Doctor Who Redacted has arrived on BBC Sounds (see our review of episode 1 here). It’s a very different take on the Doctor Who universe, as its lead writer, Juno Dawson, and director/producer Ella Watts explained to Paul Simpson.

 

Having heard episode 1, I’m intrigued to see where you take it.

Juno: I hope it’s good.

It works.

Juno: Oh excellent, there you go.

There’s an awful lot to throw in so I was not expecting pure polished drama from start to finish because those opening episodes have a lot to do in very little time.

Where did the idea come from?

Juno: Ella came to me with the notion of a podcast in 2019. Obviously I’ve written for Big Finish so I was very familiar with the notion of audio drama but I wasn’t as familiar with the idea that you could do audio drama in the medium of a podcast, although of course it makes perfect sense. Remember this was three years ago to be fair! I think I’d only just started my own podcast at this point and I was intrigued.

Because I’d written The Good Doctor novel, I knew obviously when you’re writing Doctor Who, it’s not your property, it’s not really your idea, so I was like, ‘Do I want to go back to the Doctor Who world?’ But then the first time I met Ella we did just start thinking about who these characters were going to be…

It is truly a spin off. If you listen to the first episode, [you’ll realise] this is a podcast about Cleo Proctor and her friends. It’s not Doctor Who as we know Doctor Who. I was just really taken with the idea of spending time with these three characters who are so peripheral to the Doctor and yet the Doctor has had a huge impact on their lives.

I was always a Doctor Who viewer who followed the companion rather than the Doctor. The companion was always the way in for me so this felt, obviously without using three past companions, it was a way of seeing the impact the Doctor has on humanity –redacting the Doctor from that, it’s about seeing what the Doctor leaves behind. That was really interesting to me, and by the end of the first meeting there was this idea for this plot device [which appropriately is redacted for spoilers!]

Ella: This whole podcast wouldn’t exist without Juno. From my perspective, from the internal BBC side of things, they wanted a Doctor Who companion podcast but at the time there were some restrictions on what we could do. I suggested doing an audio drama instead to get around that. My original very low key pitch was ‘What if it was Buzzfeed Unsolved, but Doctor Who’ and going in the direction of Love & Monsters and being a bit silly and being a bit funny with it.

But then Juno created these characters and this story and this heart, and we talked a lot about how often in science fiction and fantasy, people can fall into the pithole of creating fantastical metaphors for privilege. So: “this character is secretly an alien prince”, “this character secretly is a genius”, “this character secretly has access to a supercomputer”. We were saying how that can be really alienating for people who don’t feel like every door opens to you automatically, and for people who don’t feel like ‘Actually my life is really special and easy and wherever I go people treat me like a special person.’

Juno, in your interview on Newsbeat, you talked about being a kid watching Doctor Who and wanting the Doctor to come in and wanting that solace, and I had the same thing. As a queer kid, as a neurodiverse kid who didn’t really get along that well at school, I would watch Doctor Who and [I loved] this idea of someone who would just like me as I was, even if that was a [person who was a] little bit awkward and out of place. I wanted Juno to write a series that was about that and people like that who never felt like stuff was easy, who never felt they fit in perfectly but who were still valuable and loveable and charming and interesting and worth telling stories about.

Juno just created so much from there. I love these characters.

Juno: Thank you.

Ella: In fact, during recording there was actually a scene towards the end where I did cry, which was very embarrassing for me but glad to see it in the script – which is about these themes of having someone out there who cares about you no matter what.

Juno: The other thing about taking on Doctor Who is, it has a really really active fan base. The more I get involved in the world of media, I’ve learned to keep my opinions to myself and that’s about any TV show now. But I know what it’s like to love something so much and you have an opinion on it. Who among us doesn’t have an opinion? That’s something to be mindful of when you’re making creative choices within the world of Doctor Who. Not everybody’s going to like it and they’re going to tell you about it and so that is something you have to think about.

But do you? If you listen to the very very loud fan base they’re only a tiny proportion. One in ten thousand of the millions who watched Flux said something about it.

Ella: I have an opinion on this, from being a producer, director and I guess from the more administrative side of the production and overseeing it, but also as a person who has in their life written more than 200,000 words of Doctor Who fanfiction.

I am a big Doctor Who fan. I wrote my first 150,000 word Doctor Who fanfiction when I was fifteen years old and I haven’t looked back. I love Doctor Who and I love being part of the fandom. I also love art and media and fan media. Someone defined fandom as art plus community: fandom is art in conversation with itself and with each other.

Fans who make fan art and fanfiction will incorporate each other’s tropes and motifs and things that they’ve done with the characters and that’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not always the same as making a drama or making a TV show, because at some point, and this is where my slightly dictatorial director brain comes in, you have to stop taking in new opinions.

Like you say, you can’t take in 6 million opinions on a piece of drama. At some point it has to be one person’s story, and as one person’s story – or a small group of people’s story – there are going to be massive strengths to that because it provides a unique perspective. Juno brought so much of her own feelings but also her knowledge of Charlie. Charlie brought so much of herself into our drama and that makes it so much more powerful because I don’t have the same level of experience as Charlie. I find her story fascinating and charming and funny and powerful but at the same time, it’s not my story, and I can see how among those 6 million fans there might be people who say, ‘Well, hang on a minute – that doesn’t really speak to my experience or my reality or my interpretation of reality.’

At the end of the day though, that’s fine because in my opinion, whether art is being made for drama for the BBC or whether it’s being made as fanfiction I think fundamentally we make art as a way to communicate with one another. To tell each other important things that we find difficult to say in any other way. So yes, the story will not fit everyone, and yes it will only be one perspective, and yes a lot of people might fundamentally disagree with how we’ve interpreted the characters or how we’ve chosen to address it, but it’s important to tell this story because it does represent some people’s perspective and that story deserves to be heard too.

Absolutely. My immediate reaction coming to the end of it was ‘All hell is going to let loose on Sunday night.’ And secondly, good. Russell T Davies – with his New Adventure, Damaged Goods, and with Rose and particularly in that first season – gave a perspective to Doctor Who that hadn’t been there in the classic era. What you’re doing is exactly what, to me, Russell did by having Clive in that first episode. If RTD was writing Rose now, Clive would have a podcast.

Juno: Of course he would, yes.

And I loved the little shout out to LINDA.

Ella: Yes! [gives a little cheer]

Juno: Of course LINDA gets a mention, of course.

But no Marc Warren…

Juno: No, we need to manage expectations. I wanted to acknowledge LINDA but that’s as far as it goes.

Ella: That reference was one I also fought for because obviously [the] Doctor Who [production team] knew what we were talking about but we’ve got [people from] BBC Sounds and Studios in here.

We’re really lucky in that the commissioner at BBC Sounds, Louise Kattenhorn, she’s a massive Doctor Who fan. So when she was going through it, it was great because she got all the references, but there are so many people involved in this project that there are some who are not as deep Doctor Who fans as us. We definitely got the note a couple of times: ‘What’s LINDA? I don’t know if people are going to get it’ And I was like, ‘You need to trust me, we’re going to keep this in, it’s important to me that we keep this in’.

I’m so pleased that we got it through and I’m so pleased that you noticed it because when I first met the Doctor Who social guys I was trying to explain the specific character of the drama that we’d made and I said, ‘You know Love & Monsters? Imagine if someone combined that with the first episode of New Who, that’s sort of where we are.’

I’d say that that actually is the best summary of the opening episode: Rose meets Love & Monsters. And as for the characters – it’s always interesting to learn about different people. If you’ve got any sense then you want to learn about other people.

Juno: And as well I think, you come for the Doctor and you come for the monsters, and there are aliens and there are scary robots and ghosts, but along the way, I think, you will learn something about Cleo’s life and her relationship with her mum. I think you’ll learn something about Abby and Shawna’s relationship.

I say this with a lot of the projects that I write: come for the monsters and stay for the character development. I think queerness is not a plot. I think that’s something that a lot of writers could do with making a note of. Queerness in and of itself is not the plot of this podcast: they just happen to be queer and that means that they arrive at episode 1 with a lot of baggage.

One of the inclusive elements is that transcripts of the episodes are being uploaded to the BBC website along with the episodes. Are they the script? Or are they a transcript? Because reading episode 0 felt far wider than simply the script.

Ella: As the person writing them, they are transcripts. When we’ve got a final approved draft of the episode I go through it, I’ve got the script up and what I try to do is put in cues for when music comes in, if any sound direction has changed, if there’s a notable thing about the performance that I think might not be clear from the script itself – say there’s a specific way we directed the actors to go or if they’ve ad libbed a bit around their dialogue. I try to amend that and as much as possible create an experience that is going to be artistically interesting for someone even if they’re not able to access the audio at all. I would love the BBC to do more transcripts.

I’ve tried to put a little bit of a sense of humour and character into the stage directions so that people reading it can enjoy it. I didn’t just want to describe the instruments in the music, I wanted to describe the emotion of the music that we’re trying to conjure. Does this feel mysterious or ominous or threatening or gentle or tender? Stuff like that so that people can, again, get as close to that experience as possible.

In the actual scripts, either the ones you wrote, Juno, or the ones you were overseeing, were you giving cues in terms of what you wanted from the music and the effects or is it one of those times where you thought, ‘I know what I’m doing with this, they know what they’re doing, trust them to do their job’?

Juno: It’s a little bit of both. My baptism of fire was on my first Torchwood where, I think it was James Goss, Scott Handcock and various others had to sit me down and say, ‘Babe, people can’t see this.’ And I was like ‘Oh yeah! I see what you mean.’

You’ve got to be really direct with the sound cues and you have to think, ‘I want them to be on a beach, how will we know it’s a beach?’ Well you’re going to hear a seagull and you’re going to hear the seashore and while yes, it’s highly likely that somebody at Big Finish or Ella would have clocked, ‘This is set on a beach, I know how to do it’ but at the same time much responsibility are you going to palm off basically? I was taught well at Big Finish.

It doesn’t hurt to set your scenes in locations where there are lot of sound cues, which is why you’ll notice there is an inordinate amount of public transport in this podcast – buses and trains – but then Cleo lives in London so of course she’s always on buses.

Ella: Juno was with us for pretty much the entire recording and it was wonderful to have her there for various reasons. With her scripts, the sound cues that she puts in are useful for me from a sound design and producing perspective but they’re also useful in directing the actors so that they have an idea of the environment they’re in.

That meant that with Juno there at recording, say of episode 2, there’s a creepy hotel so we can be like, ‘OK, you’re looking up at this creepy hotel,’ and we talk about all sorts of impossible things we’re seeing, and I look at Juno and say, ‘OK but what does this actually look like?’ so that we can tell them what they’re interacting with. We’d come up with sounds and stuff so that they could try and react to it. Obviously you’re directing actors to be louder or quieter depending on the environment they’re in but it’s really nice to give them an idea of that environment.

James McAvoy did an interview about The Sandman recently and because of Covid reasons he recorded separately to the cast, but it meant he came in and got to record his parts hearing the sound design all around him and all of the other actors. He said, ‘In audio, it’s like the equivalent of looking at a fully produced movie with all the special effects done, seeing everyone else there and going “Right, I’m going to do that”.’ I think that’s what can be nice about audio with a script like the ones Juno gave us, which have this very clear sound picture of the world that the characters are in so that they can then navigate through it.

The fact that Juno wrote the first Thirteenth Doctor book and was writing Torchwood adventures for Big Finish was one of the reasons that I asked her to do this because I really liked her Good Doctor novel.

What did you each find the biggest challenge of doing this?

Juno: For me it was, really, going back to my first answer which is the slightly tortured nature of coming onboard something as vast as Doctor Who where there’s a lot of stakeholders involved. From conception in 2019 there were lots of starts and stops, not least the pandemic right slap bang in the middle as well. We recorded the pilot in January 2020 and then we didn’t hear anything for the best part of 18 months and then all of a sudden it was full steam ahead.

There were a lot of practical considerations with Doctor Who Redacted but when it was, just the creative process, when we actually got into the recording studio with the cast, it was so worthwhile. I think the chemistry is so good.

There were times where I was like, ‘Oh my God, Doctor Who is such a minefield’ but actually I think what we’ve ended up with is something that’s a really worthwhile addition to the Doctor Who legacy.

Ella: Yes, similar feelings to be honest. I’m 28 years old, this is my first commission, it’s a ten part drama series for Doctor Who and it has taken two years to get here. So for me it’s a pretty large percentage of my life. It’s been a lot of negotiating with stakeholders on the Doctor Who side, making sure that it comes out at the right time and it works for the right people, and that it makes sense in the wider Doctor Who brand and story. Obviously that’s been a fight.

There are so many supportive people at Doctor Who of the queerness of the show but also, it’s taking a step big enough that some people were a little intimidated. So there’s been pushing – making sure that we hire as many trans people in our writers’ room as possible, even if that means that some of them are less experienced, or as many queer people as possible, or as many working class people as possible, and stretch that across the cast, all the creatives, our artists, our composer, our sound designer… I’ve had so many meetings!

Also as Juno said, when we actually got to record it, it was like all the blood, sweat and tears was worth it. Some of my favourite moments from recording were when Lois, Charlie and Holly were doing their Blue Box Files podcast and they would have so much fun.

I don’t know if this will ever be released but we did some bonus material where we got them to improvise episodes of The Blue Box Files – certainly we’re going to use pieces of it in one of the episodes – and they would just crack each other up. Juno and I would summarise an episode of Doctor Who for them and they would take that and talk about it as if it was a Blue Box Files episode. I said ‘I just need two minutes of this’ And they went for like fifteen minutes on the first one and did an entire episode to the point of improvising the ending of the episode and ‘Please email us with your thoughts.’ They got so into it.

Ken Cheng, one of the writers, came in one day (because his cameo is in one of the episodes) and I remember really distinctly having a cup of tea with him on a break and he was looking at Holly, Lois and Charlie chatting to each other. They’d bunched up and they were making each other laugh so loudly every two minutes and talking at a million miles an hour. Ken had written the scripts before he knew who we were casting and he just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, so they’re just literally the characters, OK cool. That’s good to know.’

I’m really really proud of it, especially what Holly, Lois and Charlie put into it.

Thanks to Emma Oldfield and Anna Mears for their help in arranging this interview and Connor Johnston for his Redacted artwork

Click here to listen to Doctor Who Redacted