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Gary Russell - Real Time writer and director

Cyber Control
  What’s it like working for the BBC on a project, rather than having it all under your own control?

Not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I really did worry.

It’s just because I’ve been spoilt. I’ve had four years of doing Big Finish now, where the buck stops with me. I make the decisions about the scripts, I make the decisions about who’s writing, what they’re writing, whether I like it [and whether] I get them to change it. Then I worry about the director. I commission a director if I don’t do it myself, there’s all the casting, and I see it all through post production. Everything stops with me.

This is the first time I’ve had to go "Ooh, I’ve got to let go of this and let somebody else have a larger percentage of interest in it than I’ve got in it". So I worried, not that I thought that I was going to get interfered with by BBCi, but more that my ego, which is fairly large at the best of times, would have a severe problem allowing someone else to chip in, particularly on a story that I’d written.

I found it an absolute doddle as a result, it couldn’t have gone better. Working with James [Goss] and with Kim [Plowright] has been a joy and I look forward to doing it again. Hee hee, let’s do it again. It’s been an experiment but it’s one I think that’s paid off. I’m very pleased with it.

Cyber Planner
  Is now the time to restore the credibility of the Cybermen, with Real Time and Spare Parts?

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.

Charting Real Time
  Did you use flip charts and diagrams to figure out the structure of the story?

I didn’t do that. Martin Trickey and James at the BBC did that. I had lunch with them one day and Martin or James bought out this big sheet of paper, and it said ‘Cyberleader, planet Chronos’ and they had arrows going here and arrows going there. I was going, "Bloody hell, you’re taking this more seriously than I am!"

But actually that was quite useful. I took a photocopy of it when they weren’t looking and went, "Right, that’s what that’s all about, okay". It did help in some respects in that we were able to bash a few little plot holes out that way. There were a few other plot strands going on which as a result of [seeing] that flow chart the three of us thought "We should take that whole section out."

It was [about] a load of Cybermen in a space ship in the future trying to get to Chronos, a convoluted sort of oroborus worm thing of, "Well, that started because that started, but that started because that started... " We took that whole chunk of it out and that was just from looking at their little flow chart and thinking, "Yeah, there’s just too much there".

Dos and Don'ts
  What, if anything, did you learn from Death Comes to Time about writing for an online presentation rather than audio only?

I cannot answer that question because I have a policy with myself, as regards other Doctor Who spin-off audio products. I do not listen to them. Because, Doctor Who fandom being what it is, all you get is, "Bet you didn’t like Death Comes to Time, bet you thought Death Comes to Time is rubbish," or, "Wasn’t Death Comes to Time good, you’ve got to admit that was really good," and it’s much easier if I can just turn around and say "I didn’t listen to it".

I don’t like being drawn on comparisons so I haven’t listened to it. I’ve listened to the original pilot episode of Death Comes to Time but [as for] the rest of it - I know what happens in it obviously, but I haven’t listened to it.

What did I learn from it? All I can say is I saw a lot of the drawings that Lee [Sullivan] had done for Death Comes to Time and very early on when we were first talking about Real Time I was shown some of the animations that were being done for that pilot episode. Therefore when I was writing Real Time, I at least had in my head the way that it would be illustrated.

The thing I set out to do was to write an audio play for which the illustrations would be an embellishment. There isn’t anything that happens in Real Time that you shouldn’t be able to understand just from listening to the audio. I’ve had other people say to me there are events that happen in Death Comes to Time where if you didn’t have the visuals, you might not have got what was going on. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but the fact that people have said that made me work very hard to make sure that didn’t happen with Real Time.

Brilliant Baker
  Why do you think Colin Baker has suddenly become, according to the polls, the most popular audio Doctor? What have you done to the character to make him such a hit?

If I was to be entirely egotistical, I would say the thing that we have done that has made the Sixth Doctor popular is that, unlike on television, we’ve given him some good scripts. Beyond that there is nothing.

Colin is, I think, one of the finest actors around today. He was brilliant back then and he’s brilliant now. The difference is to do with the scripts and the attitude. Between now and 1986, I don’t think we’ve done anything different.

I think what has happened is, back in 1986, coming out of the Peter Davison era, there was a very conscious decision to make the Sixth Doctor a type of character. I think that went against the grain of what Colin wanted to do. It went against the grain in some respects of what the character of the Doctor is generally, so what we’ve done is strip away that ridiculous baggage.

All we’ve said to Colin is, "Do the Doctor as you’d like to have done him back in 1986." So without those artificial constraints he is allowed to be more Colin, he is allowed to be more Doctorish.

Nowhere in the world will you find a bigger fan of Doctor Who than Colin, a man who believes in the show, believes in the concepts, understands the scripts, has so much energy and so much enthusiasm for what he’s doing. You get him into that studio and there is a man who’s just vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom.

That’s not to say that you don’t get that with Peter, Sylvester and Paul, because you do, but with Colin there is just that determination not to do Doctor Who like it was done in 1986.

So I think that’s what we’ve done, we’ve allowed the Sixth Doctor to be the real Sixth Doctor with no baggage, and maybe that’s why he’s popular now. I think people are realising that, if anything was wrong with the TV series in ’86, it was that the costume and the stories and the baggage blotted out or covered up what a great Doctor Colin was. With that all stripped away we’re just getting pure raw Colin Baker and I think that’s what makes the Sixth Doctor now very popular.

Also, we’ve given him Evelyn and I think Colin and Maggie bounce off each other very well. They’re very happy working together. I mean, I know Colin loves working with Nicola and Bonnie as well, but there is a definite frisson between Colin and Maggie and that lifts everything.

New Companions
  In terms of popularity it’s your newer companions that are creating more of a buzz amongst the fans. Why is that?

I think it’s a bit of everything.

We’ve created Evelyn, we’ve created Charlie and we’ve created Erimem. And in the background we’ve done quite a lot with Bernice Summerfield as well. Why do people love them? I have to say there are some people that don’t.

With Maggie it’s obvious, we’ve gone against the grain. Rather than going for a young attractive [companion], that stereotype of a young, blond, busty Doctor Who companion in a bathing suit, we’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum. We’ve gone for someone whose brains matter more than the pin-up material of them. We’ve also gone for a fine actress, an intelligent actress and given her an intelligent character.

Again it was a part that was written for her. I’d worked with Maggie a couple of times before and thought "You’d make a great companion, let’s write a character for you," so definitely Maggie came before Evelyn and there’s a lot of Maggie or my perception of Maggie in Evelyn. In the case of Evelyn’s popularity, it’s the fact that she’s a great, terrific actress, terrific character and is different from anything that’s been done before.

India and Charlie work because India is just… well, no one else could play that part, no one else would throw themselves into that part [that way]. Unlike television Doctor Who, where the companion by necessity had to play second fiddle , it has allowed India to become a 3-D character - taking a leaf out of the books, but not going as extreme as the books go.

As writers listened to the first block of Paul McGann stories, they saw what India could bring to it, so for the second block they were going, "Right, India does this, India does that, India speaks in these idioms, you talk to India on a social basis, you know how she talks," so you can build that in. I don’t think that ever happened with TV companions because the writers never really got to know the actors.

There were certain rules they had to abide by. Well, we’ve thrown those rules out of the window so the writers are writing for the character and the actress through what we’ve already done and that helps no end.

Erimem made a very big impression in Eye of the Scorpion. She made a big impression on Jason and I. There was no intention when that script was written, or on the day it was recorded in the studio, that Erimem was going to continue as a companion.

Halfway through the first day I turned round to Jason and said "Caroline’s brilliant". I said to Ian [McLaughlin, the scriptwriter], "Rather than seeing Erimem dropped off somewhere else at the end, let’s just have her go off in the TARDIS because that would be a fun, different thing to do." So I said to Caroline at the time "Do you want to do this again?" and she was like "Yeah". I said to Ian, "Would you mind if we carried on using Erimem?" and he was flattered and over the moon.

So Erimem has stuck around. As yet we haven’t done a second Erimem story. We’re recording one quite soon which is the Church and the Crown, and then we’ve got Nekromanteia after that. We’ll see how her popularity goes, but she made a very big impression on the listeners for Eye of the Scorpion, so that was very encouraging.