Despite rumours earlier this year that the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary would only be an hour long (started when a piece of BBC Worldwide publicity material was snapped bearing the phrase “50th Anniversary Special 1x60 minutes”) showrunner Steven Moffat has told Entertainment Weekly in no uncertain terms that it will be longer.
“It’s a special episode,” he says. “I think you could call it movie-length, yeah. I mean, I’m saying that with a slight hint of vagueness because I don’t know the finished running time. [ Laughs ] It’s certainly well over an hour.”
Of the pairing of the two Doctors in the special he reveals: “Well, when you’re talking to yourself, there’s no filter! You don’t spare yourself! They’re quite a fun pairing, I would say. There’s a bit of the normal joshing of each other but they’re both such enthusiastic Doctors. While they might be sort of competing slightly, they’re both standing there saying, ‘Oh god, it’s so cool, there’s two of me!’ So, it’s very different. I think the other one that worked brilliantly was Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton. They were incredibly funny together. This is very different from that but it’s a sublime double act.”
He also confirms that the regeneration in the Christmas special will be “traditional… You know, the Eleventh will fall and the Twelfth shall rise. And you’ll see that in the closing moments of the show. I mean, you sometimes sit and think, ‘Are there better ways of doing it? Is there a different way of doing it?’ But quite honestly what could be better than that? It’s just too exciting.”
It seems that Matt Smith will have to wear a wig after shaving his head to appear in the Ryan Gosling film How To Catch A Monster: “However, we effect it, the Doctor will turn up in his trademark quaff. We can’t have Matt’s last stand in the TARDIS without his proper look. So, thank you , Ryan Gosling…”
He also reckons that once the new Doctor has been cast, the news will be announced very swiftly: “Unless we have an insane plan, we’ll announce a new Doctor within days of finalising the new Doctor. Because it’s very very hard to keep any kind of a secret. The last time, when we chose Matt, we had to hold over on that one, because there was a Christmas Doctor Who special called “The Next Doctor” for which Russell T Davies was playing the game of pretending it was going to be David Morrissey. So we couldn’t deflate that. [ Laughs ]. But I think we’ll go public pretty fast.”
Read more of this great interview here .
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