Steven Moffat: I expected to oversee the decline of Doctor Who
The showrunner says he now expects Doctor Who to go on forever, but when he first took over he thought he would "preside over a gentle, respectable and decent decline"
Steven Moffat predicts that Doctor Who will go on forever – but admits that when he first took over from former showrunner Russell T Davies he thought the show's popularity would begin to wane.
"I'll be honest, I thought when I took it over, and it was more or less said to me – I took over about half-way through the ten years [of nuWho] – I thought I was there to preside over the gentle, respectable and decent decline, because that's what happens to shows that run for a long while.
"They don't plunge off a cliff," he told interviewer Jaci Stephen, "but they go gently down. Every big show gets slightly less big; that's a reality."
Five years later, after a very different story to the one he expected, Moffat's belief in the show has only increased.
"As an entity Doctor Who will go on forever," he said at a Bafta event in New York to celebrate ten years of the show. "I think it will go off from time to time but then it will just come back. If axeing it for 15 years [in 1989] didn't work I'm not sure what could kill it!"
