking in a lunch to see her! But it’s madness. A woman that busy? With her own TV show? Making movies now? We’ll never get Catherine for a whole series. Still, we can but try. At the very least,we might be able to get her back for 4.12/4.13.
Thus Penny the Northerner ended up being the companion who wasn’t – causing RTD to comment on the irony of the Turn Left scenario for now Penny really doesn’t meet the Doctor - though RTD ended up writing her into Partners in Crime anyway, though not as a redhead. (The journalist who investigates Adipose Industries at the same time Donna does, remember?) There was also the fact to consider that this was still before Smith and Jones had even aired:
Mark the date in your diary: today, Catherine Tate officially said yes! Bloody hell. This is so brilliant. What a cast! But we’ve got to get it right. I’m worried about how other writers will handle Donna. Not Steven Moffat, obviously. But it needs such a delicate touch not to go too funny or too broad… says the man who, in The Runaway Bride, had her swing across the Flood Chamber and smack into the wall! And when do we tell people? Everything leaks. Freema hasn’t even debuted as Martha yet. This is going to get very complicated. Announce this too soon and it’ll mess up Freema/Martha. We’ve got to keep that début clean and successful, because Freema is so brilliant. She deserves a big launch. We can’t clutter it by announcing the next companion. I think Penny will have to live on as a disguise: we’ll ask people to write Penny as a placeholder name. (…) I’m so excited about seeing Donna again, and everything that she can do, the sheer energy she brings to it, so the opening of 4.1. is really taking shape. Oh, the moment that Donna sees the Doctor! The moment that he sees her! (…) A lot of knives will be out for Donna/Catherine, in that tabloid world. They always are, for successful women. I must, in the script, account for that “Doctor Who becomes comedy” backlash - give Catherine good, strong, emotional stuff to balance it.
As I recall, once s4 was broadcast, there were comparisons between Donna and Fifth Doctor companion Tegan, so I found it interesting that RTD picks quite a different Old Who companion to compare her to, along with several allusions in the episodes themselves, that the First Doctor era was very much on his mind at the time of writing and editing s4:
Donna Noble arrived today! She was glorious. We had the read-through for 4.2. and 4.7, Catherine sat right next to David, and she was dazzling! After all that Penny/Donna development, I just sat there and thought, this is EXACTLY what I wanted. All that work, all that thinking, all those e-mails to you, actually had a result. She’s an equal to the Doctor, a friend, a mate, a challenge. It struck me – this is how Barbara Wright would be written, if she were a 2007/8 character. That feels good. Catherine takes a funny line, makes it five times funnier, and aims it like a dart – which makes David raise his game. He throws back a javelin! I’m so happy. I realised how scared I’d been all this time, because you never really know if something is going to work.
In terms of script editing on DW, the two examples best illustrating on how this works on DW under Rusty’s regime are
a) James Moran’s original version of the Fires of Pompeii intro scene, with RTD’s rewrite posted after. There is literally no line identical, yet the content is entirely so. A short exercpt of the excerpt, so you see what I mean:
Moran’s original:
DONNA
And it’s safe? You’ve been here before?
DOCTOR:
Once, yes. Didn’t go very well, had to leave in a bit of a hurry… and I had nothing to do with Rome burning down, before you ask, that was entirely not my fault at all. Mostly. Anyway, it’s all been rebuilt now.
DONNA:
Simple yes would be fine. Hold on – I spoke to that man. You! Can you understand me?
She adresses another trader.
MARKET TRADER 2:
Course I can.
DONNA
Doctor! I’m speaking Latin! I must be one of those language geniuses. You know, like how Einstein was rubbish at school, but then it turned out –
DOCTOR:
No, that’s the TARDIS translation thingy, gets inside your head.
RTD’s rewrite:
DONNA:
I’m here, in Rome, Donna Noble, in Rome! Me. This is just weird. I mean, everyone here’s dead!
DOCTOR
I wouldn’t go telling them that.
DONNA
No, but… hold on a minute, that sign over there’s in English. You having me on, are we in Epcot?
DOCTOR
No, that’s the TARDIS translation circuits, just makes it look like English. Speech as well. You’re talking Latin, right now.
DONNA:
Seriously? I just said ‘seriously’ in Latin? But… what if I said something in actual Latin? Like, ‘veni, vidi vici’, my Dad says that when he comes back from the football.
(Welsh gag ensues, I’m cutting to)
DONNA
You’ve been here before, then?
DOCTOR
Ages ago. And before you ask, that fire had nothing to do with me, well, not very much, well, a little bit, well… But I never got the chance to look around properly!
b)
Email exchange between RTD and the Moff about the problem that both Forest and Turn Left present Donna in alternative worlds, and could feel repetitive when broadcast. RTD solved this by changing his own storyline so that Donna no longer marries and has children in Turn Left - which she originally did (telling Moffat he was better at writing children anyway) –, by changing the order of episodes put Midnight between Forest and Turn Left, so the parallel worlds wouldn’t come directly after another, and lasty, when still in doubt this was too much of a coincidence, decided to make a virtue of a necessity and let the Doctor point this out to Donna as an example of the not so coincidences around her.
The decision of how to write Donna out came amazingly late. At first, before Howard Attfield – the actor who played Donna’s father Geoff – died, there was a tentative idea of making one of Donna’s motives for joining the Doctor the way her father’s cancer was burdening her, and in the end she would return to her family with new strength. This was made impossible by the actual death of the actor, and for a quite a while, there wasn’t any real alternative idea. Though quite a lot of Journey’s End otherwise was mapped out.
I’m thinking about Donna, Martha, Rose, Jack, Sarah Jane and Mickey as a team, and the tagline: ONE OF THEM WILL DIE. I’d watch that! Trouble is, I don’t want to kill any of them. Rose Tyler was never created to die. None of them was. They were all created to show off Doctor Who’s central premise: the world and the universe is wonderful, ordinary people can do great things, and the human race survives. At a cost, yes, but a cost in the SUPPORTING characteers. I mean, really, imagine Martha’s death. Or Donna’s. Or even Jackie’s. It’s just wrong. Tonally, wrong. Maybe Mickey could die? ‘Nooooo!’ said Phil. But Mickey is the only one who seems killable, because he’s not quite central (…). But then I get shivers, because it’s always the black guy who cops it. Maybe that’s politically correct of me, but political correctness can be political AND correct. But how do I keep that tagline without delivering? Maybe one of them dies and Martha is on hand with a bit of CPR…? The repercussions of death are so complicated and wonderful to write, but really 4.12/4.13 is about fighting Daleks, not mourning. 4.13 has to have the happiest ending ever. I’m bringing them all back because I want to see six people standing around that six-sided TARDIS console, flying the Earth back home. It’s HAPPY. You can’t mess with that. Then again, I am perverse and more than capable of ignoring everything I’ve just said.
I’ve a great image of Sarah Jane surrounded by Daleks, all shouting “Exterminate!” That would be thrilling! (Yes, it’s fannish, but I reckon I’m allowed to be in my last proper episode.) And then Mickey dimension-jumps in, blasts them with his big gun, and says “No one kills a Smith!” Ha ha ha. Also, this thought blazed into my head the other day, as I was walking past Techniquest on the way to Tesco: DAVROS WOULD RECOGNISE SARAH JANE! How exciting! And Davros should be the Daleks’ slave, because I hate it when he comes in and takes control and reduces the Daleks to soldiers. You could even feel sorry for him.
If you’re wondering how we get from “the happiest ending ever” as a goal to what eventually does happen with Donna, it’s a long process, and there’ll be a quote from when he makes that decision later, but I think the real reason is inherent in how RTD writes, full stop. The man is adicted to mixing tragedy with comedy, and vice versa. All four season finales had loss as well as triumph in them, and his other work is not that different in this regard. At one point, when discussing Queer as Folk, he segues into a personal credo:
But I believe passionately that Comedy and Tragedy exist alongside each other. No way are they diametric opposites; they’re right next to each other, and they overlap in a thousand different ways. Queer as Folk episode 3 is like a thesis on that. There is a huge comedy sex scene, which results in a slapstick fall off a window ledge, intercut with the horniest threesome in the world, intercut with a drugs overdose in which a man dies. I chose to intercut Tragedy with Comedy and Sex. The whole world is compressed into that: the coexistence of all those things. (…) But I have to write like that. Funny, sad, all at once. That’s how life is. You can have a pratfall at a funeral. You can laugh so much that you choke to death. The Master is dark and genuinenly insane, and therefore can be funny as hell. Jackie Tyler makes us laugh, but I knew I’d uncover something sad at the heart of her. Her sadness over her absent daughter is there as early as Aliens of London, but you don’t really get to see it properly until Love & Monsters. Idiots will say, ‘Ah, that character is developing now’ – what, like you were going to play it all in the first 30 seconds?! – but that capacity was always there.
And so the happiest moment – the companions all together, flying the TARDIS, which was the image he started out with – demanded the saddest moment in recompense, Donna losing her memories.
One big advantage of the email correspondance format this book has is that Benjamin Cook gets to ask the questions from a writerly point of view as well. For example, how to write characters different from each other:
“I’m interested in your approaches to writing, say, Rose, Martha and Donna differ? Is it what different characters say or how they say it that defines them, makes them ‘come alive?’, makes them distinguishable?”
To which RTD replies:
That’s tricky. I don’t type DONNA and then tink now, how would she say this…? The fact that I’ve typed DONNA means already has something to say. You can worry too much about speech patterns, about imposing different styles on the words, one for Rose, one for Donna, one for Martha, one for Sarah Jane. They’re all women, on the side of good, in a sci-fi world, so their speeches aren’t going to be radically different. It’s not so much what they say, as why they say it and when. But I suppose there’s a basic characteristic that I bear in mind. An essence. Rose is open, honest, heartfelt, to the oint of being selfish, wonderfully selfish. Martha is clever, calm, but rarely says what she’s really thinking. Donna is blunt, precise, unfiltered, but with a big heart beneath all the banter. But we come back to what I was saying ages ago about turning characters. If Rose is selfish, then her finest moments will come when she is selfless. If Martha keeps quiet, then her moments of revelation – like her goodbye to the Doctor in Last of the Time Lords, or stuck with Milo and Cheen in Gridlock – make her fly. Donna is magnificently self-centred – not selfish, but she pivots everything around herself, as we all do – so when she opens up and hears the Ood song, or begs for the Caecilius family to be saved, then she’s wonderful.
More Donna praise, while he’s busy writing Turn Left:
Is 4.11 too adult? I’ve already taken out lines about the mass graves in the south of England. But I do like that creating a whole different world thing. It’s hard to do, but an enjoyable sort of hard. One minute, Donna and her family are normal people. The next, they’re impoverished and homeless, allin a few short scenes. I sort of believe it, that it could happen to any of us, all of us, in the blink of an eye. One day, I want to write a huge scale adult series with that happening. It’s good for Donna, too. I love writing her. There ‘s an indestructible core to her, like she’s always determinedly at a right –angle to events. I’d love to be like Donna.
Another question Cook asks is about agendas: “You embarked on The Second Coming, for instance, to advocate atheism? And wrote Queer as Folk to represent gay men and gay issues on tv? Do you do that on Doctor Who ever? Can you?”
RTD:
It’s tricky, that social/political/religious thing, because really that’s life, that’s people, that’s what you think about the world, and that’s why you want to write in the first place.(..) If you’re touching on big issues, you’ve got to keep turning these things, examning them, looking at the opposite of what you think. For example, as an atheist, I set out to include the “Old Rugged Cross” sequence in Gridlock to show how GOOD faith can be, regardless of the existence of God – how it can unite and form a community, and essentially offer hope. That was my intention, or my starting point, and yet the real me came bleeding through, because it transpires that hope stifles the travellers. It stops them acting. By uniting, they are passive. The Doctor is the unbeliever. The direct consequences of the travellers in the traffic jam singing that hymn is that the Doctor realises that no one is going to help them. There is no higher authority. That’s when he starts to break the rules of tha world by jumping from car to car. You could argue, therefore, that the travellers’ faith was misguided. It’s great discussing this with David Tennant, actually. We well into devil’s advocate: he argued for the car-drivers being wrong and passive, and I argued for their goodness. But I think he’s right. He got what the script is saying. But I didn’t write Gridlock thinking, this is my take on religion. My foremost thought, and my principle job, was to write an entertaining drama about cats and humans stuck on a motorway.
As for reasons why he from the start didn’t want to do more than four seasons (plus specials) and didn’t change his mind:
But then, the other night, I saw a repeat of that Longford, that Channel 4 drama about the Moors Morders, and it did me no good at all. I sunk into a proper old gloom. I didn’t even tell you about it because it was foul. Peter Morgan is such a fine writer, damn him. His longford script is so fine and subtle, so deceptively simple, heartbreaking and true, and I was so powerfully jealous. I thought, I’m sitting here typing ‘INT. SPACESHIP’. What am I doing with my career? The answer is, having a wonderful time, with absolute freedom, I know, I know. All the same, looking at Longford, the real tick and bat and pulse that goes on between people, the sheer epic quality of ordinary life, even the lives of Lords and murderers, made me ache. I’m not knocking Doctor Who here, or my love of it. This show SHOULD be different. But I do wonder (…) That’s why I turned down the opportunity to meet George Lucas the other day. The thought of more years typing ‘Int. Spaceship’ and playing with other people’s toys… I mean, no matter how much I love Doctor Who, it’s not mine. I didn’t create this show. Ah well. Lucas might not have liked me anyway. And I can always tell people that I turned him down.
So Turn Left and parts of the finale were written, and he still didn’t know how to write Donna out, when – insert sinister music here – inspiration struck:
The best news is – I’ve finally worked out how to write out Donna at the end of the series! This has been driving me mad. Quietly, desperately insane. There isn’t time to tell you all the stuff going on in my head, but sometimes I leave out the most awful fears, because I don’t even like admitting them to myself. It’s been churning in my head – HOW, HOW, HOW? She loves the Doctor, he loves her, she loves travelling with him, she chose to be with him and went to extraordinary lengths to find him again, and she has precious little to go back to, so how could she leave? She gets injured? Dies? Sylvia dies? Donna gets lost in time, and I pick her up for one of the Specials (we find her years later, on an alien world, citizen of the universe, older and wiser)? None of those ideas worked. They’re all crap. They’re all dull, actually. But then, tonight, I solved it. At 9.15 pm. It’s like it just went WHAM. Right now, I can’t wait to write it. Huge stuff.
When Cook eventually gets to see the script, he writes: “You cried when writing Donna’s goodbye, even though you knew what was coming, an dnow Phil is in tears – aren’t you worried that it might be too sad for some viewers, especially the younger ones?”
Quoth Rusty, at his most evil overlordish, in full Chris Boucher about to write Blake for Christmas vein: Not remotely. Not for a single second. I believe, huge, massively, that TV isn’t there to make you smile. Drama certainly isn’t. That ending is devastating. I hope it’s never forgotten. I hope people cry for years. In 70 years’ time, kids watching it now will be in old folks’ hom, saying “Oh, why” (…) There is this great misconception that the Slitheen are for kids and episodes like Human Nature and The Family of Blood are for adults. In fact, adults can enjoy daft green monsters, and kids can appreciate emotional, grown-up drama. Pixar understands that perfectly. JK Rowlings does. If kids are upset, then they’re feeling something, and kids feel things vividly. The death of a goldfish is like the end of the world. It’s keen, real and powerful for them. But that doesn’t make it something to be avoided. If they can reach that state through fiction, well, they’re actually experiencing something wonderful. And important.
So does he ever admit to being wrong? Well. Depends. Cook successfully talks him out of using the “What, what, what?!?” gag at the end of Journey’s End; he acknowledges quite a bit of Torchwood s1 criticsm – the wannabe adulthood of the swearing in his own season opener, and in the season in general, the fact the show hadn’t found its voice yet – and vows they’re working on it for s2; his fellow producers Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson have been lobbying to give Harriet Smith a pay-off for what happens in The Christmas Invasion, and he admits they are right, and accordingly writes her scenes in The Stolen Earth. And he sees his first version of the beach scenes “rubbish” and the later ones still not as satisfying, though “Billie sells it with her look of LUST”. But have those same points raised by, say, the internet, and he gets furious (“art isn’t a democracy”). As I said – entertaining and frustrating/infuriating man, that Russell T. Davies. But definitely not someone I’d have wanted to miss out of my fannish life.
Lastly: there is a big spoiler for the Christmas 2008 special in this book. Not for the plot, but for the premise, and the character David Morrissey plays. While I was not thrilled to be spoiled, I am now looking more forward to the special than ever.
