We’re all pretty stoked, as usual, for the welcome return of Doctor Who this year, but the shorter season is really throwing the spotlight on the individual episodes, kicking off with this Saturday’s season opener, ‘Planet Of The Dead’ – our last Doctor Who fix until Christmas!

We’ve been writing a lot about this episode – where David Tennant’s Doctor teams up with Michelle Ryan to confront two new alien species on a dangerous desert planet – and rumours about it have been rife. A couple of weeks ago, we were lucky enough to chat with James Strong, the director of Planet Of The Dead, and he was kind enough to set us straight about one or two matters…

Just to clear up one matter that made the news – there’s still a London bus in ‘Planet Of The Dead’, isn’t there?

There’s very much a bus! It’s alive and kicking in our episode. ‘Bad news’ stories obviously make much better coverage than good news stories. The truth of the matter is that there was damage done to the bus, which was a major prop in the episode, on its journey to Dubai. The original intention was actually to damage the bus, but when it was looked into, it was too difficult. Logistically we were going to need a bus in Dubai and a bus in Wales, to film. To damage one bus absolutely identically to another one is a rather complicated thing to do. So we decided that while it would have been nice to have a completely damaged bus both ends, we decided that we couldn’t do that. The damage that was done to it was a lot less than what was reported, and it only took about ten minutes of re-jigging the script to sort it out.