Neil Gaiman on Doctor Who The Doctors Wife

Preview of an interview that’s in SFX #209, on sale next week. Minor spoilers

“The joy of my episode is that you get to realise how much of what’s in the TARDIS is probably still in there somewhere!” teases story-weaver extraordinaire Neil Gaiman in an interview about his Doctor Who episode in the next issue of SFX (#209, on sale next week) . He’s referring to the fact that he got a mate to make a list for him of “every part of the TARDIS that has ever been named and referenced throughout the entirety of 50 years of Doctor Who ”. The TARDIS plays a big part in the story.

In this extract from the article, he talks about whether he found it straitjacketing to work within a television budget:

“I don’t think it’s straitjacketing. It’s part of what you do. The nature of the beast is that on the page you have infinite time and infinite money. In reality… But there are things that happen for budget reasons that actually make things better. In my episode I get to bring back a classic monster. I didn’t plan to bring back a classic monster. I tried to create a completely new monster. But shortly before shooting it became very apparent that given the incredible amount of money they were going to have to spend on my episode – they were taking other episodes behind the bike sheds, beating them up and taking their pocket money – there came a point where they said, ‘Look, we cannot stretch to doing this prosthetic stuff that you wanted, would you like a classic monster?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually you have this thing that would fit perfectly there, and we could do this to it, and it would make it work…” So we got to take a Russell monster and bring it back, which made me incredibly happy, in a weird way. It was a nice link between the Tennant era and the current era, and it was nice to bring it back and do something very different with it, turn it upside down.” (And if you’ve been paying close attention to the trailers, you can guess the monster – of not, we give it away in the issue anyway.)

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