Doctor Who's showrunner reflects on the journey so far as we inch ever nearer to the broadcast of Season 2.

It’s quiet.

The studios are quiet. Old metal beams tick and creak. A distant door slams as someone passes through. Outside, an engine. Then gone.

The Studios of the Bad Wolf in Old Cardiff Town sit and wait. They are calm, they are patient. They were once a factory that made TVs, so it’s always felt like the right home for this show. You might’ve seen on behind-the-scenes footage - though perhaps even the widest of wide shots doesn’t make it clear - the studios are so large, they have a road running between them. Indoors. An actual indoor road, two lanes, lorries trundling to and fro under a metal roof. True fact: the magnificent BBC/HBO show Industry is made here, and yet I’ve never even seen their studio. I’ve got mates in the cast and never bumped into them. I don’t know where they are. The show is just vaguely, ‘over there’. That’s how big this is!

And now, the Whoniverse sits in darkness. There’s a vast War Between set, our biggest yet, the heart of the show, once home to 200 extras, standing just over there, proud of itself, waiting to be revealed on screen. For me, that space to the right will always be the Robo-chamber, where Belinda Chandra faces astonishing revelations. Over there, the mysterious Palace from the finale. There, once the Time Hotel foyer, then transformed into a wartime hospital in the North Zone. And over there, oh, a unique and terrifying shop from this year’s Episode 5. Dismantled, but never gone. The space marked forever by the horrors that lurk there.

It’s been quite a run! Hurtling through what’s called The First Order - that’s not a Star Wars reference, though I love its grandiosity, it simply means the first order of three Specials, two seasons of Doctor Who and a five-episode spin-off, 26 episodes in total. Shooting them felt like forever; it felt like 10 seconds.

And now, the TARDIS sits in shadow. Like a secret. The studio will flare into life, briefly, I hope, in February for a few days - I’m writing this in early January so plans aren’t confirmed yet, but we’ll probably shoot material for publicity, and those thousand Electronic Press Kits you have to do. And maybe trailers. I wonder! I remember those specially-shot trailers we’d do in the old days. The Ninth Doctor saying “D’you want to come with me?” Donna Noble in the firelight. The Tenth Doctor and Martha split-screening with each other. The Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond lying on the grass in glorious cinematic 3D. Whatever happened to those things?! I liked them, maybe it’s time to do that again. But we’ll see, it’s too soon to say!

So in truth, the silence, the pause, the dust… it’s a trick of the light! The real work has simply moved, on a massive scale, to London and Ireland and beyond, transferring to screens blazing with light and pixels. Production has now moved out of the physical space, into the digital. So many people working so hard, blistering away on pictures and sound. Mind you, I’ve sat in Doctor Who FX meetings for 20 years now, and I still have no idea what the FX people are talking about. They say, “This hasn’t been QC’d but we’ll take off the lut and invert the magpie filters till we retrofold the binary lumps and shimmy the overloops into the hopmeister field.” Yeah. “That looks pretty,” I say.

But there’s a proper excitement building amongst the team as the season approaches. That shot you saw in the Christmas trailer, the last shot of all, the Doctor flying or falling or tumbling…? That’s just one shot in the middle of the most astonishing sequence. The cartoon man you saw? His voice is an old friend of the show, guess who?! And I’ve just heard the final six minutes of music for this year’s Episode 5, and I’ve played it over and over again, maybe six, seven, eight times. I love it so much. Murray Gold has written the most epic symphony and I can’t wait for you to hear it. The show in 2025 is going to be bigger and madder and darker, taking wilder swings than ever.

And while the episodes grow and gather and coalesce… The studios creak. Dust in the air. An old coffee cup on its side where a Titan will soon stand on your TV.

Plans sit waiting.

The suspense is actually Doctor Who being alive in 2025. And the important thing is…

…here comes Season 2! A whole new season! With monsters and friends and old faces and legacy and lore and myth and pantheons and beasts and quarries and spaceships and cameos and robots and rebels and shocks and songs and lasers and Mrs Flood. I am confident. Doctor Who is forever, and the future is bright!