Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale - The Final Chapter by Russell T. Davies & Benjamin Cook

In 2003, TV writer Russell T. Davies was hired by the BBC to resurrect their inert science fiction franchise Doctor Who. Many commentators said they were insane to resurrect the old show, infamous for its cheap monsters and wobbly sets. Hitting the airwaves in March 2005, Doctor Who became a smash hit, the biggest drama series on British screens for many years. It made its actors, particularly David Tennant, global stars. In 2010, after four seasons and a series of specials, Davies left the project, replaced by Steven Moffat. From early 2007 through late 2009, Davies conducted a lengthy email correspondence with Doctor Who fan writer Benjamin Cook, discussing the genesis of ideas and how to get them on screen in a practical manner. This book is the result of that correspondence, showing how the fourth season of the rebooted Doctor Who and its accompanying specials were conceived, written and filmed in unparalleled detail.

"How to" books on writing are ten-a-penny, most of them rubbish but the occasional great one (Stephen King's On Writing) slipping out. The Writer's Tale takes a fresh spin on the idea, with journalist Ben Cook and Doctor Who showrunner-producer-writer Russell T. Davies corresponding over two and a half years with Davies revealing how his ideas are born, gestate and generate hugely popular, award-winning television.

Reading 700 pages of someone else's emails might sound like torture, but Davies is an impossibly erudite, funny, smart guy and his thoughts on writing are a pleasure to read. It also helps that Davies is impossibly honest and open, to the point of it being painful. Davies acknowledges being a procrastinator who likes to spend months thinking about a story before typing a single word. When he does, it pours out relatively quickly (some of his Doctor Who scripts go from his brain onto the page in under a fortnight), but there's a lot of hair-raising moments when the production team need a completed script in just a few days that Davies is starting to write a fortnight later than he should have done. He always pulls it off in the end, but the amount of stress he causes to himself (and to Cook) in the process is genuinely hair-raising.

More interesting are the "roads not travelled," story ideas that go through many permutations and in some cases episode ideas that are thrown out because they're not working. Davies has to throw out two scripts which are not in the right place and instead write Midnight (which also has no budget, so has to be filmed on just one set) and Turn Left in a rush to replace them. There's also a fascinating early version of Planet of the Dead which features the Chelonians, the excellent tortoise-like aliens from the New Adventures novels, although that gets changed when Davies reluctantly concludes he can't send actors to the United Arab Emirates filming location dressed in layers of foam latex because they will probably expire. Other interesting elements are the extremely detailed work Davies puts into the creation of a new companion, Penny, which is eventually wasted because another producer convinces Catherine Tate to come back as Donna, or a more epic version of Torchwood: Children of Earth where Martha and Mickey have a starring role.

There is also a lot of prescient irony in the book for people familiar with the later history of the programme, or Davies' career. Davies gushes at extreme length over casting Peter Capaldi twice (in The Fires of Pompeii and the Children of Earth mini-series) but never connects up the idea that he'd make a great Doctor. Davies also anguishes at having to ransack his "dream show" idea of a future dystopian Britain to save the Turn Left script, but of course eleven years later he'd make that show with Years and Years anyway.

There's some interesting musings on canon, with Davies at one point saying he does not give a toss about it but then spending several emails musing on obscure points of lore with Cook. Davies also distracts himself to tears worrying about plot points that nobody ever notices (he confides to Cook that he almost had a heart attack because Jackie didn't notice the Doctor destroying her coffee table in a struggle with the Auton arm in Rose, his very first Doctor Who script, something he thought was implausible). Davies also notes that sometimes he likes to draw attention to similarities in scripts to make things appear to be part of a masterplan, when in reality two writers just had similar ideas too close together, such as Donna being the centrepice of her own alternate reality in both Forest of the Dead and Turn Left.

Davies leaves most of his real evisceration for the online hate groups constantly criticising him for introducing "the gay agenda" to the show, or targeting individual writers for harassment and threats if they think they don't deliver. Given how relatively restrained the online discourse was in 2007 compared to now, it'll be interesting to see Davies's thoughts when he returns to the show in 2023.

There's decidedly limited hot gossip, although allusions to John Barrowman's exuberant on-set behaviour take on a different tone when the reader realises they are referring to his tendency to expose himself on-set. Davies skilfully avoids any discussion of why Christopher Eccleston left the series, and there's mostly a lack of real controversy. There is a fair amount of what might appear to be unnecessary wafflage in the book, but some of it becomes really interesting, particularly early discussions of "Did you see Skins last night?" which ultimately turns into a lengthy discussion of what Skins gets right and wrong in character writing, and how and why it improves as it goes along.

Instead, there's a lot of fascinating trivia (Davies once spent an evening propping up a table in a bar with James Marsters from Buffy and Kylie Minogue!) and a lot of meaty, interesting musings on where stories and where characters come from, and how you can get them to do what you need when they have to also be true to themselves.

The now-rather-misnamed Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter (****) is as good a musing on how to write genre television as has ever been published. It's certainly lengthy, and has a tendency to wander off-topic, but as an over-the-shoulder look at the writing of a television show, it may be unprecedented and is always fascinating. The book is available now in the UK and USA.