Doctor’s Disney deal could make for epic adventure
Are you ready for an adventure? How about one that traverses all of time and space, hand-in-hand with an impeccably-dressed Time Lord and his fiery, fun and hilarious human companion? .
A new era of BBC fan favourite Doctor Who was ushered in at the end of 2023, with Years and Years and It’s a Sin writer Russell T Davies, who showrunner and head writer of the 2005 revival of the series, back at the helm. Whovians were treated to special episodes featuring previous stars David Tennant and Catherine Tate before meeting the Fifteenth Doctor, played by Sex Education’s Ncuti Gatwa, and his companion Ruby Sunday, played by Coronation Street’s Millie Gibson.
Now we have a brand new eight episode series, the first since the BBC struck a deal with Disney+, which has offered a budget increase allowing the Time Lord’s adventures to be visually bigger and better than ever.
“It is lovely… When we say: ‘Oh my god, there’s an alien army on the horizon’, now we can show the alien army on the horizon; before we just had to point,” he says.
“But, of course, that’s never what Doctor Who was about… we’re more about the Doctor, and a great one liner, and a smile, and the companion and her mum and having fun and being at home with it. So although we’re more impressive, I think, and more visual now, it’s never about that, really.
“Honestly, if they took the money away tomorrow, we’d still make a lovely, lovely show, just with these brilliant actors – they’d be brilliant sitting in a dark room!
“Having said that, we’ve got great aliens coming up, enormous monsters, space stations, vistas of outer space, we’ve got a colony world on an alien planet…”
“What we’ve got coming up is the full range of adventures,” Davies continues.
“We’ve got comedy stories, we’ve got music, we’ve got horror, we’ve got Welsh folk horror – that’s a very unusual territory for the show to go into. We’ve got chases, we’ve got the end of the world, and sometimes we’ve got something as simple as the end of a friendship…
“It’s got all the epic stuff, if you love that, but it’s got heart and humanity right at the centre of it.”