The showrunner told Nerd³: “If Russell [T Davies] had stayed on, [the show] would still have changed. I remember when we had our handover chat, he was saying ‘so what are you going to do, are you going to change that?’ and I said ‘well, what would you change?’ and we both agreed ‘it’s time to kick a lot of stuff out’. And actually, it is time again to do that.”

He added: “I just felt watching last time around [Series 7] that ‘oh, it’s time we fixed that and changed that and moved that up a bit and changed that tone’.”

Matt Smith departed the show on Christmas Day in ‘The Time of the Doctor’, which wrapped up the majority of the Moffat era’s plotlines so far.

Moffat explained: “It changes all the time, and it’s keeping ahead of the audience in a way. All shows age and they all age sort of in the same way. You learn how to do it, you get really slick at it, and then you think you’re really, really slick at it and everyone’s started to yawn. And you think ‘oh God, we’re really slick at this but everyone knows what we’re going to do’.”

He teased: “So now we’ve got to actually get a bit raw at it and do it in a different direction. It happens on every show – you get good at it and ‘good at it’ is the enemy in the end.”

Series 8 begins filming next month and is expected to start airing on BBC One in August 2014.

> Find out all the latest info on Series 8 in our news summary.

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> Order ‘The Time of the Doctor’ on DVD on Amazon.

> Order ‘The Time of the Doctor’ on Blu-ray on Amazon.

Watch the 50th anniversary trailer…