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In the first part of this hour-long interview, Nick Briggs discussed progress on The Prisoner; in this second part he and Paul Simpson discuss the War Doctor stories featuring Sir John Hurt – and the dangers of cliché…

(NB: Portions of this interview may appear as a podcast; they have been edited for print form.)

We’ve had three of the four War Doctor sets now with the fourth due out soon.

I’ve just been looking at the covers for those; they seem so far in the past for me, I literally had to write back to David Richardson and the designer Tom Webster and say, “Which one’s this?”

This is the Leela set?

Yes, I was looking at the individual cover for one of them and was at quite a loss to remember the story. I would remember it if it were my script, which is the one that has Leela in!

Did you record all four box sets at the same time – well, not literally at the same time…

Ah – so I won’t make that bad joke!

We did the first lot on its own, and in that one, John Hurt wasn’t actually in the studio with us, but he was connected to us live from another studio near where he lives because he was still undergoing treatment for cancer at the time so he had to be there. It was like having him in one of our booths, but just like the windows had been frosted. He was reacting to us in real time, and we were there with him; and then for the others, he came to London because beautifully he got the all clear. I think he was expecting that, but inevitably I did ask him how he was.

The others we did more or less over the period of two or three weeks, so it was a quite concentrated period of work – or maybe it was one and a half weeks? It was almost every day, so I think it was that actually.

It was quite concentrated: I might sound like a frail old thing but normally I try not to do more than two consecutive days in studio as a director. I’ll usually have a day off in the middle to do more prep and to recover. Especially since we have to get an hour’s worth of finished material a day, you’re never off as the director. I wouldn’t complain because it isn’t coal mining, it isn’t actually hard work, but it is quite hard work for me.

You’re having to be extrovert – it’s like conducting or MC-ing for a long period, you don’t have the chance to be yourself…

And if you drop the ball, it just rolls off into the corner and everyone looks at you as if to say, “Well aren’t you going to go and pick it up?” You think, “Really? I was just breathing for a moment. No of course…” And to take this metaphor to its ridiculous end, you don’t have to just pick this ball up, you have to bounce it around in an entertaining way like some fantastic basketball player.

And that’s killed that stone dead…

Yes, that metaphor is now dead!

The other thing about doing it in one go: with the Third Doctor, you were able to react to the comments about the narration (and I’m very pleased the audios are now straight audios without the narration) but you haven’t got that feedback and opportunity to play with it…

Good point.

Did that alter the way that you created it in terms of the scripting?

No, I think we had to set a particular tone and style, which massively immodestly I’ll say I did with Only the Monstrous. All the other writers asked to see those scripts and we said, “This is what we’re doing”, and they went, “Okay, I’ve got it”, and they all, in their own little inimitable ways, followed that lead. We decided that was the way we were going to do it, however you might define that way. Again [as with The Prisoner], I just went with a gut feeling – I knew that when we got the whole War Doctor thing, I had to do this. This is me: this is war and science fiction, the fusion of two things…

Obviously science fiction is a great storytelling environment, and also I find war stories, although appalling in many ways, are a great storytelling environment because it’s about the stakes being high, things being extreme, people operating at the very limits of their emotional ability.

The War Doctor stories are also very different from other things you’ve done – in some ways, they remind me of Survivors in that there is a darkness…

A bleakness.

Yes, bleakness is justified. It’s a tone that doesn’t necessarily work all the time. Over the years, Big Finish have done Doctor Who stories that have had less than happy endings. Creatures of Beauty is one that comes straight to mind, one I always think of as one of Big Finish’s unusual ones that works, and part of the reason it works is because it’s not got a happy ending. Some of the stuff James Goss has done with Torchwood has been like that too. Has there been any sort of reaction of, “Oh it’s Doctor Who, it should be nice and fluffy” from listeners?

No I’m not aware of that at all, because I think everyone is aware of how monumentally terrifying and bleak the Time War is. I think if we were not to have done that, that would have caused complaints. No, I’m really not aware – unless you know otherwise, Paul – that anyone has said, “Oh, it’s all war, war, war!” It’s the War Doctor and we know what’s coming.

Interestingly though I remember John Hurt said to me that one of the things he liked about doing it with us was that he got to do what he called a romantic scene with his relationship with the young Rejoice. He really relished those scenes – he said, “I haven’t had enough of those in my career, and it was really lovely to do.” So I have said if we ever do any more, we should find more sensitivity in there, because of course sensitivity and beauty and kindness are even more poignant in the context of something so bleak and horrific as a terrible war.

And you have to be careful about going into cliché, otherwise it becomes, “oh we’ve got to have the bright spot…”

Yes, but the whole business about cliché is a very significant point, just generally, because the reasons clichés are clichés is because we love [the situations] as well. You just have to find ways of doing it that aren’t like the writing in [some American series].

You can do things that if you stepped a long way back and looked at them with binoculars you’d say, “Surely those are clichés?” – but in the detail you can take the curse [of the  cliché] out of them. Once you set the style of the War Doctor being in a war with the Daleks and the Time Lords being just as bad, that in itself becomes a cliché, and you just have to find new and interesting ways of exploring it, where people don’t just roll your eyes and say, “oh, more of that”.

Likewise Survivors is about [the fact that] nearly everyone’s died and human beings are being not very nice to each other as a result. You could roll your eyes and say, “Oh no not more of that post-apocalyptic nonsense”, but the… not the devil but the angel is in the detail – how you do it, how you write it, how you direct it, how the actors perform it. You can bring something beautiful and surprising out of it, even though the situation is predictable. It’s like a Western is predictable, a soap opera is predictable: certain things need to happen but you do it in a way that has delight and surprise in it.

Click here to read part 1 of this interview