One of the things that has helped Doctor Who fans through the quarantine and self-isolation worldwide as a result of COVID-19 has been the tweetalongs to global viewings of Doctor Who episodes. From The Day of the Doctor to The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion and beyond, writers, producers, directors and actors have joined fans, with new material being created under lockdown conditions to bolster the experience. They’re the brainchild of Doctor Who Magazine’s Emily Cook, who chatted with Paul Simpson during preparations for The Girl in the Fireplace tweetalong…

 

 

What got you into Doctor Who in the first place?

I guess it was technically my parents. They were aware of the series revival in 2005 and they said to me and my sisters, “There’s this great TV show called Doctor Who coming back. Let’s watch it together.”

I really wasn’t sure about it to begin with. They’d told me a bit about it – Tom Baker was the Doctor they’d grown up with – but because it was this old TV show that my parents were into, I decided that it wasn’t for me. My dad had DVDs of Spearhead from Space and The Ark in Space and I’d seen bits of those and thought it was too strange and scary. (Of course now I know that they’re absolutely classics!)

My mum and dad insisted I give this new version of Doctor Who a go, which I did fairly reluctantly. I was annoyed to be missing Ant and Dec on the other side if I’m completely honest! However, I vividly remember seconds into the opening of Rose where you zoom down onto planet Earth and then she whacks the alarm, instantly I was hooked. I thought, “This is exciting, this is unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before in my life.” It was genuinely the most fast paced exciting TV I’d ever seen as a child.

I loved it and I was hooked instantly, and from then on just got more and more into it and obsessed with it – and also like most Doctor Who fans, was always very interested in how the show was made as well. So I was reading Andrew Pixley from quite a young age!

(laughs) That’ll please him

Yes, he knows (laughs). So that’s it really, that’s what got me into it.

Over the years, growing up, I wanted to absorb myself into more of that, the whole programme, and I never really grew out of it. As I became a teenager I remember my parents and grandparents saying, “When are you going to grow out of this? And it just never happened. (laughs) I don’t think it ever will.

Set that back in the mid 1970s and that’s me! Did you ever get the ‘Oh there’s no point spending time on this because you’ll never make a living out of it’?

Yes, that was my grandma. She died last year sadly and I miss her greatly – and she funded a lot of my Doctor Who obsession. I think she bought all of the boxsets that I have and I do remember her saying, not nastily but just, ‘Oh when are you going to…? You need to start focusing on a career or something that is going to carry you forward in the future’. I thought, yes she’s right.

I never thought Doctor Who would be part of my working life at all growing up. I had other interests. I was interested in becoming a teacher at the time so it was a constant reminder that Doctor Who was just a kind of fictional thing I enjoyed in my spare time.

Then when I did get the job on Doctor Who Magazine, I do remember my grandma actually apologising and saying, ‘Oh actually, all of those quiz books and all of that knowledge that you’ve absorbed over the years, you’re now being paid to have that knowledge. Well done!’

What was the inspiration for the very first watchalong during COVID-19?

I have a great interest in people generally, in connecting people, whether that’s in real life or online. Part of my job on the magazine is the social media side of things – running things like DWM’s World Cup of Doctor Who on Twitter. I like to think about how social media can be used to bring people together.

Also, I’ve never been afraid to try big things – when I came up with the idea, it wasn’t a case of “this is a fully formed idea and it’s going to be a spectacular masterpiece”. Before lockdown had officially started, I was just lying in bed one morning and thought, “You know what? I’m feeling really scared right now. The world is changing beyond recognition, it’s really scary what’s happening. We might be going into a lockdown, probably will be going into a lockdown, and I just need something right now to hold onto, to cheer myself up. Something that’s a bit of a constant in my life, something uplifting.” Obviously being a Doctor Who fan, you watch Doctor Who don’t you? You absorb yourself in the fiction of the series. So I thought, “I’m going to watch The Day of The Doctor. I love that episode, it’s very uplifting and I’m gonna have a bit of a watching party.”

My housemates, they don’t hate Doctor Who but they don’t love Doctor Who, so I knew they wouldn’t necessarily engage in it with the enthusiasm I would. So I thought, “I wonder if I tweet about it, if anyone else might join in with me. Yeah, OK they can’t physically be here but there might be something fun in just watching it at the same time and knowing we’re watching it at the same time”. Especially as with our TV viewing habits these days, so much of it isn’t done at the same time – you watch on catch up –and I just thought, “I wonder if we can buck the current trend and do something simultaneously?”

I put the tweet out and it generated quite a lot of interest to begin with. I kept posting and retweeting to keep the interest going.

When Steven Moffat got in touch via Brian Minchin to say that he was going to be watching along too, I thought, “That’s cool, that takes this thing into a new ballpark.” He was going to be joining in on Instagram and I thought, “That’s great. It is mainly Twitter but maybe it could be spread across the platforms”. But then I think Steven got excited enough about the idea to actually create a Twitter account (laughs) which he did and then it just kept growing.

I tweeted Ingrid Oliver [who played Osgood] who said it was a great idea. She was self-isolating on her own, so it was great for her, and then Dan Starkey [Strax] said that he was going to join in. At that point, it was quite a novel and exciting thing for fans, not just to be watching with each other but to be watching with the creators and stars of the show as well.

But it became far more than that; even with that first one you almost set yourself a template which I have no doubt that as with all templates you’ve wanted to go ‘Oh why did I do that?’ when you can’t do it every time! How did the prequel idea happen?

The prequel? Basically I feel there’s always been a producer in me, waiting to be unleashed and it’s taken a lockdown to unleash it! My brain is constantly having ideas. I’m always looking for things to do that are creative and fun and ambitious and productive.

Dan tweeted to say he was going to tweet along and I thought great! I’ve met Dan – he’s lovely – I’ve interviewed him and I have a good relationship with him.  A few other people were getting excited that Dan was joining in and tweeting and they said they were going to watch his cinematic introduction from 2013. I thought, “Why don’t we make a new one? Why don’t we make a lockdown-style one?”

This was literally the day before the first tweetalong and I thought, “Is this mad? Is it possible?” I just tweeted it out as a passing comment to Dan and then followed that up with a private message – “I don’t know if you saw my comment but I’m actually being serious here, do you want to give it a go?” He was up for it.

We thought that we should probably run it past Steven because he created the character. So we emailed Steven and just said “Is this OK? Do you have any pointers? Would you like to be involved?” That evening he sent over the script and obviously to get a Steven Moffat script drop into your inbox, it’s going to be brilliant isn’t it? And it was.

The following day, the day of the tweetalong, me and Dan just spent the whole morning, contacting each other to film it. Dan was filming it at his house, I was throwing him some notes and then bam! It was done.

So, you are right in saying that after that first one there was immediately a template of having creators and makers of the show tweeting along and having some kind of bonus content. People started saying they wanted to see more and I did have in my head the idea of doing Rose and The Eleventh Hour because I knew they had big anniversaries coming up. I started thinking, “I have set myself a template here.” People were asking if extra content and stars tweeting were going to happen every time and initially, if I’m totally honest, I was thinking, “Probably not. There’s no way I can get people on board every time. There’s no way I can create something new every time.”

But it happened for the next one which was Rose, and it happened with some of the others, and I very quickly realised that the live tweeters are what’s got to drive the episode choices because that is now the USP of what I’m doing. Other people might start doing tweetalongs as they have and have fans tweeting but what we’ve got, what’s unique is the live tweeters and the bonus content.

With Rose you had something up on the official BBC site with Russell’s prequel to it (Doctor Who and the Time War).

That came about because I’d seen that Russell was aware of The Day of the Doctor tweetalong and had been interacting with Steven on Instagram. I’d exchanged a few messages with Russell on that day and I just threw out that idea: “let’s see how it goes tonight with Steven but would you perhaps be up for doing one as well?” I thought, if we get him, that would be amazing or am I pushing my luck?

After The Day of the Doctor I’d got the impression that everyone had had a really great time and had really enjoyed it. So I messaged Russell again and I said, “I’m not pushing you or forcing you into anything but I just wanted you to know that it was a really positive thing, everybody seemed to enjoy it, including Steven. Would you be up for doing one for Rose?”

He replied, “Well it would be rude not to”, so I said, “Would you be up for doing some additional content or whatever?” and immediately all these ideas were going everywhere. He said, “I’ve got this prequel to Rose that we could release – you can have it if you can find a platform for it.” Obviously it was prose and that was great but we had a bit of a dilemma. How do we release the content? At that moment, the content was just being released on Twitter. We hadn’t got a Lockdown YouTube channel, I had no website that I could really host it on… so we had the content but it was a little bit of a dilemma.

Then literally the same day Chris Chibnall contacted Russell and said, “Obviously we’re in lockdown now, the world has gone nuts, Doctor Who needs to be doing something here – have you got anything?” And it was just the perfect solution to where to put that content.

So that went up on the BBC site and then Russell wrote a brand new epilogue to Rose. I wondered if we could bring it to life somehow so it wasn’t just prose and that’s when I thought we could get someone to read it. I thought of Jacob Dudman immediately – he seemed like the perfect fit for it. The video came together and then we uploaded it online.

I was very proud of it. But I was immediately already starting to think about “Beyond this, what else? Who else? How long is it going to have to run?”

There’s been some negative comments from people about the decision to stick to 21st century Doctor Who. How do you deal with that?

I would like to think I’m quite social media savvy and I’ve always been really careful with what I post online, always. But I must admit I think I was a little naive to begin with.

In my mind I was thinking, “I’m just doing a nice thing”. I’m putting in a lot of work. I’m not paid for any of this at all and I don’t want to be. I’m just trying to do a good thing. I was really surprised that anyone would try and find something negative in it given the situation we’re in.

Emily meet fandom, fandom meet Emily…

(laughs) I know! I was naive about it and that’s a stupid thing to admit because I do understand Doctor Who fandom. But I think I was really just starting to hope that…

You’ve been exposed to sides of it that you would not necessarily have had to before.

Yes, I know this side of fandom exists but I’ve never been directly in contact with it because I’ve kept my distance – but also it being directed at you as a personal attack is hard. I know it happens to people who make the show and I have a real issue with that.

If you don’t like Doctor Who or a version of Doctor Who, it’s absolutely fine you have that opinion, but that gives you no right to personally attack anyone that’s making it, because, funnily enough, they are not sitting in Roath Lock or wherever thinking, “Oh I wonder how we can make the Doctor Who that you hate.”

I’ve thought about this a lot recently and I think what it boils down to is: what every fan has in common is, they have a desire to see Doctor Who do well and succeed. But, for every fan, that might look slightly different; what one fan thinks is ruined, for another fan is an improvement. At the end of the day, people get cross if they think Doctor Who isn’t doing well because ultimately they do love it and they do want it to do well – and that just comes out in really strange angry ways.

Going back to your point about how do I deal with negativity? To begin with, I was quite shocked and surprised by it and I didn’t really know how to respond. So I did get some advice from someone who’s also experienced the more negative side of social media. I messaged and said, “I’m finding this really hard because I don’t know how to respond. Do I politely put them right and respond to them? Do I just ignore it? Do I block them?”

They said, “The best thing to do is just ignore it, because if you respond you’re fuelling a fire. If you block them then they feel like they’ve won. The best thing is just to ignore it because they want a fight, most of the time.”

I took that advice on board. I did respond with a couple of tweets – I thought, I am going to say a couple of things to put the record straight then leave it. When someone is saying something about you that isn’t true though, that’s really hard.

That fake Radio Times article was where a lot of people really thought it had gone over the top.

Yes, and as a person with a journalistic background I know that if you’re attributing quotes to someone and mocking something up, that is very wrong. And it looked so realistic that I had to put the record straight, which I did, and then it was just a case of leave it. The person in question apologised. They got in touch with me and said, “Sorry, I’ve taken this too far.” I respected that an awful lot because it’s really hard to say sorry and I wanted to acknowledge that to everyone else that had been angry on my behalf. I wanted to say, “Look, this person has said sorry now, I’ve forgiven them. I think that’s an important thing in this, I believe we all deserve forgiveness” and then just left it at that. That was kind of a positive ending to that story I suppose.

So yes, the negativity does get to you, especially when you’re thinking, “I’m just trying to do a good thing here. I’m really not trying to upset you!”

I think I’m learning to grow a thicker skin with it, if I ever have to put up with more of this stuff in the future. I think you just get better at handling it, but I’m very much of the point of view that I’m never going to be nasty with anyone, even if anyone is nasty to me. I think people’s anger directed at someone else pretty much always comes from a place of hurt themselves, or brokenness and they’re clearly not OK if they’re attacking someone unfairly. Attacking is never good. If they’ve got a justified reason for their challenge then fair enough, raise it kindly. But if they’re doing it completely unjustly then they are the one with the problem. And they need support and kindness if that’s the case. Hate never overcomes hate. It may sound mushy and corny but genuinely only love can overcome hate so I’m just going to keep being kind to people even if they’re not kind to me.

In terms of what we’ve got coming up, what’s the next one?

The next one is The Girl in the Fireplace; just before we came on here, I put the tweet out that Steven has written a new little very short scene featuring Sophia Myles. It’s called Pompadour and we’re working on that at the moment. I’m very excited – I’m excited for all of them but I spoke with Sophia on the phone yesterday and we’re very excited about what’s being created, what’s in the works at the moment. It’s quite a complicated one visually to pull together but it is beautiful.

And it’s a distraction from lockdown. That’s what a lot of people have been saying to me about these tweetalongs, not just the people joining in but the people involved in making different things. The number of people that have contacted me and said, “I am a composer” or “I’m a this or I’m a that and if you need anything to contribute towards what you’re making I’m available.”

Technically you’re increasing what you’re doing with them all the time. Are we going to get a fully animated one before the end?

There’s nothing directly in the pipeline but it’s always on my mind. I’ve constantly got different ideas and different ways that we can bring things to life and create videos. But in terms of animation, the idea has to come first. It’s not a case of, “Oh we could do something that looks like this or something that looks like that.” It has to be, “OK, what is the idea? What is the fiction? And then how can we bring that to life?” And it may be that animation does work for something or it may be something else.

Without giving any hint as to what they are, how many have you got in the pipeline?

I’m usually working on about 5 at once. It’s a lot of work, it really is. And I know that so many people seem to be aware of this and are sending really lovely messages saying thank you for what you’re doing and keep going.

After the first few – especially the one for Vincent and the Doctor where we had Bill Nighy, Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill, Richard Curtis – I got so many requests. “Can you do this one with this person and this person?” And I was thinking, “Perhaps I made it look like it’s easy to just round up all of these people but oh my gosh, your request is going to be really hard to fulfil.” The #SubwaveNetwork was another biggie [for The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End] with lots of people. But it takes hours and hours and hours to pull that together.

So I’m looking ahead and working at various different stages of trying to work out who are going to be the live tweeters? What other content can we do?

You’re basically producing a season of television.

Well, I’ve got nothing to compare it to, but I guess it’s possible a little like that, in its own way. I know a fair bit about how Doctor Who is made, from just my understanding of it not from my own experience. I’ve had lovely encouraging messages from various members of the production team making comments similar to yours I’m getting some very fast experience here.

You’re getting an experience you’ll never get anywhere else

It’s completely unique. I know Doctor Who is helping me get through lockdown, on a personal level, and I know that it is for other people. It’s a show that helps people at all sorts of difficult times in their life; it’s something that we love dearly and I genuinely could not imagine my life without it.

At the same time I think it’s really important to remember that it is a TV show and it can be a bubble that you get trapped in. With the Doctor Who fan bubble and any intense community that people are a part of, as we are as Doctor Who fans, it’s so easy to just stay there and get trapped and to forget there is life beyond Doctor Who as well.

Hersey! Heresy! Burn her at the stake!

(laughs) I’m not saying that with any disrespect to the show at all but I find that is something that helps me to enjoy it more almost, to have my life outside of Doctor Who and not let it be all-consuming. I think if it is all-consuming, that’s when as a fan you become fanatic.

Or very jaded.

Exactly. It’s fine to get invested but when it gets to the point of you’re starting to comment on something – such as the casting of the new Doctor, or the direction of the show, or an element of the show – and you’re saying “it’s harmful for you to do this” and “it’s wrong of you to do this” or whatever it may be, at that point you have to think: “It’s just a TV show.” It’s not a life or death situation. Other things in life are. There are some real horrors in this world.

For example, approximately 25,000 people die a day as a result of world hunger. Far too many people live in extreme poverty. When you see some of that poverty (as I have myself when I went to Kolkata to work in schools for street children), that is a horror, that is an injustice… not what’s happening in an episode of Doctor Who that you don’t like. I think it’s really important to keep this perspective.

 

Updated: The Doctor Who Lockdown tweetalongs continue with The Fires of Pompeii on Sunday May 17 at 1900 BST. #VolcanoDay

The tweetalongs are supporting the COVID-19 Film and TV Emergency Relief Fund set up by the BFI and The Film and TV Charity. To contribute, click here