If You Read One Thing…
Scottish award-winning TV writer Steven Moffat OBE has created fantastic characters and gripping storylines leading to global fame
Make it this month’s exclusive interview with Doctor Who and Sherlock writer Steven Moffat OBE
AS one of Britain’s foremost television writers, Steven Moffat has written it all – from school kids to Time Lords, best friends to detectives. We’ve seen Steven’s work on our screens since 1989, starting with ITV children’s drama Press Gang. Steven wrote all 43 episodes, drawing from his own experiences working as a teacher in Greenock.
His other early series include a pair of BBC sitcoms; Joking Apart was a cult success in the mid-90s but arguably, it was Coupling, about a group of six friends in their 30s, that really put Steven on the map.
From there, it was hit after hit. After Doctor Who’s 2005 relaunch, Steven wrote some of its most acclaimed episodes, becoming the show’s head writer and show runner from 2010 to 2017.
Alongside this, with close friend Mark Gatiss, he created Sherlock, the modern-day Sherlock Holmes series starring Benedict Cumberbatch that took the television world by storm.
Born in Paisley, Steven had always wanted to write, taking influence from two distinct sources.
“I was just instantly fascinated by the idea of writing stories,” Steven says. “I can’t recall ever having a different ambition.
“I discovered that my grandparents had the complete works of George Bernard Shaw and I was gripped, they were amazing, and I just thought ‘Oh gosh, I’d like to write that.’”
But it was the hit time-travelling series, Doctor Who that really got Steven thinking about a career as a TV writer – being particularly inspired by the titular character’s regenerations.
“Doctor Who compels you to look behind the scenes. When the Doctor is a different person, and you realise it’s a different actor, you start seeing behind the scenes. That sparked my interest in TV, to find out why things happened in Doctor Who.”
Fast forward a few decades, and Steven has played an integral part in the show’s history, having
written for numerous Doctors, from Christopher Eccleston to Peter Capaldi. Notably, both Peter and previous Doctor David Tennant are fellow Scots, which added an interesting dynamic to the series.
“We played on Peter’s gloomy Scottish tone a lot. The Doctor sounds great in a Scottish accent, it lends a sort of gravitas to everything. You say ridiculous things and it sounds OK, even to another Scot, which is bewildering!”
David Tennant, also hailing from Paisley, may not have used his natural accent as the Doctor, but that didn’t matter to Steven.
“While he was doing a London accent, the west of Scotland speech patterns were still there, gabbling in case people stopped listening!”
One of Steven’s most successful episodes of the sci-fi drama was the 50th Anniversary special from 2013, The Day of the Doctor. This cinema-released feature-length episode starred both David Tennant and Matt Smith as the Doctor, alongside a long-lost past incarnation of the Doctor, played by the late John Hurt.
However, writing the celebratory episode was far from a joy for Steven.
“The Doctor sounds great in a Scottish accent, it lends a sort of gravitas to everything”
“It was a completely miserable process to work on. The level of expectation was preposterous and the budget wasn’t anything like it should have been.
“I think I pulled off The Day of the Doctor though. Pulling that one off was a real feather in my cap!”
After working on Doctor Who for the best part of 12 years, you might think Steven would be ready to leave time travel well and truly in the past, but you’d be wrong. Steven has written a TV adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s book The Time Traveler’s Wife for US network HBO – creating something of a time paradox himself.
“I loved the book,” Steven says, “I read it many years ago, when I was doing Doctor Who for previous show runner Russell T. Davies and so I wrote the episode The Girl in the Fireplace as a very direct response to the book.”
The episode casts David Tennant’s Doctor as a time traveller who falls in love with French aristocrat Madame de Pompadour, after he steps through a time window to the 18th century. The Girl in the Fireplace caught Audrey Niffenegger’s attention, and it became the start of a symbiotic relationship between the two writers.
Steven would also go on to introduce the character of River Song, played by Alex Kingston, who became the Doctor’s wife via a temporally long-distance relationship that only has them crossing paths at exactly the wrong time.
“Slightly blindly, I drifted into creating River Song. I loved the shuffled timeline of their relationship, I thought it fitted perfectly into Doctor Who. I was aware of the similarities with The Time Traveler’s Wife of course, I acknowledged it and put a copy of the book in the TARDIS – where the Doctor keeps one of his spare keys! “In Audrey’s next book she has a character sitting and watching The Girl in the Fireplace on TV, so I got in touch with her then and we met up for a laugh, she figured out that I’d ripped her off! She even came to the première of The Husbands of River Song,
River Song’s last appearance, so it’s come full circle.”
Alongside The Time Traveler’s Wife, Steven has written a new thriller, Inside Man, for the BBC – which he’s being very cryptic about.
“Being as deliberately deceptive as possible, it’s about a man on death row in Florida and a woman trapped below a vicarage in England, and how their fates collide.
“The BBC’S shelves are bare right now because no one’s making shows and if they make them they’re not making them very fast. I think it will be deliverable by the end of the year. Anything that’s transmittable will be transmitted pretty fast!”
The BBC is where Steven saw success with another of his series – Sherlock. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson, this modern-day retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, won nine Emmys, four BAFTAS and, to Steven’s surprise, was broadcast to enormous popularity across the globe.
“The world didn’t know that what they wanted was a sexy, modern Sherlock Holmes – and we weren’t sure either”
“You’d have to be insane to expect that level of success! And it bemuses me to this day how vast, how complete and how epic that success was. It was a hit in China. I got recognised in a lift in China once, that was something! What do you do with that? The world didn’t know that what it wanted was a sexy, modern-day Sherlock Holmes – and, to be honest, we weren’t sure either!”
With the programme being such a success, it’s only natural for fans to clamour for more. Steven says that’s out of his hands, owing any future Sherlock adventures to the availability of his two Hollywood star leads.
“I would certainly never say never. If Benedict and Martin pop up and say, ‘What do you feel about doing that again?’ We’ll just do it – you wouldn’t say no to that!”
Sherlock catapulted little-known actor Benedict Cumberbatch into the limelight, and by the time the second season came about, he and Martin Freeman were starring in Hollywood films such as The Hobbit.
“It was remarkable that we even got three more series and a special given they were film stars before the second run started, so let’s wait and see!”
Across Steven’s career he has written sitcoms, dramas and even the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin, having been asked personally by director Steven Spielberg. Choosing a highlight might seem difficult.
“I’m always mostly preoccupied by what I’m doing next, but I would tentatively say a highlight would be somewhere between Sherlock and having added such a memorable monster to Doctor Who.”
Steven created the Weeping Angels – moving statues that attack when you close your eyes – that first appeared in 2007’s Doctor Who episode Blink and most recently in 2021’s New Year episode, Revolution of the Daleks.
“There’s only about three monsters that count, and I’ve done one of them! So I’m extremely proud of that. I have a Weeping Angel in my garden to commemorate.
“If I was to narrow it down to one thing I’ve ever done though, I think the best script I’ve ever written, and the best produced script, was A Scandal in Belgravia for Sherlock. I think that was my finest hour.”
With more than 30 years of writing behind him, some of Britain’s biggest TV hits and so many more exciting programmes to come, Steven Moffat is at the height of his career. The wee Doctor Who fan from Paisley, reading his grandparent’s copy of the works of George Bernard Shaw, would certainly be proud.