First up, in the latest, and still current, issue of DWM I have two articles. One is a
feature about the last ten years of Doctor
Who, with interviews and timelines and so forth. And the other is a Fact
of Fiction about the story Rose, broadcast almost exactly ten years ago (it
was exactly ten years ago a few weeks ago).
This was particularly fun for several reasons. One, firstly,
most importantly, it’s a great story that I love, and that I think has a lot of
interesting things to be written about it. Secondly, for the piece I emailed
Russell T Davies a few questions and got some amusing, insightful and
revelatory answers, which is great because it makes me look good for asking
them. And thirdly, because I’d managed to track down the numerous drafts of the
script, I would be in a position to reveal new
facts, rather than simply rearranging well-known facts into a more
convenient order (which I would never do, that is specifically what I am trying
to avoid, but occasionally a well-known fact has to be included out of
completeness).
The challenge is, of course, to find out stuff that Andrew
Pixley hasn’t already found out. With this particular era of Doctor Who that’s easier than with older
or more recent eras, because it’s an era which hasn’t had the comprehensive
archive coverage of the old stuff or the very recent stuff, where Andrew has been
free to divulge the contents of early drafts and shooting scripts.
(The other super-challenge is to find out things where
Andrew Pixley has got it wrong. These are rare but wonderful facts, like
discovering a copy of Marco Polo in a
haystack. Usually, if I’m doing very, very well, I’ll find one of these per Fact of Fiction. Like, with Rose, in a DWM article he mentioned an actor playing Mickey’s headless
duplicate in the back-alley location, when it turns out that the script was
specifically re-written so that the headless duplicate wouldn’t be needed in
that location. Tiny things!)
So that’s why I’ve ploughed the beginnings of a furrow doing
Fact of Fictions for the new series
stuff; so far I’ve done Rose, Dalek, The
Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Love & Monsters, The Shakespeare Code,
Voyage of the Damned, The Next Doctor and A Christmas Carol. I hope to do more; I think there are
interesting stories to be told about the writing of Aliens of London/World War III, Father’s Day, New Earth, School
Reunion, The Girl in the Fireplace, Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, The
Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, Blink, The Unicorn and the Wasp... the
list is long and ever-growing.
The other great thing about doing Fact of Fictions for stories I like - I’m not sure I could do one
for a story I didn’t rate, though it would be an interesting exercise – is that
it’s a chance to deconstruct the structure, to figuratively look under the
bonnet and see how it was put together (bad choice of metaphor, it’s the engine
under the bonnet, not the chassis). I don’t know about other writers but for me
analysing other people’s scripts, working out why they made the choices they did,
working out the purpose of each scene, each line, is a huge part of the craft
of writing. It’s a bit like literary criticism, except a) it’s not about the
art, it’s about the craft and b) there is a point to it. Even with Shakespeare,
for me it’s more interesting to analyse the dramatic structure than the imagery.
Let me see the nuts and bolts!
And while it’s a trap to assume that every choice was
deliberate – storytelling is a matter of instinct half the time, you don’t cut
to another scene because a Robert McKee graph tells you to, you cut to it
because that’s the next bit of the story, the bit you were telling has finished
and there’s something more interesting going on over there with those other
people. I’m not talking about post hoc textual
analysis, what matters is the writing process – and given the opportunity to
follow a script through its drafts, you can follow the process. Why stuff was
cut, why stuff was added, why it was changed.
Rose is a great
example of that. Next time you watch it, or read the script, just think about
what each scene is doing, why it is there. Russell T Davies is – both
consciously and instinctively – doing so many things at once. Establishing the
characters, making you care about them, establishing the tone, the sense of
humour; establishing the universe and its rules; and introducing every element
of Doctor Who’s format clearly, accessibly, simply and
unfussily, with each element arising
naturally out of the developing narrative. It’s both incredibly clever –
for the parts that are the result of conscious thought – and the work of someone
who is incredibly talented – for the parts that are instinctive.
Usually, going through drafts, you find all the bad ideas
which writers have discarded along the way, which is always entertaining, and
very, very reassuring to discover that other people have bad ideas too. With
Russell, though, although there is a process of refinement, of simplification,
he doesn’t really have bad ideas. The first draft of Rose is pretty much the same as the final script, except it’s
longer and has more ambitious action. But what’s interesting is the way it’s
rewritten; to shift the emphasis, to make each scene do the work it has to do
better.
For example, when the first edit of the episode came in
short, Russell had to ‘pad’ the episode out by a few minutes, which he did by
adding a couple of scenes with the Doctor and Rose walking through the Powell
Estate (as well as rewriting the scene at the end of their walk so that it
would follow on from the new stuff – meaning it would need to be shot again).
Now, in a sense all of the added material is padding, it isn’t really telling
you anything new or advancing the plot – but Russell is taking the opportunity
to add some scenes in order to improve the story. He adds Rose questioning the
Doctor’s lack of surname; he clarifies the not-immediately-clear plot point that the arm
fixed on Rose because it was tracking the Doctor down; he adds the element that
the Doctor’s fighting a war on his own. Maybe you wouldn’t miss these scenes if
they weren’t there, but I think it’s interesting to see how Russell used them
to address problems that must’ve popped out when watching that first edit – as well
as showing us more of the Doctor and Rose’s chemistry.
Anyway, I’ve wittered on long enough. For the full story,
read The Fact of Fiction on Rose in the current issue of DWM, available from all good newsagents.
