Alex Moreland @thoughts-from-alex - Tumblr Blog

So, anyway, the thing about The Reality War is

Star Trek: Discovery star Sonequa Martin-Green chats why she's so "at peace" with the show ending after season 5.

I spoke to Sonequa Martin-Green about the final series of Star Trek: Discovery - we got into her feelings about how the show has changed across the years, her hopes for how it might be remembered, and what it was like filming her last scenes as Michael Burnham.

#star trek #star trek discovery #sonequa martin green #michael burnham #star trek: discovery #st dsc

Moon Knight review: Oscar Isaac is having the time of his life in comedic Marvel series

What quickly becomes apparent across Moon Knight, though, is that Isaac has channelled all of that Star Wars frustration into this role. It’s a post “somehow, Palpatine returned” performance, Isaac clearly deciding that if he’s going to take on another big franchise role, he’s going to have as much fun as he possibly humanly can doing it. That much-mocked British accent (which is, in fairness to Isaac, much less grating in context than it was in the trailers) is the most obvious tell: a mockney affect, with a cadence audibly inspired by Karl Pilkington and Russells Kane and Brand, that always indicates he’s not taking things completely seriously.

Tonally, then, it’s big and broad – the baseline is very much set by Oscar Isaac’s performance, who’s clearly having the time of his life with that bewildered (and bewildering) accent. It is, if you like, much less The Dark Knight and much more The Lark Knight: there’s a lot of jokes and a lot of levity, with Isaac clearly quite comfortable as a comic lead. Steven Grant is visibly out of his depth in a Marvel movie – this, with occasional but notable exceptions, looks and feels closer to a big-screen outing than something like Hawkeye did – and Moon Knight has a lot of fun with that fish out of water juxtaposition.

Moon Knight is, by some margin, better than Hawkeye and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and while it’s not as immediately novel as WandaVision or as charming as Loki, it has obvious potential to outpace them both. However, anyone expecting this Disney+ series to be of a piece with Netflix series like Daredevil, or Noah Hawley’s abstract X-Men drama Legion, is only going to be disappointed.

#moon knight #marvel #Oscar Isaac #mcu #ethan hawke #marc spector #steven grant

Euphoria’s second series loses sight of its own strengths

Euphoria can be quite funny, occasionally indulging in a sort of irreverent humour that almost makes you wish it went full-tilt comedy. It’s best when it recognises that any stories about teenagers are always heightened and exaggerated, so sidesteps any obligation to realism – not in the sense that it’s better when it’s doing Things That Simply Don’t Happen to Teenagers, but rather its more imaginative moments of flair and flourish, reimagining exposition as a slideshow presentation or a behind the scenes TV interview.

Still, it rarely feels interested in those aspects of itself, opting instead for a similar self-conscious, trying-just-a-little-too-hard maximalism as last season; anyone hoping this series would learn a few lessons from the genuinely very good, matured and pared back Christmas specials released in 2020 will likely be disappointed. It makes a few improvements (giving more space to Colman Domingo and Maude Apatow in particular) but often finds itself making the same mistakes too (Euphoria is once again baffling for how fascinated it is by Jacob Elordi’s Nate, a villain so consistently callous he’s the least realistic teenager of any of them). At its worst, the series is messy and overwrought, straining to be heard over its own noise.

Nonetheless, this is still Zendaya’s series first and foremost, and Euphoria remains dedicated to giving her a showcase for her talents. You can already tell which episode will be her awards submission piece, full of screaming histrionics and manic energy; she’s much better, though, in the moments of quiet cruelty and cold disregard where it feels like Euphoria has suddenly become strikingly observant. It’s the former that could win Zendaya her next Emmy, but it’s the latter that she’ll deserve it for, letting that world-weary affect curdle into sheer contempt in a way that feels truer than anything else Euphoria commits to the screen.

#euphoria #euphoria hbo #euphoria s2 #zendaya #sam levinson #mauda apatow #sydney sweeney #nate euphoria #cassie euphoria

How we made The Sarah Jane Adventures: "We were like a family, and it was beautiful"

“Children don’t need to be told that dragons exist,” says Phil Ford, quoting the writer GK Chesterton. “Children already know that dragons exist. What the fairy tale does is teach them that dragons can be defeated. That was something that was very strong through all of The Sarah Jane Adventures: those monsters are out there, but you can survive them.”

“And I suppose if The Sarah Jane Adventures is any kind of metaphor, that’s what its message is – that there are all kinds of obstacles that we all face through life, but they can be overcome.”

“One of the one of the great things about writing for children is that you can inspire them to go on to do other things,” Ford continues. “Maybe one of those things they want to go and do is actually write themselves. I mean, that’s what happened to me: I became a writer because I was inspired by old style Doctor Who, by episodes with Jon Pertwee and Sarah Jane.”

Click here to read the full interview with Anjli Mohindra (Rani Chandra), Daniel Anthony (Clyde Langer), Sinead Michael (Sky Smith), Porsha Lawrence-Mavour (Kelsey Hooper), and executive producer Phil Ford celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

#the sarah jane adventures #doctor who #elisabeth sladen #russell t davies #phil ford #daniel anthony #anjli mohindra #clyde langer #rani chandra #k9 #sja #classic who

Doctor Who Review: Eve of the Daleks

So, I quite like Thasmin, as a concept. I think romantic relationships in Doctor Who are, generally, a good thing worth doing; I think that, at the start of Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Doctor, it’d been long enough since the last Doctor/companion romance to be worth doing it again. Indeed, I was always surprised that, despite the Davies-era nostalgia that informs his era, Chibnall didn’t build a Doctor/companion relationship as the explicit spine of his populist reboot of Doctor Who.

“Explicit spine” being a carefully chosen phrase there, incidentally. I tweeted after the episode finished that I would’ve liked to see Chibnall introduce these ideas and themes much earlier, and a lot of people replied to tell me it’s been there since the beginning. (Actually, more than one person told me I needed to pay more attention to Doctor Who, which is, forgive me, very funny.) People pointed to Arachnids in the UK in particular – I rewatched it earlier, and it’s a lot better than I remembered or ever gave it credit for, but it’s about as concerned with alluding to a Yaz/Ryan romance as it is a Yaz/Doctor one. I think had this always been Chibnall’s plan, he’d have made it much more explicit much earlier; as Andrew Ellard pointed out, Chibnall is a writer who typically introduces details like that upfront immediately. (Which, relatedly, is why I don’t think the “actually, Nick is a sensitive portrayal of neurodivergence” defence is worth dignifying, aside from all the other reasons.) It seems more likely to me that, if Thasmin can be traced back to Arachnids in the UK, it’s in the response to that episode rather than its content – it’s Chibnall being influenced by the fans, rather than fans reading tea leaves he’s left for them. (Thasmin: it’s the people’s project!)

I think it’s a good thing to make it explicit; I think it’s neat that those moments do take on an extra textual resonance now, and I think it’ll make rewatching Series 11 and Series 12 a much more rewarding experience. Honestly, I like the idea that on some level I can watch the show that the Thasmin stans have been watching the past few years – if nothing else, they seem to have been having more fun than I have – but nonetheless it’s a shame for Chris Chibnall to have left it as late as he has to delve into it like this.

Even if you do read into some of the more subtle tea leaves (Yaz like Yasmin like Jasmine like Rose; the house in It Takes You Away is a triangle; so on) surely those are details that give Mandip Gill and Jodie Whittaker very little to do? It’s great that, finally, Mandip Gill is getting material like this, beyond her usual mechanical and perfunctory expository questions – that scene where she talks to Dan is sensitive and mature, certainly her best performance in the role. But still, I don’t think it’s unfair to wish this had been paced differently – couldn’t Graham have had that conversation with Yaz at the end of Revolution of the Daleks, asking her if she’d ever tell the Doctor how she felt before they went travelling together again? – to allow her more space to actually act.

#doctor who #thasmin #eve of the daleks #thirteenth doctor #yaz khan #chris chibnall #doctor who series 13 #jodie whittaker #mandip gill #doctor who review #doctor who meta

Doctor Who Review: The Vanquishers

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about Jodie Whittaker, since there are fewer and fewer opportunities for that left, and I probably don’t take that chance often enough.

In a sense, The Vanquishers is quite a good lens through which to view her performance, indicative of all the different tensions that it embodies. There are bits of it that are fantastic here, like the interrogation scene with the Grand Serpent; again, it feels like a desperately obvious thing to highlight, to the point that it really just feels like describing the concept of acting, but Whittaker is always strongest when she’s playing against a strong guest star like Craig Parkinson here. There’s a welcome edge to that interrogation scene which livens up proceedings nicely – even as it also, by comparison, draws attention to how adrift Whittaker sometimes is when given reams of technobabble to deliver to a greenscreen environment. (Or, indeed, how Chibnall underwriting his companions undercuts Whittaker too. It would’ve been great to see her against the more active Yaz of last week, but immediately Chibnall gives Mandip Gill the most basic expository dialogue again – complete with an almost cruel “normal service resumed” quip to highlight the regression! – and, with one exception, there’s very little for Whittaker to latch onto.)

More than anything else though what’s interesting it that Whittaker gets the chance to do something here that she’s genuinely never had before. It’s not playing three (well, four) versions of the character here – most of the fun of that comes from the Doctor experiencing the same narrative structure we’ve been watching for the past six weeks, it’s not really an actorly showcase for her by any means. Indeed, there’s an odd unwillingness, or maybe Covid-related inability, to actually show the two Doctors sharing the screen – it’s really only a step away from the weightless technobabble we mentioned a moment ago.

No, what’s interesting actually is that it’s the first time we’ve seen attraction and romance scripted for Whittaker to portray. It’s something that Chibnall has largely eschewed, in contrast to his two predecessors (for whatever reason – small c fan conservatism seeming to me equally as likely as a reluctance to deal with the media response), and as a result the character Whittaker’s been given seems, well, smaller on the inside than before, offered less of a range of emotion to play even as it’s clearly something she’d be good at.

You can see her coming to life in those moments, both flirting with her other selves and in that stumbling intimacy with Yaz at the end, and it’s fantastic – even as it also emphasises how much of a shame it is we’ve never got to see it before now. There’s rightfully been some critique of the ‘Thasmin’ plotline in recent weeks, but I was entirely onboard with it surprisingly quickly – if (big if) that’s something they’re going to properly commit to over the next three episodes, well, it’d at once be too little too late but also difficult to complain about our two leads finally getting something new and interesting to do.

#doctor who #chris chibnall #jodie whittaker #thirteenth doctor #thasmin #yaz khan #mandip gill #the vanquishers #doctor who flux #doctor who series 13 #doctor who review #doctor who meta

Doctor Who Review: Survivors of the Flux

If nothing else – setting aside any other complaints or criticisms about the concept for the character – Tecteun should have been a gift for Jodie Whittaker.

Broadly speaking, Survivors of the Flux offers what I’d once assumed might be the plot of the 60th anniversary: reuniting the Doctor with Tecteun, confronting her past, a grand moment of catharsis or perhaps even forgiveness after learning of the traumas she experienced at Tecteun’s hand. That is very broadly speaking, though – it’s interesting how this episode largely elides much of the ‘Timeless Child’ aspect of The Timeless Children, offering no references to the fact that Tecteun experimented on, tortured, and repeatedly killed this orphan child to discover and replicate the secret of regeneration. Instead, it’s about Division again, both in a way that doesn’t strictly follow The Timeless Children nor really necessitates it either. One wonders how, or even if, they’re going to tie together – the Doctor as the original Time Lord has proven largely superfluous, an incidental detail at best. (Presumably the Doctor’s latent Timeless Child powers are the exact counterbalance to the Flux – it was designed to kill her, after all – and after she reverses her own polarity that’s how she’ll restore the universe next week, or something like that.)

Plot mechanics aside, though, that shift in focus speaks the foundational flaw in Survivors of the Flux. It’s the first time Chibnall’s Doctor Who has made explicit the emotional undertone of The Timeless Children, finally calling Tecteun the Doctor’s mother outright – but then it largely sidesteps the implications of that. You can’t escape the sense that what Chibnall finds really interesting here isn’t the idea of the Doctor confronting her abusive mother – actually, you can’t escape the sense that the show doesn’t even mean to suggest she’s abusive, but never mind that now – but rather that he’s most compelled by… an ill-defined interdimensional cabal of spies. (Given how closely Chibnall riffed on Casino Royale with The Woman Who Fell to Earth, and given they surely at least asked Judi Dench if she was free for this, you wonder if on some level Flux is meant to be his Skyfall.) Tying that so closely to the Doctor’s family if that connection isn’t going to be explored is one thing, of course; suggesting the Doctor’s main problem with the Division is that they “interfered in contravention of all Time Lord directives” makes you wonder, earnestly and with genuine curiosity, what Chibnall thinks his lead character’s main traits are.

All of which means, anyway, there’s precious little substance to the confrontation between the Doctor and Tecteun. We’ve noted in previous weeks that presenting Jo Martin’s Doctor as still broadly heroic undercuts much of the identity crisis Whittaker is given to play, and that continues here (“morality was always your flaw”) – but shuffling Tecteun out of the picture so quickly, and glancing over much of the emotional connection, is even worse. Again, Tecteun should’ve been a gift for Whittaker – something that none of her predecessors have ever played, or at least not substantially, an opportunity to carve out something that is if nothing else genuinely new for the series – but Survivors of the Flux is scarcely even interested. That is always the problem with Chibnall’s Deep Lore storytelling: not that it’s transgressive or blasphemous (if anything, it’s not transgressive enough), but that it has never once served Jodie Whittaker particularly well as lead actor of this show.

#doctor who #tecteun #the timeless child #survivors of the flux #doctor who spoilers #jodie whittaker #chris chibnall #doctor who flux #flux #time lords #division

Galactic Yo-Yo Podcast: Village of the Angels

On Monday evening, I went round to visit Molly and Jonny to talk about this week’s Doctor Who episode – I managed to get lost on the way to and from their flat, but luckily in between that we were able to successfully record an episode of Galactic Yo-Yo.

We spoke about Weeping Angels, Chris Chibnall and Maxine Alderton, how this episode might've been impacted by coronavirus, and our thoughts on the wider Division plotline and where it might be going next.

LISTEN HERE

#doctor who #galactic yo-yo #doctor who flux #weeping angels #chris chibnall

Doctor Who Review: Village of the Angels

Village of the Angels understands the Weeping Angels as scary first and foremost, though. That’s fine: they are scary, after all. While at times it risks feeling a little like a greatest hits package, the lack of straightforwardly new ideas about the Angels is offset by Maxine Alderton’s knack for coming up with striking images: Claire with Angel’s wings, the Angel set alight as it manifests from a sketch, the Angel drawn by the polygraph, and, of course, that cliffhanger. This is also comfortably Jamie Magnus Stone’s best effort as a Doctor Who director too, an improvement on his previous episodes by some margin – encouraging, given he’ll be directing Whittaker’s regeneration.

There is a sense, though, that Village of the Angels has suffered for being part of Flux – or perhaps that Alderton has been somewhat short-changed when asked once again to write an episode that leads into the series finale.

#doctor who #weeping angels #chris chibnall #jodie whittaker #thirteenth doctor #doctor who flux #maxine alderton #jamie magnus stone

Doctor Who Review: Once, Upon Time

How does Once, Upon Time – offering, more likely than not, what will be our most substantive look at the Doctor’s time in the Division – inform our understanding of the character, how does it prompt us to view her in a new light? In terms of the broadest details of the plot, there’s not a lot here that’s new: Fugitive of the Judoon and The Timeless Children both established this status quo, indicating the Doctor’s pre-Hartnell life as a Division operative. Where those episodes each implied a certain moral ambiguity to the Division, Once, Upon Time encourages you to read them (and by extension, Jo Martin’s Doctor) as straightforwardly heroic – on a rescue mission, facing down the cartoonishly villainous Ravagers, and in the Doctor’s own words risking their lives to save the universe.

It renders this with the same sort of redundancy we’ve discussed before. If the Doctor wasn’t meaningfully different at this point in her life, what actually is the point? How does the knowledge that the Doctor once did everything she’d typically do – literally, actually, in this very episode, Whittaker’s Doctor taking inspiration from Martin’s to defeat the Ravagers – but with a vague military aesthetic, change the way we understand the character now? If it doesn’t add anything, does it take anything away? How does it inform our understanding of the identity crisis Whittaker’s Doctor is having now – what is it that she’s actually conflicted about?

#doctor who #chris chibnall #jodie whittaker #jo martin #fugitive doctor #timeless child #doctor who flux

Doctor Who Flux Review: War of the Sontarans

Elsewhere, our wider series arc – the Chibnall Masterplan, if you like – continues to clarify itself, marking the first episode so far in which the Timeless Child concept makes its case as a story worth telling.

The danger it always posed, more than anything, was one of redundancy. The Timeless Children offered a rejection of established canon, a leisurely scroll through a newly-updated Wikipedia page – but what that rejection relies upon, in lieu of the intimate character-drama about an identity crisis Revolution of the Daleks largely sidestepped, is something new and compelling to replace it. If the ultimate conclusion is that the Doctor – rather than being a Time Lord from Gallifrey – turns out to be an entirely different time-sensitive alien, one that coincidentally also happens to look human and can regenerate into different forms, it’s hard not to question what the point of the whole endeavour is.

It’s not that Flux has ruled that possibility out entirely, of course. (For instance, it feels like there’s a strong possibility the Doctor will turn out to be a Mouri – after all, what’s does it mean for a child to be Timeless if not having lost their home planet Time?) What it has done, though, is contextualised the idea in terms of themes Chibnall keeps returning to: where Moffat often alluded to Time as a sentient force, Chibnall hasn’t just committed to that but taken it a step further, suggesting it’s a malevolent, villainous force. It’s in keeping with the aspects of Chibnall’s vision for Doctor Who that feels, if not explicitly religious, certainly much more theistic than either of his predecessors.

It also, finally, feels like something that’s written for Whittaker’s Doctor rather than just around her. The Temple of Antropus imposes a linear structure on Time; in threatening that, Swarm becomes more distinct, not just a nebulously evil figure (at risk of the same redundancy – how’s he different from the Master?) but one with a meaningful goal. It’s a question of Order vs Chaos – in many ways the perfect challenge to Chibnall’s Doctor, a version of the character that’s more of an arbiter than an interventionist, someone who from her first story has set out to sort out fair play across the universe, less chaotic and more orderly than ever. (It’s also characteristic of Chibnall the writer, an obvious resonance with the law and order themes of his crime dramas.) Finally, the Timeless Child is finally starting to cohere as the outline of a story rather than just a plotline.

#doctor who #war of the sontarans #flux #chris chibnall #the timeless child #jodie whittaker #thirteenth doctor #swarm #azure

Doctor Who Review: The Halloween Apocalypse

In a sense, Flux is what many always expected of the Chibnall era, or at least a lot closer to it than Series 11 and Series 12 were.

Certainly, the received wisdom was that he’d likely offer a more heavily serialised take on Doctor Who than we’d seen before – admittedly probably an assumption based on a slightly superficial reading of Broadchurch, but still. (If you were looking for tea leaves in his earlier work, actually, Chibnall’s plays are somewhat underdiscussed – for obvious reasons, of course, but there’s a couple of details in those that reappear across Series 11.) With his first year on Doctor Who relatively standalone, and his second a little more interconnected, you could quite easily make the case that Flux is both an evolution and a culmination of that: Chibnall finally doing the six-hour movie everyone always assumed he would.

That, though, obscures a lot of what Flux is actually doing, and how fundamentally unusual it actually is. It’s serialised, yes, it’s a six-hour movie, yes, but Flux has relatively little in common with dominant mode of prestige television: typically, if a producer is touting their upcoming drama as “a six-hour movie, really” you can assume the end product will be glacially paced, lacking any sense of what television’s strengths are as a medium and how those strengths are distinct to it. (Chibnall has described the Disney+ Marvel shows as Doctor Who’s natural competitor in 2021, and something like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – with its formless and lethargic structure – was probably the worst-case scenario for Flux.)

Instead, Flux is structured almost as – well, it’d perhaps be charitable to say it’s a series of vignettes, because this is an altogether more scattered affair than that implies, but there’s a lot of plates spinning all at once, and it’s clear that Chibnall feels no obligation to resolve them (or in some cases even connect them to the main narrative) within the fifty-minute runtime. It’s the slightly chaotic, everything-at-once structure of Resolution or Spyfall writ large, and here as there it gives The Halloween Apocalypse a certain momentum – on this scale, though, it feels unfamiliar, even wrongfooting. Those little asides and gestures to Sontarans and Weeping Angels and 1820s Liverpool are, by any conventional wisdom, probably a mistake to include – but they lend the episode a sort of sprawling ambition, a structure that feels unlike anything Doctor Who has done before and one that it’ll hopefully maintain in the coming weeks.

#doctor who #doctor who flux #the halloween apocalypse #chris chibnall #jodie whittaker #thirteenth doctor #yaz khan #dan lewis #mandip gill #john bishop #series 13

Class cast & crew on their Doctor Who spinoff, cancellation woes, & Series 2 plans

“I loved every minute of it,” says Patrick Ness of his Doctor Who spin-off Class. “I’d be doing it now if they’d let me.”

Following a group of students at Coal Hill school, Class was Doctor Who’s third spin-off since its 2005 revival. With a celebrated young adult author at the helm, Class was a series in the same vein as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, always bursting with ideas and deeply invested in its characters. After the success of The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, Class seemed set to reach similar heights – until it didn’t.

Five years since the show was first released on October 22nd 2016, creator Patrick Ness, director Ed Bazalgette, and stars Greg Austin, Sophie Hopkins, and Jordan Renzo look back on Class – reflecting on its complicated relationship with Doctor Who, revealing which Doctor Who companion was almost the star of the show, and telling us about their Series 2 plans for the Weeping Angels, as well as episodes by authors Juno Dawson, Derek Landy, and Kim Curran.

#doctor who #class dw #patrick ness #derek landy #juno dawson #kim curran #steven moffat #weeping angels #bbc class #classdw #greg austin #katherine kelly #sophie hopkins #jordan renzo

How we made Robin Hood: the cast and crew of the BBC series look back 15 years later

Even as they forged their own path, though, Armstrong found the legend difficult to live up to at first. “I had a picture in my head of what Robin Hood looked like: six foot two, muscular, all these images came to my head,” explains Armstrong. “I felt a bit underconfident, because people have an idea of what Robin Hood should look like, or I had anyway. I think I was very self-conscious about that.”

“At the table read, in the Sheriff’s Great Hall – with all the executives from the BBC and BBC Worldwide, there were over 100 people – I convinced myself I was gonna get replaced. I was that nervous! But once the cameras started rolling, and I was surrounded by my fellow cast members, and especially the stunt team as well, I felt safe.

“After the first episode some critics were quite cruel, saying physically, I didn’t look like how Robin Hood ‘should’ look like. But that’s their opinion, so excuse my language but f**k them,” says Armstrong, explaining how “in the break between series, I worked with a trainer and put on about a stone and a half of muscle. I came back looking physically different, and I felt more at ease with myself.”

#robin hood #bbc robin hood #jonas armstrong #lucy griffiths #maid marian #dominic minghella #foz allan #sherwood forest #robin hood 2006 #robin hood bbc

Colin Baker on Big Finish, Jodie Whittaker, and who should play the next Doctor

The world of Doctor Who is anticipating a big change: it won’t be long until Jodie Whittaker embarks on her final series as the Doctor, soon to regenerate into the fourteenth (ish) actor to play the Time Lord. Has Baker been following her performance?

“I’ve seen enough to know that I thoroughly approve,” he enthuses. “I love something that she has brought, that I’ve never seen in a Doctor before, which is joy: the joy of being the Doctor. I suppose joy isn’t a particularly manly attribute. Usually, smugness is more what men go for, rather than joy!”

“Those initial episodes, where she was finding out who she was and making a sonic screwdriver? All those moments, I actually loved it. I’m looking forward to having the chance to sit and watch all the other stories! I love the way it was going. And I’m sure she will have a thumping good exit, I’m looking forward to seeing that as well.”

#doctor who #colin baker #6th doctor #sixth doctor #classic who

Primeval’s cast and crew on unanswered cliffhangers, Doctor Who rivalry and dinosaur co-stars

“I've always been obsessed by dinosaurs and monsters, all that kind of stuff, since I was a boy,” said Douglas Henshall, explaining what drew him to the ITV drama, the first two series of which are available on BritBox today. “Primeval was kind of a hang-over from childhood, a way of vicariously satisfying the old childhood memories.”

The series began life at the BBC, under a very different title. “I'd made a [documentary-style series] called Walking with Dinosaursfor the BBC back in 2000,” recalled co-creator Tim Haines, previously a science journalist with a background in zoology, “and it struck me that all that technology [could be] used for a drama. Because the BBC wanted a recognisable piece of IP, we made Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World first. I then came up with the idea of Cutter's Bestiary, and developed a script with another writer, which didn't go anywhere.”

It's at this point that Adrian Hodges – who had recently won a BAFTA for Charles II: The Power and Passion – came on board. “One day I went into [BBC Head of Drama] Laura Mackie’s office, and she asked me what I wanted to do next. She suggested Bleak House – I’d already done David Copperfield, so I said no, I don't want to do another Dickens, thank you. I want to do something that's fun, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'd just watched all of Buffy, I thought it was a brilliant show. I wanted to do something with the same vibe, the same feel to it.”

#primeval #doctor who #douglas henshall #andrew lee potts #hannah spearritt #itv #radio times

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Alex Moreland