Behind the Scenes of The Next Doctor (Part 22)

Russell T. Davies, as interviewed by Paul Connolly for The Daily Mail:

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Doctor Who. You get a lot of other dramas: fantasy, period, the whole lot - and many of them are very good - but they tend to be a little pious, a bit solemn.



Doctor Who just has a great sense of enjoyment. And that’s down to David Tennant, really, at the heart of the show.

And so an awful lot of preparation and hard work goes into making the Doctor Who Christmas Special. It’s made with love and passion.

We plan a couple of years ahead, so, when I start writing, I’ve usually been thinking about the plot for a while. And I always write with the 100 Best Christmas Songs CD playing to get me in the right mood.



The strange thing is that Christmas never really ends for the Doctor Who cast and crew. I began writing this special last January - and I’m about to start writing the next one. We started shooting back in April, and we were still working on it until earlier this month.



We’re definitely coming to the end of an era, with myself and David Tennant leaving after the next series. David’s leaving for the same reason as me - because he’s knackered!



But we also have this sort of wanderlust that makes you want to go and try new things, and, much as I love Doctor Who, it’s never going to have a real emotional intensity. It’s time to move on.

Except, I think that if you’re a real fan, you don’t really think of it like that. You just wait for the next Doctor to come along, spend ten minutes hating him and then he does something funny and you fall in love with him.



It’s just that sort of show. It’s the best part in the world and there’s some lucky actor out there - and I’m not sure they’ll choose a new Doctor before Christmas, but they might - who is going to get the best Christmas present in the world.

