Steven Moffat on Douglas Is Cancelled: 'Suddenly, careless talk was costing careers'

I didn’t tell anyone about it; I refused even to tell my wife what I was up to all day. I just typed away and felt a calm, glowing confidence that I would deliver my theatre piece and stadiums would fill. How the crowd roared in the quiet of my office.

That’s not exactly how it worked out. I sent the play off to various theatres and sat back, wondering if it was too much to expect a bidding war.

Oh, the silence that fell. Most of the theatres didn’t even reply, and those that did said, "No." Or, "Ew." Oh, what a cold wind was blowing now that the TARDIS had faded from my life. I’d been dumped back in reality, and the world outside 221B Baker Street was just sort of shrugging at me. It was a lesson in humility: specifically, that I needed to acquire some.

Back then, it wasn’t called Douglas Is Cancelled. We didn’t even use "cancel" that way. It was for taxis and planes and Amazon deliveries, not human beings. Also, back in 2018, the #MeToo movement was just kicking off, dumbfounding the world. Well, dumbfounding roughly half the world and causing the other half to say, "Yes, we’ve been trying to bring this up, actually."

Not being selfish in any way, but this made aspects of my play, well, relevant. Relevant to the point of being, well, opportunistic. I don’t like being opportunistic. I’m not even sure about being relevant.

So, into the bottom drawer went my play. That’s fine, that happens. I write on impulse, and sometimes – actually, most of the time – nothing happens. Down in that bottom drawer are two half-hour TV comedies that I really like (I’m glad someone does), two half-finished plays, a half-finished screenplay and three chapters of a novel.

They were all the Best Ideas Ever once, and here was another Best Idea joining them – sliding into the mortuary drawer like a murder victim in a crime drama. Clang, onwards.

And then something happened. Well, two women happened. Two of the best. Fortunately for me, the first one was my wife. Sue liked it. Sue liked my play. Yeah, you’re thinking, "Big deal, your wife."

But here’s the thing: Sue doesn’t always like what I write, by any means, and Sue is Sue Vertue. TV producer legend, with a CV (Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, Gimme Gimme Gimme, Sherlock) that could shrivel any presumptuous husband. But, yes, she liked it. Kept mentioning it.

Once, she pointed to a line and said, "How did you know to write that bit?"

"Well, I’m a writer," I pointed out, hoping it wouldn’t come as a shock. "Yes, but that bit’s good."

As the years passed, she kept bringing up the play. And there was reason to, because… well, it wasn’t getting any less relevant, however I felt about that. Suddenly, cancellation was everywhere. People were capsizing their public lives with a single utterance. Careless talk was costing careers. Twitter was a minefield, and the unwary were going up like fireworks all around us.

And just to bring it right back to what I’d written all that time ago, TV presenters (just like Douglas in my story) were regularly destroying themselves by being basically human. "It’s the right time for that show," Sue would keep saying. And yeah, maybe the mortuary drawer was rattling…

The second woman was a movie star, which would turn out to be quite helpful in the long run. I’d known Karen Gillan for years, of course – ever since our glory days on Doctor Who, when she was the flame-haired Amy Pond, putting the fear of Scotland into the monsters of time and space.

She’d flown away to Hollywood since then, where she’d increased the average leg length by an appreciable amount. But Karen isn’t one to forget her old friends, and now and then she’d return to the homeland, usually on the back of some movie launch, summon her old Doctor Who gang, and sweep us off to a show or a restaurant or a movie premiere.

Once she asked me what I was up to, and I told her about my play and all the empty stadiums. "I’d love to read it," she said, which is the kind of thing people say to writers to shut them up. So I emailed it to her and, to my astonishment, she actually did read it (who does that?). And she loved it. "That needs to get made," she said.

The thing about Karen, when she says things like that, they kind of happen. Once she was a little girl in Inverness who thought she should be on TV and a moment later was starring in Doctor Who. Then she thought she should be a movie star and boom, she was. (She ruthlessly exploited her film star looks by shaving her head and painting herself blue – you can take the girl out of Scotland…)

In recent memory, she has blended a whisky, developed an app and shown her appreciation of comedian Nick Kocher by suddenly marrying him.

I went with her to a Fringe show in Edinburgh involving clowns. She collared one of the clowns afterwards and demanded to be taught clowning because she didn’t "know about that yet". I expect she is a clown now. Next time you go to the circus, look closer at the clowns – one of them only looks like they’re on stilts.

So, one day, I was sitting on the set of something or other, and it occurred to me that I had a script loved by an actress who was an actual movie star and by an eminent TV producer who I’d already gone to the trouble of sleeping with – so why didn’t I do the one thing I knew how to? Why didn’t I just write it as a TV show?

And since I’m writing this in Radio Times, I don’t suppose it will surprise anyone to know, that’s exactly what I did…

Douglas Is Cancelled will air on ITV1 and ITVX on Thursday 27th June 2024.

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