TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE

The Time Traveler’s Wife will sweep us off our feet, showrunner Steven Moffat tells Siobhan duck

SHERLOCK and Watson. The Doctor and his companion. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Time after time, Steven Moffat creates small-screen magic with his impeccably cast double acts. But ask the celebrated screenwriter and he’ll credit the stars for his lucky streak of serial hits.

“People might admire a TV show for its writing or its direction or its production design, but they don’t love anything other than the people in it,” Moffat says.

“Love… we reserve love for other human beings, and probably hate, too, to be honest. We reserve our connection for the actors. That’s what you fall in love with. So, you can do the best James Bond film in the world, but if you don’t like the guy playing James Bond, you’re screwed.”

As such, Moffat gave us Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as modern-day Baker Street sleuths, brought the Tardis into the 21st century with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, and charged Cold Feet’s James Nesbitt with becoming a new generation’s Jekyll.

Now he’s at it again, this time placing Rose Leslie (The Good Fight) and Theo James (Sanditon) at the heart of his reimagining of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling book The Time Traveler’s Wife. Yet in Moffat’s view, a good adaptation “isn’t just rendering something in a different medium,” he insists. “It’s about saying, ‘How about if we did it this way?’”

Moffat was on holiday in Australia when he first read Niffenegger’s tale about a man struggling with a genetic disorder that causes him to travel unpredictably through time. It struck such a chord that Moffat eventually wrote it into Doctor Who – with the Doctor using the book as a place to hide his spare Tardis key.

“I absolutely adored it. I mean, I love time-travel stories anyway, obviously,” he says.

“But this was such a different use of time travel, not as an exciting gateway to adventure but the impediment to a grand, ordinary love. It was so amazing, as is the way you get to use the device of scrambling up the order of their days to make something new and vital and interesting about what is basically a very happy marriage.”

As well as giving more scope to the romance, Moffat’s TV adaptation also injects a bit of levity into the adventure.

“Humour is a good way of integrating happiness on screen,” he explains. “I also think real life resembles a sitcom more than it resembles a drama.”

The Time Traveler’s Wife Streaming from monday, Binge