Russell T Davies on how Doctor Who can get away with rewriting its own history
With 61 years of stories, the long-running sci-fi show has a habit of changing its history.
When a show has as much history, and features as many complicated timey-wimey shenanigans as Doctor Who, it's unsurprising that it can sometimes throw up events and new points of canon which seem to contradict its own past.
However, speaking at a recent BAFTA event called Russell T Davies: A Life in Pictures, Doctor Who's current showrunner Davies explained how the series gets away with this, and why he isn't fazed by any potential contradictions.
He said of the show: "It's destroyed Atlantis three times in its history and if someone came to me tomorrow with a great story about the destruction of Atlantis, I'd do it again.
"In the 1960s, with William Hartnell, they went to Troy and did the wooden horse... that so wouldn't stop me doing Troy and the wooden horse again now. I'd do it again now. That's not a spoiler – I'm not doing it! But you'd just put in one line, 'Oh, a glitch in time, we're here again!'"
Just last year, Davies's episode The Giggle featured a potential fix-all explanation for any canon discrepancies, with The Toymaker telling David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor that he had "made a jigsaw" out of his history.
Meanwhile, the sixth episode of this year's season 14, Rogue, appeared to canonise the Shalka Doctor, played by Richard E Grant in the animated web series Scream of the Shalka, who had previously been considered another take on the Ninth Doctor, and therefore not canon.
At the BAFTA event, Davies also spoke about that episode, and explained how the concept of a regency era romance was pitched by writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman.
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"They came in saying they wanted to do a romance for the Doctor," he explained. "I was looking at the series as a whole saying 'I need an episode that's fun' because it had got a bit dark and it's about to get dark, so I needed a fun one. That fits with romance... and then they said, 'We just want the episode to be one great big long party.'
"We spent ages – we looked at the 1940s and the 1920s... it could've been set in the court of King Henry VIII, having a ball, and then eventually someone, I can't remember who, said, 'Let's do Bridgerton and then we get to do the Doctor Who/Bridgerton episode'."
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Authors
James Hibbs is a Drama Writer for Radio Times, covering programmes across both streaming platforms and linear channels. He previously worked in PR, first for a B2B agency and subsequently for international TV production company Fremantle. He possesses a BA in English and Theatre Studies and an NCTJ Level 5 Diploma in Journalism.
