With a brand new Doctor, production team and sonic screwdriver, not to mention the legacy of David Tennant to overcome, the stakes for the next series of Doctor Who are high. Neil Midgley followed the filming over six months.
Mercure Holland House Hotel, Cardiff
September 23, 2009
Steven Moffat, the new lead writer and executive producer of Doctor Who, calls the cast and crew assembled in the Caernarfon Suite to order. 'This,’ he says, with a portentousness that’s only half-sardonic, 'will be the most scrutinised hour of our television lives.’ No fewer than 58 members of cast and crew are gathered for the script read-through of the first episode of the 2010 run: a new series, but also a new production team, a new companion and a new Doctor in the form of Matt Smith.
'I think that’s Steven’s form of encouragement,’ Smith says drily. As the Doctor, Smith will be scrutinised not only by 10 million viewers, but also by some very nervous BBC executives and a dedicated – some would say slightly unhinged – online fan community. 'You don’t really think about it on a day-to-day level,’ Smith says. 'Because if you did, you’d never get anything done.’
Today Smith is wearing jeans and a sweater rather than the Time Lord’s natty new bow tie and tweed jacket – but there’s still no mistaking the thick, shiny quiff that will surely spawn a million youthful imitations this spring. (The bow tie, with tweed jacket and braces, was Smith’s idea, and a last-minute replacement for a 'more piratey’ look that the producers had developed.) Though Smith, 27, received good notices for his breakthrough TV role, in the little-watched BBC2 political drama Party Animals, he was a surprise choice to play the Doctor. His energy and projection silence the room as the read-through gets under way, but they are almost matched by Moffat, who reads the stage directions so fast that people have trouble turning their pages quickly enough to keep up.
'It’s basically Trumpton,’ Moffat says of Leadworth, the fictional English village in which the Doctor – his Tardis out of control – crash-lands at the beginning of the episode. At 60 minutes, this episode will be a third longer than most, yet it still has plenty to get through. Smith hasn’t quite finished regenerating – a process that varies in length from Doctor to Doctor, but for Smith will carry on throughout episode one of the new run. There’s his new companion to introduce: Amy Pond, played by 22-year-old Karen Gillan – who was the last person to audition for the role, and who Moffat says was 'a bit kookier’ than the others. And then, of course, there’s the obligatory threat of global annihilation – in the form of the Atraxi, an orbiting crowd of thuggish galactic policemen – to dispatch.
Even at the read-through, Smith makes a compelling Doctor: funny but not comical, thoughtful but not academic. As the chattering crowd of publicists and BBC commissioning editors disperses, Smith says that he doesn’t dwell too much on how his Doctor will be different from Tennant’s. 'If you analyse it in that way, it ceases to be spontaneous and momentary,’ he says. 'Ask me in nine months’ time, when it’s on TV.’
The Cathedral Green, Llandaff, Cardiff
October 7
Despite the small matter of being located in Wales, Llandaff’s village green – with its church spire, war memorial and Tudor timbers – easily passes for Leadworth. Moffat’s script has required a few features to be added for the location shoot: a duck pond, so that the Doctor and Amy can bicker about the absence of ducks, and a red telephone box, ready to be exploded. They’ve turned one house into a pub, repainted the entire exterior of others, and brought a fire engine. But there’s one thing even a Time Lord can’t control: the British weather.
'We’ve had trouble with the rain,’ Smith says, huddling beneath an 'E-Z Up’ canopy that shelters make-up bags, filming monitors and a trestle table of instant coffee. A bright blue director’s chair has the word matt stencilled on the back, with a hot water bottle lying ready for use between takes. 'It’s meant to be an idyllic, sunny village,’ Smith says. 'But, as you can see, it’s pouring down.’
With characteristic cheer – Smith seems never to be irritable, even at the end of a long day’s location shooting – he says that Moffat has come up with a potential explanation for the rainfall. 'They’re thinking of putting a line in the script saying, “Oh, it’s the Atraxi, they’re getting ready to boil the planet.” Something like that. There’s always a way round the weather in Doctor Who,’ he says.
Over her mini-skirted costume, Gillan is wearing a floor-length coat, wrapped in a blanket and sporting a rain hat. 'Which can only be described as an old-woman, Last-of-the-Summer-Wine hat,’ she giggles. The race to save the planet that’s unfolding on the village green will, Gillan says, help to show viewers what bonds the Doctor and Amy together. 'They’re two of a kind. They’re both a bit lost,’ she says. 'Because Amy has no parents, she’s this Scottish girl in an English village. So they’re both lost souls that have found each other. And they both have a sense of adventure about them, and I think that’s what the Doctor loves about Amy. She has that spirit in her, and that fire. She keeps him on his toes.’
The pair step back out into the rain for another take. The Doctor is trying to attract the attention of the Atraxi spaceship by flamboyant use of technology that the aliens wouldn’t expect their sensors to pick up on an English village green – namely, of course, his sonic screwdriver. For now, it’s still Tennant’s screwdriver (at this point in the episode, in fact, the 'raggedy Doctor’ is still wearing Tennant’s battered suit and trainers). For the purposes of both the episode (to frustrate the Doctor and cause a nice bang) and the series (so Smith can have his own, spanking new sonic screwdriver), the screwdriver has to explode.
'We’ve concealed a spark effect in the sonic screwdriver,’ says Danny Hargreaves, who is in charge of special effects for Doctor Who. 'It’s a mixture of an ingredient called “black powder” together with titanium granules. When you put an electrical charge through it, it burns the black powder, which then burns the titanium, which gives you lots of sparks.’ When the scene is shot, Hargreaves takes the role of Wile E Coyote, standing off to one side with a wireless remote control. A receiver in Smith’s pocket is then connected to the screwdriver itself by a wire that runs down his sleeve.
Bang goes the screwdriver, and Smith flinches so violently that he snaps it in two. After the take, standing in the middle of the village green in the rain, Smith points theatrically at the ash on his hand. 'Look what they do to me!’ he squeals.
St David’s Hotel, Cardiff
October 7
All that rain, it turns out at the end of the day on the Cathedral Green, may not be such a problem in the final version of the episode. 'It’s a funny thing, rain on television: sometimes you can see it, sometimes you can’t,’ Moffat says. 'I mean, how do you write a scene where people react to the fact that it’s raining? When they’re in England? People don’t go round saying, “Oh my God, it’s raining, it must be an alien invasion!” ’
Moffat is settling into the hotel bar – a welcome haven from the squall outside – with Piers Wenger, the head of drama for BBC Wales, and Beth Willis, the show’s third executive producer. For this new run, which starts on BBC One on Easter weekend, these three have taken over from the almost legendary team of Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner. Davies and Gardner transplanted Doctor Who to BBC Wales for its new incarnation after a 16-year absence from the screen and, through Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant, created a success that was monstrous in more ways than one. In those illustrious footsteps, Moffat says he has one goal above all others for this new series.
'For it not to be shit,’ he says succinctly. 'One wobbly wall, one pony-looking effect, one tiny thing goes wrong, and it’s back to the 1970s.’ Though there will be obvious differences – a new Doctor, for one – Moffat says that the team are not focused on changing the show from what’s gone before. 'The audience, whether they’re eight years old or 48, they’re not waiting to see why it’s different or strange or new, they’re just wanting it to be really good. It’s actually an incredibly easy challenge to make something different. It’s incredibly hard to make something good.’
But, Willis says, Smith brings new and surprising qualities to the Doctor. 'You will be sitting there watching the rushes and Matt will do something and you’ll think, “Ooh, I haven’t seen the Doctor do that before” – and that is really exciting. It would be dreadful if he was going on and trying to do an impression of David.’
When Tennant was completing his regeneration, he took to his bed. But Moffat hasn’t given Smith such an easy ride. 'I thought it would be fun if, while he was still regenerating, he had to run around and save the world,’ Moffat says. 'He’s barely out of the box when he realises: I haven’t changed my shirt yet and I’ve got 20 minutes to save the world. It’s like trying to save the world with flu. And he does it with two minutes to spare.’
Both Wenger, who produced the critically acclaimed dramas Housewife, 49 and Ballet Shoes, and Willis, who worked on Ashes to Ashes, are new to Doctor Who this series. But, during the Davies-Gardner era, Moffat established himself as one of Doctor Who’s most respected episode writers. Many critics believe Blink, which he wrote, to be the best episode of the modern era so far. The Doctor, then played by Tennant, barely appeared in Blink. It not only featured a young Carey Mulligan, but also had really spooky aliens, the Weeping Angels, who could only move if unobserved. Hence: 'Don’t blink. Blink and you're dead.’
Moffat, who is 48, also created and wrote the sitcom Coupling, and has co-written the screenplay for the upcoming Steven Spielberg film The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
While Moffat doesn’t replicate Davies’s larger-than-life whirlwind of camp, he does talk almost unbidden and with great speed and enthusiasm about Doctor Who. It quickly becomes clear that Moffat has been a very, very nerdy fan for a very, very long time. He forcefully bats away criticisms of the modern series – that, for example, it is much more earthbound than the 1970s version. 'Over half of Doctor Who takes place on Earth, always did,’ he says. 'There’s a very, very good reason: that’s where it’s made. Also, there was something that was open to old Doctor Who that’s not open to modern Doctor Who: going to a forest in Epping and saying it’s an alien planet. And one of the reasons kids have such a huge relationship with it is that it’s not beyond the scope of their recognisable world. You cannot change the fact that the Daleks have a sink plunger sticking out of them. That’s brilliant, because you can get a sink plunger and you can be a Dalek.’
Both Moffat and Wenger seem eager to address one rumour that persistently dogs the current Doctor Who production: budget cuts. 'We’re subject to the same production efficiencies that all dramas are,’ Wenger says diplomatically. The idea of 'efficiencies’ among very senior BBC executives is to get programmes more cheaply without the cuts being seen on screen and, Wenger says, 'We’re working very hard to make that happen, and will continue to do so, because that’s not easy.’
Moffat has a spikier retort. 'This is going to sound pious,’ he says, 'but the original Tardis was a budget cut. It was. They couldn’t afford to make a spaceship. They couldn’t afford even to do a magic door. They couldn’t afford to do a sphere. So someone came up with, Why don’t we do a police box? And it’s bigger on the inside. That’s the single best idea, I think – though I am a bit prejudiced – in all of fiction.’
Upper Boat, near Cardiff
February 9, 2010
The security guard at the Doctor Who studios is on his rounds. Gaynor, who is staffing reception, says she’ll phone him: only he has the key to the locked studio. Meanwhile, Gaynor passes a form across the reception desk, to be signed by every visitor and in which they promise complete confidentiality. Demand for information and gossip about Doctor Who is intense, the form says, and even confidences shared with friends can end up being published. It is a bizarre message to receive in the dowdy reception area of a light industrial unit just off the road to Merthyr Tydfil.
But when the guard gets back with the key, it becomes clearer why things are so cloak and dagger. Inside the locked studio is the one big new Doctor Who feature of which no photo has yet reached the outside world: the interior of Matt Smith’s Tardis. The set sits, rather sweetly, in the same studio as the old, Tennant-era Tardis, separated in a rather low-tech way by some portable fencing and curtains.
This new Tardis – not an obligatory accessory for each new Doctor, but required by the damage done to it in Tennant’s last episode – is big. It must be three times the size of Tennant’s, on multiple levels with staircases in between. Less grubby than its predecessor, with a transparent plastic floor on the main level, its walls are resplendent with polished copper and its central column features a blown glass decoration that could be straight from Tales of the Unexpected. There are old car seats and downstairs – downstairs! – a swing. With a nod to Paul McGann’s Tardis, the central column features an old TV screen on an extendable trellis. It also has a 1980s-style computer keyboard, and a His-Master’s-Voice style trumpet speaker.
Viewers won’t see this Tardis until the end of episode one, when the Doctor and Amy walk in for their first journey together. That first episode is now just about finished, barring a couple of CGI monsters that are a bit rough round the edges, and the occasional smudge in the dialogue. The aliens hold off from actually boiling the planet, but that exploding screwdriver still looks a bit of a shock. Most importantly, from the moment he stumbles out of his crashed Tardis, Smith is certainly his own Doctor. Less prickly than Eccleston and without the slapstick of Tennant, he brings an air of muddled intensity that’s a bit reminiscent of, say, Tom Baker (though without the stripy scarf).
Today, Smith is filming in the studio next door. Production has reached episode 12, with the storyline that will arch across the series about to explode into its hide-behind-the-sofa conclusion. 'The Doctor you meet in the first episode is a different Doctor from the Doctor we’re filming now,’ Smith says. 'Because in episode one, of course, he’s a man getting used to his body, going “How do I fit into this world…” ’
Smith trails off, apparently brewing further thoughts about his first episode. But then, with a conspiratorial grin, he asks, 'Have you seen the new sonic screwdriver yet?’ and pulls it from his pocket. It’s a very shiny metal toy with a green light and, when Smith flicks his hand, metal claws that pop out at one end. Smith is evidently as chuffed with it as all the eight-year-old boys who are given replicas of it for Christmas will be. The titanium sparks on the Cathedral Green in Llandaff are now a distant memory.
Having shared his secret, Smith thinks again. 'I think episode one has a lovely fairytale quality to it, which is a credit to Steven. I think it’s quite filmic, actually, and has a great story,’ he says. And then, almost in a whisper, he adds, 'It’s a good start for us.’
'Doctor Who’ returns to BBC One on April 3
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