Russell T Davies looks forward to new episodes of Doctor Who and pauses for a moment's reflection...

Five months to go! And the Doctor Who factory is steaming, rattling, thundering ahead, vworp vworp!

We’re at peak output, right now. All five blocks in production, with eight regular episodes plus four Specials in varying states of readiness. Not one of them completed yet! Special One, The Star Beast, is almost finished - music done, tick, grade done, tick, FX done, tick - but we haven’t finished the title sequence yet.

While at the other end of production, Episode Eight, which contains the words ‘kingdom’, ‘gold’ and ‘Tigella’, hasn’t had a single second shot yet. And there isn’t time to pause, as we leap on to the 2025 season. Right now, four scripts are being written simultaneously, including this one, right here in front of me, which you won’t see until the year after next. It contains the words ‘garden’, ‘firmament’ and ‘diploma’.

And yet. There’s time to pause. Like that bit on a rollercoaster where you pause, gently, at the top, before plunging back down screaming in abject terror. So this is a little moment to stop, to look round, to admire the view (my God, Episode Three is so good!) and even to look back for a moment, and reflect…

March 2023 passed me by, in a blizzard of work. But I know that lots of people mark the anniversary on 26 March, the date Rose was first shown on TV in 2005, when Doctor Who came crashing back into our lives. There are many happy memories of that day.

But one particular message reached me. And I think it’s lovely.

A disclaimer first: I don’t read DMs. My only form of social media is Instagram; I’ve got a Twitter account somewhere, which was set up for the Doctor Who Tweetalongs in the lockdown, but I can’t even remember how to access it any more. So Instagram it is, and I don’t like to make the page private cos I like the hurly-burly out there (though time, and transmission, will see how long that lasts). But DMs are impossible, in my job. So many of them! I open the requests from strangers once in a while, but only when my eyebrows are bothering me, because the white-hot ferocity of the DMs scorches them right off! Roar goes the furnace! Scream goes me! Slam goes the door! And I seal them off for another year. I get a quick glimpse of messages saying “Bring back Nyssa!” Usually accompanied by that curious aphorism, “Doctor Who is all about change”, which is a funny thing to say about a 60-year-old show, but there you go, slam! Closed! No more!

So I know that a lot of nice messages go unread. And I’m sorry about that, but hey, if I started to read them, you’d only get ten minutes of Doctor Who a year. However, a mate of mine bounced across a message he’d been sent, because he thought I’d love to read it. It was from a viewer, who said this on 26 March, and has given permission for it to be reproduced here.

“I love Rose, but I really love that burping bin. And tiny me thought that burping bin was the best thing in the world. When I was at primary school, I was a lonely child. I didn’t have any friends - it sounds like an exaggeration, but I never had any friends at all.

“We had this Friendship Bench at school, where you would sit, basically, to encourage people to make friends with you. Which might sound like more of a Humiliation Bench, but my mum encouraged me to sit on the bench because she worried about me. So I sat on it for weeks alone.

“Then the Monday after Rose, I sat on it and a kid came over and started talking to me. And I remember it so vividly, that almost in sync we asked each other if we’d seen that programme with the burping bin on Saturday night. And we both laughed so much about it.

“I have a lot to thank Doctor Who for, but specifically I wanted to thank it for that silly burping bin and, in a funny way, my first friend.”

Blimey.

Good old Doctor Who.

Oh, right, pause over, here comes the rollercoaster, plunging back down, waaah, oh dear God, it’s a flume, splash, argh, come on! Five months to go!