The Return of the Doctor

It’s a bright, warm, spring afternoon, and Russell T Davies – the writer of Dr Who – arrives on set in a black suit and a black coat. It’s clear that he’s been around the nether world of science fiction for far too long. The set would normally be populated by alien life-forms – the Moxx, with its face of blue, the Slitheen, and the Living Trees – all drinking their coffee through straws. But not today. The set – a derelict car-parts warehouse in Cardiff – is completely empty. Everyone is off filming a life/death struggle against the evil Toclafane. In Penarth.

Davies walks through the props department shared by Dr Who, and the Dr Who spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, doing a quick stock-take. Space age vehicle from the year 5 billion? Check. Although it does look alarmingly like a VW camper van. Corpse? Check. “You’ve got to have corpses” he says. “You don’t want to keep hiring them in. Corpses are expensive. Especially when you hire them in on the scale we do.” Traffic lights, beds, radios – all from the past, the present and the future. And a teasmade. At a push, you could live here. But, oh, the nightmares…….

Davies is genuinely excited to rummage through Dr Who history. Well, he’s a fan. And not in a clever-clever, ironic, postmodern way. After the success of Casanova, Davies’s costume romp, he was desperate to get started on something else. “The BBC were going ‘How about The Tale Of Two Cities – in outer space?’” says Davies. “Whenever a friend of mine went in for a meeting, I’d say, ‘Tell them I want to do Dr Who’.” Eventually, the nagging paid off, and the BBC gave him the commission. Davies would be free to take us to the limits of our dark imaginings – in Cardiff.

Dr Who first appeared in 1963, and is now the longest-running science fiction television series in the world. With good reason, reckons Davies – it’s down to the writing. “Take The Talons of Weng Chiang, for example” says Davies. “Watch episode one. It’s the best dialogue ever written. It’s up there with Dennis Potter. By a man called Robert Holmes. When the history of television drama comes to be written, Robert Holmes won’t be remembered at all because he only wrote genre stuff. And that, I reckon, is a real tragedy.”

He pulls at the Doctor’s clothes racks. There’s no long scarf any more. “The scarf was a fantastic accident” says Davies. “They were throwing clothes together in some warehouse, and apparently the Doctor said ‘Let’s try a scarf’. They gave some wool to a woman who knitted something that was far too long. If they had sat there and said ‘Let’s have a really, really long scarf’ it wouldn’t have been funny. Before we started, we talked a lot about ‘ecentricity’. Well, the Doctor’s got two hearts. He’s 900 years old. And he travels in time and space. He doesn’t need funny clothes.”

It created uproar in the Dr Who online community. But everything creates uproar in the Dr Who online community. Fans spend hours logging what’s right – and what’s wrong – with Davies’ Doctor. He just ignores them. “In the community of sci-fi shows, I think we're the only one that actively ignores its online fanbase. American shows seem to court them, or pretend that they do. That way lies madness. I can't think of a show that's improved its quality, or its ratings, by doing it. It's like going in search of a massively biased focus group – why would anyone do that?”

But Davies was sensible enough to keep the tardis – an old-fashioned Police box. After all, he was creating an action adventure science-fiction show in a world that was full of them. And, early on, he realised that what made Dr Who unique was the fact that everything else was American. “I decided on big iconic Britishness” he says. “When we go to London, it’s a picture postcard London, with red double decker buses and the London Eye. We don’t have pearly kings and queens, but not far off. The tardis is central to all that.”

There are three tardises – one made from fibre glass, to lug around on location, and two made from wood. And there are four daleks. In the Doomsday episode, they unleashed hordes of hidden Daleks from inside the Genesis Ark, but only four survived – by hiding in The Void. In real life, they are all kept under lock and key. In Cardiff. Not because of the danger they present to the planet. “It’s just that everyone wants to be a dalek” says Davies. “To be honest, if they weren’t locked up, they would be damaged to buggery.”

The Dr Who end credits say Davies is ‘writer’ and ‘executive producer’. That’s an understatement. He has a say in everything, down to the colour of the Doctor’s suit. After filming, he watches all the rushes – every single frame of them. He works across Dr Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, writing the key episodes. And when there’s an edit, or a dub, Davies is there. It’s no wonder that he hasn’t had a day’s holiday in three years. There’s simply no time. And when he had a cold, in 2006, it messed up the schedule for months.

For Davies, it’s all about retaining control. But in a good way. He remembers Second Coming, where Christopher Eccleston claimed to be the Son of God. It had a very precise description of Devils in it. “I wrote ‘Their eyes shine with tiny white reflections of light’” says Davies. “But somebody made the eyes red. Now, I’m not being a dictator, saying ‘It has to be done like this’, but I watch an awful lot of telly. Red eyes look like Buffy. Green eyes look like Blake’s Seven. So I changed the eyes to white again. It taught me that, as a writer, you can’t say things out loud often enough.”

Nowadays, when Davies says something, people listen. A poll of industry experts, conducted by the Radio Times, rated Davies as the 17th most powerful person in tv drama in 2004 – he’s probably Top Ten by now. And The Stage voted him the most important artist at work in British television. So he’s no stranger to the dramatic gesture. And as he discusses his work, he becomes animated. He uses his hands like an Italian. He enunciates, slowly, for effect. If you met Davies for the first time, you would say ‘That man definitely works in theatre’.

Which was where he started – at the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre in Swansea. “And it wasn't just swanning about pretending to be a tree” says Davies. “It was massively disciplined. God, he [Godfrey Evans] would kill you if you were late, and I still carry a lot of that stuff with me. Never late!” Davies was the son of two teachers, but he learnt more at Youth Theatre than school. “They were the first people who first got me writing - they'd get us to write little half-hour plays, and rehearse them, rewrite them, put them on for the public. Brilliant times.”

Olchfa Comprehensive wasn’t as inspirational. “At the time” says Davies, “it was proud of being ‘Europe's largest comprehensive’. It had 2,500 pupils, which is a ridiculous size for a school. But I avoided getting beaten up because I'm so tall [he is 6” 6’]. I just sort of kept my head down, immersed myself in TV and comics – Marvel comics, loved them – and all sorts of comic strips, like Schulz and Uderzo. I spent a long time wanting to be a graphic artist – because I can draw – and it took me until I was about 20 to realise that it was the writing I liked, not the drawing.”

He studied English at Oxford, but his first step towards a career in television was the Director’s Course at the BBC. Apart from the odd distraction – he presented an episode of Play School, and produced Why Don't You...? – his sights were firmly set on directing. His big break came with his first television drama – a six-part serial for children entitled Dark Season, that starred a very young Kate Winslett. His talent for writing soon became apparent, and he went on to produce scripts for Children’s Ward and Cluedo.

But it was the Channel 4 drama Queer As Folk that first brought him to popular attention. Or unpopular attention – it remains the seventh most complained about show in the history of British television. The gay drama, featuring rimming, underage sex and recreational drugs, also featured complicated, sympathetic characterisation. But it’s the rimming that people remember. Davies is unrepentant. He has continued to write homosexual characters, and has excelled himself with Captain Jack, the star of Torchwood. He’s attracted to male, female and alien – tv’s first omnisexual.

In the variety of work that Davies has done, he’s always looking to “make the impossible work”, whether it’s a gay man falling in love with a woman (Bob And Rose) or Jesus coming back (Second Coming). And just about every episode of Doctor Who. But, at the end of all that dramatic conflict, he likes a good, old-fashioned happy ending. “I think there’s a real skill and genuine craft to a happy ending” he says. “I think the natural bent of all dramatists is to go dark. But I’m quite happy to go the opposite way. For the moment.”

His outlook wasn’t always so positive. Just look at The Grand. It was Upstairs, Downstairs, set in a big 1920s hotel. And it went out at 9pm on a Friday. “My God, that show was steeped in misery” says Davies. “That was me exploring. And experimenting. I wrote about shell-shock after World War One, betrayal, depression. The ratings just went down and down and down. As it got darker and darker and darker. I know the mistake I made – I thought drama was tragedy. It’s a profound mistake to think that drama can’t be fun.”

And The Grand wasn’t his only failure. Well, writing is an imprecise science. Some things work. Some things don’t. Take Mine All Mine, Davies’ drama about a family who inherited Swansea – by the end of its run on ITV, it was getting two million viewers. “But there was still no way I would be unemployed after that” says Davies. “It’s just not that sort of industry. There’s a lot of work for good television writers. And I’m one of those. In this country, you have to be a drunk and a drug addict for people to stop employing you.”

Not that he’s excusing an audience of two million. Davies thrives off an audience. It defines what he does – popular drama. He’s a fan of everything from Coronation Street (“the wit and wisdom of that show – I watch it five times a week”) to Cold Feet, and reckons that Shilpa’s victory in Celebrity Big Brother was “the most fascinating two weeks in television’s history. Almost.” To Davies, reality tv is just a different way of telling a story. “After all,” he says, “when Panorama discusses racism, who really wants to watch?”

Newsnight are still pestering him for an interview. And Davies is still saying no. There aren’t many television dramatists who would say no to Newsnight – and the chance to discuss narrative arc and subtext. Apart from, maybe, Russell T Davies. “I very rarely watch it” he says, “but, when I do, I end up throwing stuff at the screen. I think they’re hugely pretentious. I saw them once reviewing the Lion King. Which is one of the most brilliant films ever made. And the snobbery, talking about Disney. I couldn’t believe it.”

Early on in the Dr Who production process, Davies knew he had the Saturday night 7pm slot – and it informed the feel of the programme he was going to make. “If you channel hop on a Saturday night” says Davies, “you’re up against the big Light Entertainment shows, like Ant and Dec, with a shiny black floor and a huge audience. With background music behind everything. They’re phenomenally loud, those shows, and I believe that’s what draws an audience. So we decided to make Dr Who really noisy.”

Davies used to work with graphics, and it shows. He is keen on visuals. He’s even taken to drawing aliens – Cassandra was one of his – to show his creatives. For the first few months of the job, he was sat in the big chair saying ‘Big pictures! Big pictures! “I was shouting ‘Blow up Big Ben. Blow up Number 10. Let’s have a space ship. Not just 10 daleks. Let’s have 1,000 daleks. Coming out of the spaceship. Coming out of 10 spaceships’. That was one of the excitements of working on Dr Who for me – big pictures.”

Tell him that CGI is getting cheaper. Tell him – and then stand back. Because today he’s trying to get an extra shot that makes sense of episode three. And it costs £3,500. He doesn’t have £3,500. Davies will never complain about the funding of Dr Who. Not publicly, anyway. “But it’s still the sort of budget, I gather, that they get for Waking the Dead. And they’re standing around in morgues. We’re blowing things up, with monsters everywhere. We could make a much smaller show. We don’t. We make it big and blousy.”

The new series has certainly escaped the confines of the three-wall set. And it’s more contemporary. “I keep reading about how I introduced emotion” says Davies. “How ridiculous. I’ve introduced emotion? Dr Who is about two opposites travelling together – their friendship and their love for each other. An alien and a human. He’s got a tardis. She’s got a family. And a mother. And a boyfriend. Which is an innovation for Dr Who. But not for me. It’s the only way you can write it now. The more polarised, the better.” He’s 900. She’s 19. How much more polar can you get?

Davies divides his time between Cardiff – a nice little flat looking out over Cardiff Bay – and Manchester. “It used to be 50/50” says Davies. “But now I’m here for 10 or 11 months a year. And home for weekends. To see the most patient boyfriend in the world.” He has, finally, got the pants and socks to support the two-city lifestyle. But he can’t get used to one of the worst journeys on British Rail. “Four hours of hell. It’s like Calcutta – sitting on a box of chickens with peasants hanging from the windows outside”.

Which is one of the reasons why Davies is ready for a new challenge. “I’ve always always wanted to adapt The Old Curiousity Shop. I love it. It’s about time someone had the nerve to rewrite Dickens. The whole plot is a mess. The first three chapters narrated by Edward somebody? Obviously Dickens worked out that he couldn’t be in every scene. So, at the end of Chapter Three, he goes ‘That’s the end of my part of the story – goodbye’. And Quilp’s death? Is that it? Anyway, lo and behold, ITV are doing it. If you stay too long somewhere you start missing out on chances like that.”

A fourth series of Dr Who has already been commissioned. And Davies is putting the finishing touches to scripts for Christmas 2007. His work here is – almost – done. When he does leave, it will be with happy memories. Especially the day the Doctor returned, on March 26, 2005. “That afternoon,” remembers Davies, “I went into town – shopping and pottering about. There was a buzz in the air. I felt like I was eight-years-old again. It was like ‘Mum’s dragged me to town, and I’ve got to get home because Dr Who’s going to be on’ I’ll never forget that feeling. As long as I live.”



		The Return of the Doctor It’s a bright, warm, spring afternoon, and Russell T Davies – the writer of Dr Who – arrives on set in a black suit and a black coat. It’s clear that he’s been around the nether world of science fiction for far too long. The set would normally be populated by alien life-forms – the Moxx, with its face of blue, the Slitheen, and the Living Trees – all drinking their coffee through straws. But not today. The set – a derelict car-parts warehouse in Cardiff – is completely empty. Everyone is off filming a life/death struggle against the evil Toclafane. In Penarth. Davies walks through the props department shared by Dr Who, and the Dr Who spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, doing a quick stock-take. Space age vehicle from the year 5 billion? Check. Although it does look alarmingly like a VW camper van. Corpse? Check. “You’ve got to have corpses” he says. “You don’t want to keep hiring them in. Corpses are expensive. Especially when you hire them in on the scale we do.” Traffic lights, beds, radios – all from the past, the present and the future. And a teasmade. At a push, you could live here. But, oh, the nightmares……. Davies is genuinely excited to rummage through Dr Who history. Well, he’s a fan. And not in a clever-clever, ironic, postmodern way. After the success of Casanova, Davies’s costume romp, he was desperate to get started on something else. “The BBC were going ‘How about The Tale Of Two Cities – in outer space?’” says Davies. “Whenever a friend of mine went in for a meeting, I’d say, ‘Tell them I want to do Dr Who’.” Eventually, the nagging paid off, and the BBC gave him the commission. Davies would be free to take us to the limits of our dark imaginings – in Cardiff. Dr Who first appeared in 1963, and is now the longest-running science fiction television series in the world. With good reason, reckons Davies – it’s down to the writing. “Take The Talons of Weng Chiang, for example” says Davies. “Watch episode one. It’s the best dialogue ever written. It’s up there with Dennis Potter. By a man called Robert Holmes. When the history of television drama comes to be written, Robert Holmes won’t be remembered at all because he only wrote genre stuff. And that, I reckon, is a real tragedy.” He pulls at the Doctor’s clothes racks. There’s no long scarf any more. “The scarf was a fantastic accident” says Davies. “They were throwing clothes together in some warehouse, and apparently the Doctor said ‘Let’s try a scarf’. They gave some wool to a woman who knitted something that was far too long. If they had sat there and said ‘Let’s have a really, really long scarf’ it wouldn’t have been funny. Before we started, we talked a lot about ‘ecentricity’. Well, the Doctor’s got two hearts. He’s 900 years old. And he travels in time and space. He doesn’t need funny clothes.” It created uproar in the Dr Who online community. But everything creates uproar in the Dr Who online community. Fans spend hours logging what’s right – and what’s wrong – with Davies’ Doctor. He just ignores them. “In the community of sci-fi shows, I think we're the only one that actively ignores its online fanbase. American shows seem to court them, or pretend that they do. That way lies madness. I can't think of a show that's improved its quality, or its ratings, by doing it. It's like going in search of a massively biased focus group – why would anyone do that?” But Davies was sensible enough to keep the tardis – an old-fashioned Police box. After all, he was creating an action adventure science-fiction show in a world that was full of them. And, early on, he realised that what made Dr Who unique was the fact that everything else was American. “I decided on big iconic Britishness” he says. “When we go to London, it’s a picture postcard London, with red double decker buses and the London Eye. We don’t have pearly kings and queens, but not far off. The tardis is central to all that.” There are three tardises – one made from fibre glass, to lug around on location, and two made from wood. And there are four daleks. In the Doomsday episode, they unleashed hordes of hidden Daleks from inside the Genesis Ark, but only four survived – by hiding in The Void. In real life, they are all kept under lock and key. In Cardiff. Not because of the danger they present to the planet. “It’s just that everyone wants to be a dalek” says Davies. “To be honest, if they weren’t locked up, they would be damaged to buggery.” The Dr Who end credits say Davies is ‘writer’ and ‘executive producer’. That’s an understatement. He has a say in everything, down to the colour of the Doctor’s suit. After filming, he watches all the rushes – every single frame of them. He works across Dr Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, writing the key episodes. And when there’s an edit, or a dub, Davies is there. It’s no wonder that he hasn’t had a day’s holiday in three years. There’s simply no time. And when he had a cold, in 2006, it messed up the schedule for months. For Davies, it’s all about retaining control. But in a good way. He remembers Second Coming, where Christopher Eccleston claimed to be the Son of God. It had a very precise description of Devils in it. “I wrote ‘Their eyes shine with tiny white reflections of light’” says Davies. “But somebody made the eyes red. Now, I’m not being a dictator, saying ‘It has to be done like this’, but I watch an awful lot of telly. Red eyes look like Buffy. Green eyes look like Blake’s Seven. So I changed the eyes to white again. It taught me that, as a writer, you can’t say things out loud often enough.” Nowadays, when Davies says something, people listen. A poll of industry experts, conducted by the Radio Times, rated Davies as the 17th most powerful person in tv drama in 2004 – he’s probably Top Ten by now. And The Stage voted him the most important artist at work in British television. So he’s no stranger to the dramatic gesture. And as he discusses his work, he becomes animated. He uses his hands like an Italian. He enunciates, slowly, for effect. If you met Davies for the first time, you would say ‘That man definitely works in theatre’. Which was where he started – at the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre in Swansea. “And it wasn't just swanning about pretending to be a tree” says Davies. “It was massively disciplined. God, he [Godfrey Evans] would kill you if you were late, and I still carry a lot of that stuff with me. Never late!” Davies was the son of two teachers, but he learnt more at Youth Theatre than school. “They were the first people who first got me writing - they'd get us to write little half-hour plays, and rehearse them, rewrite them, put them on for the public. Brilliant times.” Olchfa Comprehensive wasn’t as inspirational. “At the time” says Davies, “it was proud of being ‘Europe's largest comprehensive’. It had 2,500 pupils, which is a ridiculous size for a school. But I avoided getting beaten up because I'm so tall [he is 6” 6’]. I just sort of kept my head down, immersed myself in TV and comics – Marvel comics, loved them – and all sorts of comic strips, like Schulz and Uderzo. I spent a long time wanting to be a graphic artist – because I can draw – and it took me until I was about 20 to realise that it was the writing I liked, not the drawing.” He studied English at Oxford, but his first step towards a career in television was the Director’s Course at the BBC. Apart from the odd distraction – he presented an episode of Play School, and produced Why Don't You...? – his sights were firmly set on directing. His big break came with his first television drama – a six-part serial for children entitled Dark Season, that starred a very young Kate Winslett. His talent for writing soon became apparent, and he went on to produce scripts for Children’s Ward and Cluedo. But it was the Channel 4 drama Queer As Folk that first brought him to popular attention. Or unpopular attention – it remains the seventh most complained about show in the history of British television. The gay drama, featuring rimming, underage sex and recreational drugs, also featured complicated, sympathetic characterisation. But it’s the rimming that people remember. Davies is unrepentant. He has continued to write homosexual characters, and has excelled himself with Captain Jack, the star of Torchwood. He’s attracted to male, female and alien – tv’s first omnisexual. In the variety of work that Davies has done, he’s always looking to “make the impossible work”, whether it’s a gay man falling in love with a woman (Bob And Rose) or Jesus coming back (Second Coming). And just about every episode of Doctor Who. But, at the end of all that dramatic conflict, he likes a good, old-fashioned happy ending. “I think there’s a real skill and genuine craft to a happy ending” he says. “I think the natural bent of all dramatists is to go dark. But I’m quite happy to go the opposite way. For the moment.” His outlook wasn’t always so positive. Just look at The Grand. It was Upstairs, Downstairs, set in a big 1920s hotel. And it went out at 9pm on a Friday. “My God, that show was steeped in misery” says Davies. “That was me exploring. And experimenting. I wrote about shell-shock after World War One, betrayal, depression. The ratings just went down and down and down. As it got darker and darker and darker. I know the mistake I made – I thought drama was tragedy. It’s a profound mistake to think that drama can’t be fun.” And The Grand wasn’t his only failure. Well, writing is an imprecise science. Some things work. Some things don’t. Take Mine All Mine, Davies’ drama about a family who inherited Swansea – by the end of its run on ITV, it was getting two million viewers. “But there was still no way I would be unemployed after that” says Davies. “It’s just not that sort of industry. There’s a lot of work for good television writers. And I’m one of those. In this country, you have to be a drunk and a drug addict for people to stop employing you.” Not that he’s excusing an audience of two million. Davies thrives off an audience. It defines what he does – popular drama. He’s a fan of everything from Coronation Street (“the wit and wisdom of that show – I watch it five times a week”) to Cold Feet, and reckons that Shilpa’s victory in Celebrity Big Brother was “the most fascinating two weeks in television’s history. Almost.” To Davies, reality tv is just a different way of telling a story. “After all,” he says, “when Panorama discusses racism, who really wants to watch?” Newsnight are still pestering him for an interview. And Davies is still saying no. There aren’t many television dramatists who would say no to Newsnight – and the chance to discuss narrative arc and subtext. Apart from, maybe, Russell T Davies. “I very rarely watch it” he says, “but, when I do, I end up throwing stuff at the screen. I think they’re hugely pretentious. I saw them once reviewing the Lion King. Which is one of the most brilliant films ever made. And the snobbery, talking about Disney. I couldn’t believe it.” Early on in the Dr Who production process, Davies knew he had the Saturday night 7pm slot – and it informed the feel of the programme he was going to make. “If you channel hop on a Saturday night” says Davies, “you’re up against the big Light Entertainment shows, like Ant and Dec, with a shiny black floor and a huge audience. With background music behind everything. They’re phenomenally loud, those shows, and I believe that’s what draws an audience. So we decided to make Dr Who really noisy.” Davies used to work with graphics, and it shows. He is keen on visuals. He’s even taken to drawing aliens – Cassandra was one of his – to show his creatives. For the first few months of the job, he was sat in the big chair saying ‘Big pictures! Big pictures! “I was shouting ‘Blow up Big Ben. Blow up Number 10. Let’s have a space ship. Not just 10 daleks. Let’s have 1,000 daleks. Coming out of the spaceship. Coming out of 10 spaceships’. That was one of the excitements of working on Dr Who for me – big pictures.” Tell him that CGI is getting cheaper. Tell him – and then stand back. Because today he’s trying to get an extra shot that makes sense of episode three. And it costs £3,500. He doesn’t have £3,500. Davies will never complain about the funding of Dr Who. Not publicly, anyway. “But it’s still the sort of budget, I gather, that they get for Waking the Dead. And they’re standing around in morgues. We’re blowing things up, with monsters everywhere. We could make a much smaller show. We don’t. We make it big and blousy.” The new series has certainly escaped the confines of the three-wall set. And it’s more contemporary. “I keep reading about how I introduced emotion” says Davies. “How ridiculous. I’ve introduced emotion? Dr Who is about two opposites travelling together – their friendship and their love for each other. An alien and a human. He’s got a tardis. She’s got a family. And a mother. And a boyfriend. Which is an innovation for Dr Who. But not for me. It’s the only way you can write it now. The more polarised, the better.” He’s 900. She’s 19. How much more polar can you get? Davies divides his time between Cardiff – a nice little flat looking out over Cardiff Bay – and Manchester. “It used to be 50/50” says Davies. “But now I’m here for 10 or 11 months a year. And home for weekends. To see the most patient boyfriend in the world.” He has, finally, got the pants and socks to support the two-city lifestyle. But he can’t get used to one of the worst journeys on British Rail. “Four hours of hell. It’s like Calcutta – sitting on a box of chickens with peasants hanging from the windows outside”. Which is one of the reasons why Davies is ready for a new challenge. “I’ve always always wanted to adapt The Old Curiousity Shop. I love it. It’s about time someone had the nerve to rewrite Dickens. The whole plot is a mess. The first three chapters narrated by Edward somebody? Obviously Dickens worked out that he couldn’t be in every scene. So, at the end of Chapter Three, he goes ‘That’s the end of my part of the story – goodbye’. And Quilp’s death? Is that it? Anyway, lo and behold, ITV are doing it. If you stay too long somewhere you start missing out on chances like that.” A fourth series of Dr Who has already been commissioned. And Davies is putting the finishing touches to scripts for Christmas 2007. His work here is – almost – done. When he does leave, it will be with happy memories. Especially the day the Doctor returned, on March 26, 2005. “That afternoon,” remembers Davies, “I went into town – shopping and pottering about. There was a buzz in the air. I felt like I was eight-years-old again. It was like ‘Mum’s dragged me to town, and I’ve got to get home because Dr Who’s going to be on’ I’ll never forget that feeling. As long as I live.”

		© Richard Johnson 2000 - 2009