I have to say that the fact of Spare Parts and Real both being around at the same time is total coincidence, that wasn’t how it was originally planned at all. I remember talking to James Goss one day and suddenly going, "Oh my god you want this to go out in August and Spare Parts goes out in July and oh they’re going to clash!" and then we thought, "No actually they’re going to complement each other because [Spare Parts] is one end of the spectrum of Cybermen, pre-Tenth Planet, and Real Time, in my mind, is as far in the future as the Cybermen can go."

So that was nice. There wasn’t a conflict, they complemented each other.

Why did we go for Cybermen? Because originally we thought we’d go for Daleks, then we thought that was a bit too obvious. And I like Cybermen. [Doing something with] Cybermen involves using actors to play [them], they move around a bit more. I mean I love Daleks, obviously I adore Daleks, but from a Big Finish point of view, after what we did with Dalek Empire, [Nicholas] Briggs’ four-part mini-series, and what we’ve done with the Doctor Who’s, I thought ‘What else could we do that would be special? Probably not a lot at this stage’

Whereas with Cybermen I wanted to get in various things. I can’t take the credit for the female Cyberman. The character of Savage was originally a man and it was James Goss who said ‘Couldn’t it just be a woman?’ and I thought ‘Yeah, never been done, there’s never been a female Cyberman, Cyberwoman, Cyberperson before.’ So that was a bit of a kick.

I wanted to do that, I wanted to do the whole playing around with time and the various twists at the end. At the time we’re recording this interview, episode one has gone out and people are picking up on things and going "Well this didn’t make any sense" and "Why was this done?" and I’m sitting there thinking "By the time you get to episode six you’ll go, ‘oh, that’s what that was about.’" At least, I hope that’s what happens. If that doesn’t happen then I should be shot, but that was the plan.

I wanted to do a story that really interwove within itself. You’ve got a time travel story and messing around with the web of time and you’ve got a time portal, and the Cyberleader at one end and you’ve got the Doctor and Evelyn and everyone else here, and something going on in the middle. I wanted to do a story where I could really twist everything together, so for the first two or three episodes you’re getting a bit of this and a bit of that and you begin to think, "What’s that got to do with anything else?" and gradually things will come together.

It was an experiment on my part to see if I could write that sort of story and work within the restraint of ten minute episodes. Obviously I failed on the ten minute episodes as episode one was seventeen minutes long, but that’s just one of those bizarre things that you work your damnedest to make sure it’s ten minutes and it isn’t.

I sit down now and wonder how that stretched to seventeen minutes. It was timed at ten minutes, it equates to ten minutes in all the other plays we’ve done, and it’s actually seventeen minutes. But then, you get seven minutes free, so that’s the way it goes.