More excerpts from RTD’s memoir revealed:
“It’s such a shame we never got to make Series Three, though. Three scripts were fully written for it, and it breaks my heart they won’t be seen.”
“We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything.”
“And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia – look it up, it’ll make you shiver!”
“There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester. That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who’s lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks.”
“I was talking to a lot of other writers as well, and I wanted to bring Juno Dawson back for another story after her amazing Eurovision episode.”
“I was also talking to the writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman about bringing Jonathan Groff back as Rogue, which would have been glorious. That sequel was forever getting postponed. It didn’t appear in Series Two, but I would have tried for it in Series Three. We were talking about Rogue in an eighties story, maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre.”
“So we had a lot of fabulous ideas, some fully fleshed out, with a Dalek four-part epic to end the series. We were ready to go.”
We’ll get there eventually in the retrospectives, but yeah, I think “Sleep No More” is fine. Not a home run, but fine.
He’s a real bulllshitter, and seems too diplomatic to tell a gritty tell-all. But these excerpts seem true to be, even if they’re incomplete.
I do have questions about whether these writers were paid for their “fully written” scripts - I assume they must have been, which is odd.