Actors who have played Doctor Who (The Revival);
2005 - 2009: Alan Cummings (The Ninth)
2009 - 2013: Peter Capaldi (The Tenth)
2013 - 2014: Kris Marshall (The Eleventh)
2014 - 2015:
Show Off Air
2015 - 2019: Ben Miller (The Twelfth)
2019 - 2022:
Show Off Air
2022 -: Katy Wix (The Thirteenth)
Actors who have played the Master (Revival);
2007 - 2009: Anthony Head
2009 - 2013: Geraldine James
2013 - 2014: Sean Pertwee
2014 - 2015:
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2015 - 2019: David Tennant
2019 - 2022:
Show Off Air
2022 - : Rory Kinnear
Showrunners:
2004 - 2011: Mark Gatiss
2011 - 2013: Howard Overman
2013 - 2014: Adrian Hodges
2014 - 2015:
Show Off Air
2015 - 2016: Ben Aaronovitch
2016 - 2019: Jamie Mathieson
2019 - 2022:
Show Off Air
2022 - : Hamish Steele - Maxine Alderton
Showrunning Through Time and Space: An Interview With Hamish Steele
Abbey White
October 1st 2022
It’s a dark and gloomy mall somewhere in Britain, already the Doctor and her new companion Ryan, have seen a Security Guard killed by an auton, submerged into a plasticky mass much to their horror. Now stuck inside a kiosk, they ponder what next as the Doctor scoffs a chocolate bar.
“How can you eat at a time like this?” Ryan asks as the Doctor finishes. The Cumming’s Doctor would have campily swatted it away, Capaldi would have sternly justified his consumption before following it with a joke at his expense, Marshall would have acted awkwardly smug about it and Miller’s wouldn’t have touched a chocolate bar at all, instead likely using it as a weapon or offering it awkwardly to his companion. Instead Katy Wix’s Doctor looks at the wrapper baffled and softly says;
“Oh, I need the energy boost” before continuing to scoff her chocolate bar and proceeds to use said energy boost to find her way out of the mall.
It’s with these words, that we found out the Doctor is back, after a over two year hiatus following Ben Miller’s departure as the Doctor and Jamie Mathieson’s departure as Show Runner. With no clear successor in place and worries around bloated budgets, it seemed that Doctor Who was destined to the cancellation realm. Talk about a possibility of long discussed possibility Russell T. Davies taking the show-running reigns with Eddie Izzard at the helm were deflated when Davies accepted a job show running the adaptation of William Gibson’s, The Agency for HBO.
For many, that seemed to be it for the Doctor. So it came as a surprise when an announcement in early 2021 that Doctor Who was in production. The vague drops of information were tantalising, the Doctor was now to be played by a female actress and with two show runners who had unexpectedly taken the reigns of the show.
It’s the show-runner Hamish Steele that surprised several commentators, who’s previous work was primarily within Children’s and Young Adult media with projects like Deadendia, The Tall Tales Of Urchin and Badly Drawn Animals. But indeed in the last year of Miller’s run they would contribute two episode scripts and has collaborated with Big Finish on a several occasions, making a big impact with the community when they did .
Then the first trailer was released, the Doctor being played by Katy Wix was a pleasant surprise. Instead of Miller’s awkward patrician, we had a strange and almost surreal Doctor, a scatter shot mad scientist with a Police Box. Meanwhile her companions, Ryan played by Tyler Luke Cunningham and Sarah played by Katie Leung can only react in confusion and intrigue at what the Doctor will do next.
Now with the release of the first series, I can sit and interview Hamish about LGBTQ+ representation, mixing Horror with Science Fiction for all ages, the Master, musical numbers and future series...
So, I’ll start by asking how did your background in Children’s and Young Adult oriented animation interact with Doctor Who?
Well, if Doctor Who means anything it’s mixing concepts, stories and ideas that Children, Teenagers and Adults can relate to. Indeed in my opinion that was the problem with the Marshall Series, that it skewed to hard to an adult audience and as a result forgot to include the younger audiences who had been part of the shows success from the beginning.
My background in just barely getting animated shows off the ground, means that I had to ensure I understood what Children and Young Adults would want to see. Indeed, Deadendia nearly didn’t get off the ground, they was the possibility the show would be made and then cancelled. Test audiences indicated that there was a place for Young Adult oriented horror which is what convinced one of the BBC producers to bring me on as a co-show runner. My aim was to try and help make a Doctor Who show that everyone can enjoy, I think the team succeeded.
Speaking of, the opening uses a bevy of horror tropes, and the shows intersects horror stories within the show, how did you approach horror knowing your audience would be broad?
Well Doctor Who has always had horror elements and stories, spooky moments that made hide behind the sofa. One thing we realised really early on is that, what age range finds stuff scary doesn’t make any sense.
Before we did a writers room, we went to a theme park during Halloween as part of a ‘get to know the team’ type thing, and one thing we talked about was a family in front of us during one of those interactive horror escape rooms. There was a 6 or 7-year-old, and they were loving every second, laughing and clapping. Then there was a 12 or 13-year-old, and they were clinging to their parents. Early on, when we talked about the horror in this, talking about age ranges, I always thought this is a show for families that like horror and spooky stuff, alongside the Science Fiction as well.
So the reasoning behind that opening minute of episode one is that it’s kind of a test for the audience. I think it’s one of the scariest bit in the series, it’s a bit like an 80s slasher, with Lilly getting chased through an abandoned shopping centre. If you can get past that, you’ll be fine with everything else. Some episodes are horror, and some are comedic, so we tried to put that all into that opening minute — a little promise of what’s to come.
(Abbey White, 2022).
One of the main talking points when the show trailer was initially dropped was not only surprise at the show runners but also on the casting of the Doctor, can you elaborate at all on why Katy Wix got the job?
So I wasn’t focused too much on the casting process. I was helping plot stories, doing an Alien and having everyone written in gender neutral language and just seeing what would happen. It was Maxine who told me about Katy, she was one of the final few candidates left at that point.
So I go with the Casting Director to meet her and the finalists and we get chatting and she would be soft spoken at times before making a quip or a joke, which really surprised me and would nearly always make me laugh. And then we watched the audition, and I loved she played the Doctor as an eccentric oddball. Most of the other actors were doing more stoic characters, whilst Katy’s seemed like a mad scientist at times. It what in my opinion allowed the more serious moments to have more weight, especially since Katy’s background is comedy, so she’s better prepared at threading the needle when you have the episodes where the Doctor has to become more serious.
One of the important factors of the revived show has been it’s LGBTQ+ inclusive nature, including having a lead character who’s trans, how has making the show more representative of the community been?
It was quite hard, I had done previous show pitches where a producer told me that no queer representation was to be allowed. So when I came to Doctor Who I expected the same, and depending on the exec or the producer, not to name names, I would be told that. It slowed down production a bit because I was refusing to budge on this.
In the end I had help from Alan Cummings, who had done some voice work for The Tall Tales of Urchin and Deadendia and who the BBC were keen to have come back for the Sixtieth Anniversary. Anyway I manage to let Alan know what was happening and told the producers he wouldn’t appear in the anniversary unless the show had LGBTQ+ representation. In the end the Producers gave up, and so I was able to include Ryan.
How has the shift from Animation to Live Action presented challenges and how do you think it’s helped the character of the show?
Well you can get away with a lot more in animation, shots, movement and style are all based upon the animator in question. The Live Action is hampered by everything being based around what you can shoot within a budget. However, animators come at scenarios as people watchers if anything, so we can write and propose movement better than someone just firmly couched in live action. I think it’s why I got along with Katy, sketch comedy is based around being able to people watch and gain insight from their movements.
Before you did Doctor Who officially, you helped create a fan comic and worked to do an episode for Big Finish, how have you tackled working with the fan community whilst making it still accessible to new audiences?
It’s always hard to do that, especially with such a long running and culture impactful show as Doctor Who. I remember a writer came up to me and was like ‘Every writer working for this show wants to pitch, Mechanoids versus the Great Intelligence’ and so we deliberately avoided doing that. Much of the time was ensuring that we did, more standalone stories for the show, I enjoyed episodes like Bump In The Night or Twilight because there self contained stories which just so happen to have our three main characters bumbling through.
Just giving Fans more of the same doesn’t help the series develop in my opinion. The second series of the Miller tenure was very safe and appealed to fans, and you saw
Despite being able to Time Travel, in the Miller years, the amount of historical episodes amounted to about three a series, whilst here you have about five historical based episodes, why did the team decide to increase the number of historical episodes?
Well I love history, one of the scripts I used to pitch the revival was an episode set in 1879 and involving Vampires and Bram Stoker because I love doing stories set in Victorian London. But the main pusher behind the shift was Maxine, she decided that the show has shifted too far away from historical stories, so we decided to try and incorporate more of them. Not everyone was happy with the shift, but there were people who enjoyed is doing stories set in per say the Victorian Era or the one set in Egypt in 1922 or Ancient Rome just to name a few, a show about time travel should include historical episodes and additional cast a light on the past which people may not always question.
This Series’s take on the Master has been lauded by many, including former actors of the character like Tennant and James, how did you approach the character?
Well every writer has a different perspective on the Master, some make him this hammy evil genius, or a sly trickster but for us, the Master didn’t really come together till later in the production. Maxine sorted of pieced it together when we met Rory, we went with a Master who is at first affable and charming before he reveals his sinister side, but even then, we want him to be ‘human’. I think it was Rory that brought the most, you kind of feel sad for him at times.
Just Quickly, I heard you’ve been at work on the Sixtieth Anniversary Special, can we gain insight?
Well, I can’t say too much other than Cummings is coming back, though everyone already knows that. I will say, I think it’s a shame that the show has never done a musical episode before, though with Cummings back, maybe we should…
[Grins]
You can watch Doctor Who on the Sc-Fi Channel on Fridays or On Demand on the BBC World Player.
1. This write up is inspired by and includes a modified extract from ‘Dead End: Paranomral Park; Creator Hamish Steele on Crafting the Animated YA LGBTQ-Inclusive Horror Series’, (2022); Abbey White, Hollywood Reporter.
Whilst the vast majority of it is my own writing, I thought that Hamish Steele made the point better than I could here.
