The Tertiary Console Room: An Interview With Rob Shearman

ROB SHEARMAN is the author of two rather popular Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas. One of them featured a talking penguin, which people liked a lot. The other featured a talking house, which people liked a lot too. Now, as the chimes strike midnight, (owing to that pestilential time difference), the chart-stopping author tells all to JONATHAN DREYFUS, in what promises to be wholly terrifying…

Can you give us an idea of your writing career so far?

I've just been incredibly lucky really. I originally wanted to be an actor, but I was awful, which sort of got in the way of my making anything of it. So because I'd always had this half idea that I'd really like to be writing – which, at that point, was copious amounts of dreadful poetry and short stories that didn't go anywhere - I began to think, well, if I want to be involved in drama the thing to do is to try and write it and that way I can get myself a decent part. So at the age of eighteen or so, I began writing scripts. And quite quickly, I found that I actually could, if I just kept on at them, start selling them. By the age of about twenty-one I had accidentally become a professional theatre writer.

At that age I began winning a few international awards for play writing. I was still, at that point, a student. When I graduated from university I was immediately given, by the Arts Council of Great Britain, a resident position at a regional theatre, which made me, at that point, (and I think I still am), the youngest recipient of an arts council bursary. This meant that within about a year of that I was being headhunted by numerous theatres in Britain to write for them, one of which was run by Alan Ayckbourn. Alan's work may not be so familiar outside Europe, but he's just about the most staged writer over here since Shakespeare - and I'd long been a fan of his comedies.

By the age of about twenty-four, I was in the national news quite a bit as being this quite exciting up and coming playwright and, as I say, winning awards on a fairly regular basis: things like the Sunday Times Play-Writing award. I even won an award at the National Theatre – pretty good stuff really.

I'd been a fan of Doctor Who for quite some time, and at this point Doctor Who was the furthest thing away from my dreams I'd ever had. I got to be, I think, quite snobbish about writing, because I was being feted so much. Some of my stuff was even beginning to be taught at universities! That's quite an odd thing to find out, and it's fun to read students' ramblings as they start to assess your work, putting it in context with other playwrights, and so forth.

Anyway, Doctor Who, at that point, was just beginning with the [Virgin] New Adventures, and I read them. The idea of actually writing any Doctor Who seemed incredibly unlikely, I think partly because I'm not a very good prose writer, and partly because at that point there seemed to be no outlet for anyone who wanted to write drama to get involved with Doctor Who at all. I think had Big Finish come along at that point and said, "We're doing a series of new Doctor Who audio adventures," I would have said "No! I'm far too important and grand and serious to be tackling stuff like that, even though I'm a fan".

But times change, and it was when Big Finish finally did get the license, which was I think at the end of '98 or beginning of '99 that I first heard about it. Someone who I knew from university, who's also a writer, called Nick Pegg, told me at that point that he was writing a [Big Finish] Doctor Who story called The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, and said, "You ought to have a go at this," because although he knew that, at that point, I was largely still doing theatre, I was also now writing for BBC Radio, and he said, "Perhaps it would be good to have someone who's also written for BBC Radio professionally to be writing for Doctor Who on audio."

I was invited to the Big Finish launch party, and I knew nobody there except Nick. Gary [Russell] and Jason [Haigh-Ellery] were there, but I didn't know them from Adam. I'd heard of them, because I'd been a fan, and when I was a teenager I bought fanzines, which Gary was editing, and I'd seen Shakedown, which Jason had produced. I was quite nervous of them, as a matter of fact, because it's odd meeting people you've known virtually all of your adult life by name, but have never actually spoken to.

Gary, I think, was quite keen that I should just have a go at writing one because, as I say, of my BBC Radio background. I didn't really get to know Gary or Jason very well for the next six months; I just went away in the summer of '99 with a deadline to write The Holy Terror by February 2000. I had other writing to do at the time, so I actually wrote it at the deadline, and I didn't really speak to Gary or Jason again up to that point.

I did feel a bit on the fringes at the start. I was already involved with Big Finish marginally at the time that the news broke that they had the license, and I just sat back and smiled and was pleased for them, but I didn't really know anybody involved with it at all. It's odd, because now I regard an awful lot of the writers at Big Finish as very close friends, but at that time they were just names to me.

I do feel very lucky, as, because of my previous writing, I bypassed a process that I knew other people had to go through, I was just asked to write a story.

I thought, well, that'll be quite fun, and I was a bit less pompous than I had been, so Gary asked if I'd like to knock out an idea. I gave him about a page of what would eventually become The Holy Terror, although it was completely different actually, and Gary said, "Yeah, great! If you can just put a penguin in it that'll be fantastic."

That's how I got involved with the whole Doctor Who site. All this was about 10 years after becoming a professional writer, and it was quite a nice thing to do really. It does ground you a bit; if I ever get worried writing Doctor Who, because it's actually quite a difficult thing to write, I just look up at my wall and see all these other pictures and I can feel pompous and pretentious again, which is quite a good wheeze.

You see, on my thirtieth birthday, my girlfriend framed lots of my old theatre posters for me and hung them all around my office. I find writing quite a horrible thing to do - it makes you feel very insecure about your ability. So having these posters stare down at me can be very reassuring if you're sitting there worrying about how you're going to sort out the Daleks.

How do you go about writing an audio?

I think that the thing you've got to do is always remember that this is something which is for sound only. You've got to come up with an idea which will not only work on audio because you can get away with it, but one that will only work on audio, and will exploit the audio medium better than any other. I'm not entirely sure that Holy Terror did that; it was an attempt to do something where an awful lot of the comedy would work because you couldn't see what was going on. After all, there is this four-foot penguin walking around, which would have been quite hard to achieve on TV.

With The Chimes of Midnight I was trying to write something with a very atmospheric soundscape. I think that, on TV, Chimes would have been the least frightening story ever made, and probably one of the most boring! The idea is always to try and find a way to give Alistair Lock a nightmare, because there's so much going on from his angle, and trying to make something which, if you think of the listener putting on their CD player and headphones, is going to excite them and make them feel that this is really good radio drama, as opposed to anything else.

Some of the complications are that the story telling can be quite difficult on audio. I find it quite hard to concentrate if I'm listening to radio, so you've got to be complex enough to keep things interesting and involving, but the storytelling also has to be simple enough to feel straightforward so you can follow what's going on, which I think is quite a hard thing to get right. That's the main audio necessity.

From where did you draw the inspiration for The Holy Terror?

It's odd, really. I had this idea a few years before, which was supposed to be a stage play, that was based upon an old pre-medieval idea that one of the ways in which you could try to communicate with God would be to find a human vessel that was totally innocent, with none of the corruptions of the fall of man, the Tower of Babel and stuff like that.

So James I of England, and I think Akbar the Great, who was some warrior - Mongol, Hun, whatever - had the idea that if you were to separate two babies at birth, isolate them and give them no contact with the outside world, the language that they would be forced to develop in order to communicate with each other would be the language of God. If you had the language of God, you could use them to effectively become the new Messiah. Which is an interesting idea, and probably a load of rubbish, but it was quite creepy to start with.

So anyway, I'd had the idea to base a stage play on that for quite some time, and I remember in the mid-90's trying to sell it to a theatre, but they said, "It's a bit Doctor Who-ish though, isn't it?" and I actually thought it wasn't! So when I was asked to come up with something, I had this idea for a story in my head, which, at the first meeting with Gary, had he asked me for, would have been completely different from The Holy Terror. It was this strange, wacky comedy about a time cabaret, which I might try and pitch to them at some point, if I get desperate.

I went back home and thought about it, when he asked me to write a storyline out, and I thought, I can't give him that, he'll just hate it, so instead I dredged through my back catalogue of ideas that'd fallen away, and thought, well, they said it was a bit Doctor Who-ish, I'll try and do that one instead. So I brought up The Holy Terror, and wrote it within this strange, decaying castle. It was quite straight at the time, there was no real idea of it being a fantasy castle. In the first page or two that I submitted there was no suggestion that it was a prison, and that there was someone there who was actually writing it. It was meant to be completely straightly done, just a satire about religion, I suppose. That was how I pitched it to Gary, at any rate, and that's how he accepted it.

What was it like writing for this "four-foot penguin"? Are he and the Sixth Doctor easier or harder to write for than a TV combination?

I thought it was probably easier, in the end. I must admit that when Gary first said, "This is great, we'll have this, but put Frobisher in," I probably went white for about a week. I went away and re-read all my Frobisher comics - I had an awful lot in the attic - and I did like Frobisher, but I was having a problem with the idea of a how shape-shifting, essentially quite comedic companion, who was a penguin, was going to work in the audio medium. I did think that almost all of Frobisher's joke was that you could see this penguin, walking around, changing shape once in a while.

Once I got beyond this problem, I was fine. Initially I was coming up with ideas and thinking, how do I make him change shape? How's that going to work [on audio]? Then I realised, well, I won't, I simply won't make him change shape. I'll write a story in which the fact that he's a bird is actually part of the point, because that's why people respond to him differently, which was quite fun. I wanted to have him quite witty and fun, sort of devil-may-care with the Doctor.

Part of the problem with the TV combos is that the companions have to run the usual course of what companions do. Companions are people who, basically, are quite well meaning, decent characters who care for the Doctor enormously and get locked up a lot and eventually rescued by him. I wanted a character that thought, as far as he was concerned, that he was the star of the show, and the Doctor was his sidekick. That made it quite fun and, I think, a lot easier. It would have been quite difficult to have inserted a character like Nyssa or Peri into the idea I had, but to make Frobisher the centerpiece, the one that everyone thought was a god and wanted to worship, made it come alive for me. I was quite pleased with that; I think it worked out very nicely.

Were you happy with the finished product?

Oh yeah, absolutely! I was quite astounded by how good it was, which I think is not to do with me. I think the weakest part of The Holy Terror, and I still feel this having listened to it, was the script. I think that the performances were tremendous, Colin [Baker] and Robert [Jezek], playing the Doctor and Frobisher, sounded to me exactly how I imagined they should be. They both put so much into it to making that relationship work; enough that you forget that they'd never met before. It felt like they'd been working together for some time.

Sam Kelly, Peter Guinness and Roberta Taylor, who were the obvious [guest] star parts, were just absolutely brilliant. I think Sam Kelly doing the scribe for me is probably one of the happiest experiences I've ever had professionally with an actor. I just sat there in the control booth thinking my God he's so good! Peter playing his Richard III villain was superb.

All the rest of the guest cast that Nick [Pegg, the story's director] got in was great as well. I was really impressed by Stefan [Atkinson], who did Pepin, because Pepin was a sort of me, really. I wrote Pepin as this rather nervous emperor god, as I would be if I were an emperor god. He was quite a frightened person who didn't believe he was worthy of such great honour. Stefan brought that out incredibly well, and it's in some ways rather a shame that because there were so many notable guest parts around him, I think he tends to be forgotten amongst a fairly fantastic cast.

Nick Pegg did a fantastic job with it. Nick being the person I'd known for about ten years, Gary quite sensibly thought it would be reassuring for both of us if we worked off each other. Nick's an incredibly intelligent man, and came back to me and said, "I liked the script, and I have a couple of my own suggestions about the odd line-change". He was quite right, because Nick is usually right about most things. He gave an incredibly calm sense in the two-day recording.

But it wasn't, in some ways, the happiest of recordings, to be honest. Again, I think it was my fault. We did all the comedy stuff on day one, which everybody really enjoyed doing, which left all the horror stuff, which is really unpleasant in The Holy Terror, for the second day. It left everybody with a very bad taste in their mouths. I remember leaving that recording thinking, it's not going to be very good, it was a bunch of great performances, but the script isn't as good as it should be. I sat in the pub afterwards thinking, well, that's it really. It was a good try, but I think I let them down a bit.

When I finally heard the finished thing, with the comedy and horror mixing in, as opposed to being separated, I was actually really impressed by what Nick had done. I think it flows very well, though it's a bit too long. I think that smoothness has to do with the certainty of Nick's direction, and how good Russell Stone's music was as well, which I think was breathtaking.

When you're watching it in studio, it's just people standing at mikes, there's no movement at all. But when you listen to it later on, Gareth [Jenkins] had given the idea of people walking on stone all the time, and they actually moved from speaker to speaker. And with Russell's music as well… I can picture very well those two days in studio, but I now close my eyes when I'm listening to it, and I can actually see the castle, which is a tremendous testament to what Russell and Gareth achieved. I think it's absolutely extraordinary.

So you weren't expecting the rave reception The Holy Terror received?

No, absolutely not! I thought it was going to be slaughtered. I didn't really know what anybody was expecting. The Holy Terror was recorded quite late, in August [2000], about the time that [The] Apocalypse Element was coming out, and up to that point, because I had been listening to them all, I think all the stories had been quite traditional, and there was nothing, at that point, that was quite as silly as The Holy Terror, or quite as comedic. I remember buying [the stories] every month, thinking, I've really got this wrong, haven't I, because it's completely not going to fit in to what the range is putting out. So I was quite nervous.

I remember going to a signing on the day it was released, and people queuing up and buying it, and they didn't know me from Adam of course, but I was signing their covers, and I remember writing on all the covers, "I hope you enjoy it," because I was really hoping that they would, and I was worried they'd go home, listen to it and send it back.

And the news began, as always happens, because the Internet is very quick at gathering a response, to filter through. People seemed to really take to it. And I was flabbergasted. I remember when I was writing it, I was just hoping it wouldn't be bottom of the Doctor Who Magazine poll. I thought, if I can just make sure that I'm not bottom, then that'll be great. But when The Holy Terror won that, I was quite shocked, I don't think it's the best of that year at all. Obviously I was absolutely delighted, but it was a very strange difference between what I was expecting and what actually turned out. I'm not trying to rubbish my own story, but there were stories out there that I think overall worked better than The Holy Terror, and that's, as I say, to do with the script.

Did this incredible reaction in any way influence the writing of The Chimes of Midnight?

It actually made it a lot harder. Typically. I was asked to have a go at doing a [Paul] McGann story, just before the recording of The Holy Terror. We six writers [Mark Gatiss, Shearman, Paul Cornell, Nicholas Briggs, Justin Richards and Alan Barnes], were all sent this quite secret e-mail, with Gary outlining what he wanted the season to be, because there is a link between all the stories. We've now reached the third release, so I think it's becoming quite clear to people that there is an ongoing story.

We all, bar Nicholas Briggs, who was off doing a Myth Makers interview, met up for a meeting in a pub in London, and outlined our basic ideas. That was fine. At that point The Holy Terror hadn't come out. When The Holy Terror did come out, it was the week I was starting to write Chimes. I was expecting that I could use, in some ways, what I anticipated as a fairly nonplussed or negative reaction to The Holy Terror to spur me to write Chimes better, because I had my own problems with The Holy Terror, as I say.

Instead, I was getting these really great reviews, which made it phenomenally hard to try and do Chimes as well. I felt, suddenly, that I had to live up to this story, and that's quite difficult, because, in some ways, you just want to wipe the slate clean and start all over, and suddenly I was thinking, is this what they want? If The Holy Terror was good, what am I doing this time? That made it quite tricky.

I didn't enjoy writing Chimes very much as a result; I found it to be quite a difficult process. I liked it in retrospect, because I quite like the story, but at the time I was sitting there, writing an episode every two days, and I'd finish one and think, well I dunno if it's any good or not now. I thought it was quite a fun idea when I started, but now I think it's totally not what people are expecting. I was a bit concerned. It was quite tricky.

Where did the inspiration come from this time?

It was stolen, pretty much. I now knew Gary a bit better than I had during The Holy Terror experience, and I'd become aware that he was a fan of Upstairs Downstairs and of Sapphire and Steel, and, quite shamelessly, I said to him, "I'm going to mix those two up," and of course he loved the idea, because that was, for him, TV heaven. That was it, really.

I'd always loved Sapphire and Steel in particular when I'd been a kid. It's a very eerie, atmospheric series about time itself being a threat. It's very slow moving, but extremely creepy stuff. When I'd been a child, once I'd started watching Doctor Who, it'd never really frightened me, but Sapphire and Steel had always frightened me. And I thought, well, I'd actually really like to write a frightening story, but looking back into Doctor Who's past, and trying to emulate those things that'd got my pulse racing won't really do the trick. So I looked elsewhere.

I really wanted to write a story which I thought would be just frightening. I think what's frightening it not a stated threat, usually, but it the idea that there's a threat there, but you don't really know what it is yet. I find uncertainty to be a lot more frightening than people being openly menacing. So I thought, if I can just keep a story going for as long as possible in which weird things are happening and people feel trapped, but they've no idea even if anyone means them any harm or not, I think that could actually be quite scary.

So that was the idea really, and I was trying to spin various plates on sticks for as long as possible, trying to see how long I could keep Chimes going before I had to come up with an explanation for the whole thing. It was quite fun.

Also, I remember watching a movie on TV some time in 2000, called Nick of Time, which is not a great film, but it's got a great idea, which is that the whole thing is told in real time. And I thought, wouldn't that be great for Doctor Who? Wouldn't it be really exciting to have a story which unfolds minute by minute? I thought, well, it'd be quite fun to have a go at that, because Doctor Who had never done it. Doctor Who always cuts from scene to scene, there's never any sense of that build-up that I really wanted to give Chimes. So I tried to write it so that if it lasted one hour forty minutes, or whatever, that is effectively one hour forty minutes of the Doctor's life. So, from the moment he arrives to the moment he leaves, that is real time for the Doctor's perception, which is again quite fun, and again quite hard to do. I gave myself another rod for my back by that, but that was the fun part of writing it.

Is it any different writing for the Eighth Doctor and Charley, given that they're the "now" team, rather than a "then"?

They are very different. I'm not sure that's because they're the current team. I was quite keen to try and make the Eighth Doctor someone I thought the Doctor should be, as opposed to what the Eighth Doctor had been up to that point, which is rather lazy of me. But I didn't like the TV movie very much; though I like McGann in the TV movie, I don't feel within the hour that he appeared on screen you can really gage what he would have been had it gone into a series very well. I don't think that's a very good way of [presenting a new Doctor].

I became aware that Paul McGann himself would never have gone back and watched the TV Movie before going in to do the recording, nor would he have read any of the books, so it was up to me to try and write a Doctor that I would have liked the Doctor to have been. So I wrote a wish-fulfilling Doctor. I wanted a Doctor who was quite funny, quite endearing and charming – pretty much the sort of Doctor I'd always wanted to have on screen ever since I'd become a fan.

In some ways that was easier than Colin, because with Colin you had to take on board who Colin Baker's Doctor was, and the reaction there'd been against that. I made Colin, in one scene in particular in the first draft of The Holy Terror, a lot more abrasive, and Gary said "No no no no! Colin and I don't feel that should be happening any more." Colin had made it quite clear after Whispers of Terror, that he wanted his Doctor softened, because he felt that there had been various mistakes made on TV, with his performance and the scripts he was given, and he wanted to have a chance to correct them.

So, when you write for Colin at Big Finish, there is very much a sense that you're going into charted water, though you've still got to be aware of the reaction against what's gone before. Whereas with Paul [and India Fisher] it feels a lot more free, and with Chimes I wanted to write Charley as a companion who seemed to me like lots of fun, and was willing to be caught up in the adventure without it being an angst-ridden thing, which is quite ironic, because so much of what's happening to Charley at the moment is an angst-ridden story. It's all about whether she should have died on the R-101 or not, and it was quite fun to write a story about that, about whether this character should be dead or alive, but still make her an optimistic, fun character, as opposed to someone who's going around moaning all the time about her fate.

I think I preferred writing for Charley and the Eighth Doctor to Colin and Frobisher, but then again I feel that's partly because I could make them more the centre of the action in Chimes than I could in The Holy Terror. I think The Holy Terror had a problem, in that it didn't really allow much for the Doctor to do, whereas the Eighth Doctor was so much more the centerpiece of Chimes with Charley, so that was a bit better constructed.

How do you think The Chimes of Midnight turned out?

I think it's great, I know I shouldn't say that but I really do. It was a different sort of reaction [for me]. When I went to the studio for Chimes, I remember sitting through that thinking, I'm really enjoying this, because as I say I hadn't enjoyed writing it much, and I'd been quite nervous about Big Finish's reaction to it. But Paul [McGann] really seemed to enjoy Chimes; I remember he would keep on saying after every take, things like "This is great fun, isn't it?" He obviously was really into it, and I think he communicated that sense of excitement, and actually finding it quite funny and eerie at the same time, to all the other cast members. So they all really went for it, and all really bought into the idea of what was going on.

I remember leaving with the director, Barnaby Edwards. We left after that final day and drove back, because I was staying with him for that recording, and he was saying, "It was great fun doing that," and I just said, "Yeah, I had a blast watching that!" We were both just hoping that Barnaby could find a way to translate what we'd enjoyed into the audio itself.

It was given to Andy Hardwick and Russell [Stone] very early because it was recorded in January 2001, and wasn't out until February 2002. I get the impression that both of them would work on it, tweak bits of it and try to develop it as an ongoing labour of love over the next year. They both wrote to me afterwards and said that they'd really enjoyed the script and found it quite frightening, and wanted to get the most out of it.

So when you listen to Chimes, what I can hear at any rate is a lot of people's very hard work being put in over a very long period of time. I think it sounds wonderful, quite orchestrated, which is what you always want but you never dare to think will really happen. So, when I put on Chimes, I can just sit back and enjoy it, and forget I was even involved in it. I think they've done a fantastic job on it.

Though no "official" reviews have been published, it's pretty clear that The Chimes of Midnight is in for the same phenomenal reception as The Holy Terror. Your thoughts on this?

I hope so. I would love it if that were the case. I don't know if that's true, I've been receiving complimentary e-mails and very negative e-mails as well, which is fine with me. It seems to be more of a general split this time: the people who like it do seem to like it a lot, and I know Gary's very proud of it, which is good, I think he feels it's one of the better Big Finish stories; I think he's very proud of the way it's turned out.

I think that because Chimes isn't a standalone, and because all six stories this [McGann] season, in differing ways, do feed of each other to a certain extent, it will probably not be remembered in [the same way as The Holy Terror]. I think what will happen is that, come June, or at least after NeverLand's out, people will look back and see the six stories as being part of a set, rather than saying, "Wow, wasn't Chimes good," or "Wasn't NeverLand or Seasons of Fear particularly good," I think that they'll all see one big, linked story, which I think is no bad thing anyway. I thought it was much more fun writing this time for something which felt like part of an ongoing series.

The Holy Terror, which I am proud of, I don't want to give the worrying sense that I'm doing it down, seems to stand out as doing something a little different. The reason people seem to like it as much as they did is that it's very identifiable on its own, whereas Chimes will just seem to be part of the basic patchwork of this six-story arc. But I'm obviously really pleased people like it so much, it's tremendously gratifying to me that people are enjoying it, and I hope they continue to do so, and that the reviews are good. Though I've not read them yet. I've read some online ones, though, which are very positive. Including yours, actually, which was very nice. So I'm hoping that people will still buy into it.

Is it easier or harder trying to fit into a season?

It's harder, but it's also great to feel part of a team. The problem that a writer usually faces is that it's quite lonely. I don't mean to make it sound like I'm trying to get anyone's sympathy here, but most of the job is actually spent having to be cut off, away from everybody else, just doing the job. People can't really react to what you've done until you've done it. There are people who are part of the writing process, but they come in on the second or third or fourth draft, and they give reactions to what you've done. But you've actually got to do it first.

With Chimes, though, it was quite nice to be able to speak to Alan Barnes over e-mail, and say to him things like, "I'm doing this with Charley, is that OK? Because I know what you've got in mind for her in NeverLand is going to be interesting, and you did create her in Storm Warning," and I can write to Nick Briggs and say, "Can I use a continuity reference from Embrace the Darkness in Chimes?" (which I then cut so it didn't end up in it), but it's that idea that we were all part of a shared project which I really enjoyed.

It was harder, because you can't just go off on your own and write a story as much as you would like. I was quite keen that I didn't cheat on Chimes. I wanted Chimes very much to be an important part of the six-story arc, whereas some of the stories, I think, have less to do with it. I wanted to make sure that we upped the stakes, and said, "Look, this is actually about Charley's fate here, and about something really bad going on," as opposed to just alluding to it, as I could have got away with, probably, if I'd wanted to. It's nice that the one I'm writing now [Jubilee], I can do on my own again, and just say, "Well, I'm doing this Dalek story which doesn't affect anybody else at all," but I wouldn't mind having a bash at doing another arc-related story at some point, if they ask me to.

What's it like sitting in on the recording of your own stories?

It's a bit like hard work, actually! My background is working in theatre, where you attend rehearsals for weeks, which is always a fairly gruelling process because you're meant to be there so you can help, and you can cut, and you can be attacked by the actors if things aren't working well. Recording is still the same thing; only you need to deal with it quicker. I'd love to say that it was a tremendously fun experience to sit down and watch Colin and Paul do the lines that you've given them, but you sit there and you worry. You're worrying about whether you've done your job well enough to let them do their jobs well enough. I just like it when it's over.

I always go, because I think that I should go. I couldn't go to [The] Maltese Penguin, because I was too busy at a meeting for TV work, but I think that if the writer can be there, and the director wants them there, then they should be, if only to reassure the actors that everything's going well, because actors are very nervous people.

For example, in The Holy Terror, Sam Kelly was required, when he was doing the voice of that child, to put on a very silly voice. He had to lower his voice and speak very slowly, and he said after the first take, "Is this going to sound stupid?" and Alistair said to him that it wasn't. He wasn't overly worried, but he needed to be reassured before he carried on doing it. And he was, and he did it very well, but actors, particularly in Doctor Who, do get a bit concerned that they're being asked to do extremely silly stuff. If the writer's on hand, to be the one who's responsible for being so silly in the first place, rather than hiding because he knows how dreadful it is, it makes it easier for them sometimes.

What goodies can we expect from The Maltese Penguin?

It's a comedy. I think both The Holy Terror and Chimes are comedies, but they have a serious intent. The Maltese Penguin is just meant to be a laugh. When I was asked to write it, I was told that it was just going to be a freebie for subscribers only, and I thought, well, in that case, let's just have a bit of a romp, not worry about it too much and put as many jokes in as possible, not unlike the way that The One Doctor doesn't try and make any serious points, just tries to be very funny.

Frobisher is a very important part of The Maltese Penguin, as I imagine the title gives away, and the Doctor is a sort of cameo. The idea is how Frobisher would behave in a Phillip Marlowe/Raymond Chandler/1940's film noir, and how he'd deal with it. Badly, really, because he's not very good. He goes around trying to solve these crimes with a hard-boiled narration over the top.

Hopefully it'll just make people laugh. It isn't something that is going to be, I imagine, earth-shatteringly dramatic, but I think it's quite funny and quite sweet.

Similarly, what can we anticipate from Jubilee?

Jubilee's different. I haven't written it yet, but the idea of Jubilee is that it's a very angry, black comedy. It's meant to be funny, because they're all meant to be quite funny, but Jubilee's probably the most serious Doctor Who story I've tried to write. I can't say too much about it or I will get lynched [by Gary].

Given your past successes, are you confident of the same reaction to future ventures?

No. I just keep my fingers crossed. I just hope that people like what I want to write. I think if you worry too much about audience response, you end up trying to write for them, rather than actually trying to write what is the whole point of the story. I hope people like it, but if people turn around from things I do in the future and say, "That's the worst Doctor Who story I've ever heard in my life," as long as long as I thought it was worth writing, I think that I still have to be happy with that.

Have you been approached by BBC Books, or any other such Doctor Who organizations, as a result of your popularity?

Yes, I have. They haven't said just write a book willy-nilly, but I've been told by Justin [Richards, BBC Books Doctor Who range editorial consultant] a couple of times, that if I wanted to, he'd be very receptive to my pitching of an idea, and David Howe's done the same thing with Telos [Publishing], but by no means does that mean that whatever I wrote would end up being published, and I suspect it probably wouldn't, because I'm not a very good prose writer.

I don't think I'm going to do it, because I'm actually quite busy, and I have lots of TV work and theatre work to do, and I think writing a novel would take months, as opposed to the few weeks writing a script takes. But it's very nice to be asked, and I do enjoy reading the books, and I admire the writers of the books enormously actually being able to do that. It is nice, though, to feel that there's an invitation to try, if I want to.

Have you any plans for a future in Doctor Who writing? Would you become involved if the show were to return? Hypothetically?

Hypothetically I would want to meet whoever was doing it. It sounds a bit snobbish, again, but it's back to what I was saying in the first answer, it's easy to do Doctor Who because as far as my agent's concerned, it's a niche market and nobody really notices it anyway, so I can still go out and write my theatre stuff and still be this reputable writer who no one knows is doing Doctor Who. Doctor Who does have a certain stigma about it if you're trying to be a "serious writer". On TV it'd be a lot more obvious, and I don't mind that, but I'd want it to be good, otherwise it wouldn't be worth doing.

I have a suspicion that if it came back, it wouldn't be Doctor Who as I wanted it to be. I think, great, go for it, do it however they want to do it, but unless it was the sort of story I wanted to tell, it probably wouldn't be worth doing for me. I'd always be open to finding out, because it would be interesting, but personally, I wouldn't hold my breath and expect that I would do that.

Are you currently working on any non-Doctor Who projects?

At the moment I'm writing for a series on the BBC called Born and Bred, which should be on British screens in November. That's going to be filming this summer, and I'm currently trying to work out my first draft script for that. There should be my own BBC film made and transmitted this year as well, which is a comedy called About Colin. And more radio work - Martin Jarvis (of Vengeance on Varos fame!) is directing a comedy I've written called Inappropriate Behaviour, and that will be broadcast in August.

I'll probably get back to theatre next year. I'm taking a year off theatre this year, because I'm doing a fair bit of TV stuff. I've been asked to write some TV comedy projects, in some ways off the back of The Holy Terror. Quite surprisingly, people at BBC and ITV, the commercial networks in Britain, have heard my Doctor Who story. When I was doing theatre, they were aware of me, but thought I was a theatre writer, now that I'm writing for something that has a TV basis, they think, well, let's give him some TV work. I'm doing a fair bit of TV this year, which is quite interesting, and also pays better, which is quite a relief!

Rob Shearman, thank you.