Book review
Written by Russell T Davies, Benjamin Cook
BBC Books Paperback
Release date Out now

The ‘great correspondence’ continues, as Doctor Who scriptwriter/showrunner Russell T Davies reveals the secrets behind the writing of David Tennant’s final ‘specials’…

This bumper second helping of emails between Doctor Who Magazine writer Ben Cook and nuWho showrunner Russell T Davies continues much as before, doubling the size of this paperback edition of the first book with an additional 300 pages. Things left off as The Next Doctor was taking shape, and the new ‘Book 2’ (making it easy for readers of the previous volume to start straight in on the new stuff) picks right up with the planning of the Doctor Who specials and the Torchwood mini-series Children of Earth.

Little has changed, with Davies still following his appalling working practices (writing scripts very late, often just in time to meet ‘tone meeting’ deadlines; working late into the night; seemingly ‘winging it’ when it comes to major plot points). Despite the horror of discovering how he works (and he seems compelled to work this way, as a late attempt to get onto ‘normal’ daytime hours crumbles after a few days), this is a compulsive page-turner. It’s the book equivalent of slowing down to watch the aftermath of a car crash. We’ve all seen the David Tennant TV ‘specials’. Now we can see how they were put together and why they turned out to be such a let down in the eyes of many fans.

It is great being an eyewitness to events, a fly on the wall of Davies' internal monologue. David Tennant’s decision to leave Doctor Who (and his temporary ‘wobble’ when Steven Moffat takes over), and the effort to co-ordinate his live-on-air announcement at the NTAs, is chronicled in superb insider detail.

The mess that was the creation of Torchwood: Children of Earth is also charted, and done so in a very honest way that does not reflect at all well on Davies himself. He seems self-aware enough to castigate his own failings when the other writers (John Fay and James Moran) are motoring ahead with their work, while he’s not made a start on the first episode. Despite that, the series itself turned out to be superb, gripping television, which makes the reader more appreciative of the Cardiff-based TV craftspeople who have repeatedly pulled Davies' arse out of the fire.

Similarly, it is alternately chilling and heartening to realise that incoming showrunner Steven Moffat had written his first Matt Smith script long before Davies even started work on Tennant’s swan song, The End of Time. In fact, the highlight of the book may be the exchange of emails in which Moffat, politely but quite firmly, warns Davies off from using the Daleks in The End of Time as he wants them for Smith’s first series.

At one point Davies tries to convince himself that his haphazard working methods and anti-classical episodic structuring is the very reason Doctor Who has high viewing figures and is so popular (arguing that viewers can get the traditional beginning-middle-end episodic structure in shows like Merlin and Primeval). This is patent nonsense, and is like so much of the other nonsense that Davies (and his co-conspirator Cook) convince themselves is ‘brilliant’ (the single word most over-used by Davies, mostly when talking about his own work).

Davies admits to being reluctant to bring the Time Lords back, even though the natural ‘wrap up’ to the ‘time war’ saga demands it, as Julie Gardner has to point out to him. He also takes a while to realise he can’t use the Master in The End of Time (as an intergalactic conman) as originally intended as John Simm’s casting meant everyone would recognise him as ex-PM Harold Saxon! A strong script-editor would have been able to point these problems out at the ideas stage, thus saving everyone a lot of time.

And yet… This is fascinating stuff. In an ideal world it’s not how blockbusting television should be created, but it is the reality of how it is done (at least for Russell T Davies, and he warns in the introduction that his is most definitely NOT an example to be followed). One cannot help but think, though, that if he’d spent more time working properly on story concepts and issues (instead of ‘instinctively’ solving things) and less time emailing Ben Cook at 3am, the final outings of David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor would have been vastly improved. Mark James

VERDICT: 8/10
A compulsive read, and a revealing — if frightening — glimpse into the working practices of one particular TV writer.

Click here to read the review of the original edition of The Writer’s Tale.