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Introduction - Interview
with Robert Shearman
Episode six of 91Èȱ¬ ONE's Doctor Who transmits on
Saturday 30 April.
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Beneath the Salt Plains of Utah,
billionaire collector Henry Van Statten holds the last relic of an alien
race.
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When the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper) investigate, they discover that the Doctor's
oldest and most deadly enemy is about to break free...
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Writer Rob Shearman still feels like he was handed
a winning lottery ticket, only to discover it was a double rollover
week.
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Delighted to be asked to write for the new series of Doctor Who, he
was then stunned to be given the job of bringing the Daleks - or rather
a solitary, suffering Dalek - back into the Doctor's world.
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"To be honest, I was staggered," he admits. "I assumed (lead writer
and co-Executive Producer) Russell T. Davies would
want to handle such a key episode, but he gave it to me and I was absolutely
thrilled to get it."
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Russell had been impressed by a 2003 Doctor Who audio play featuring
the Daleks which Rob wrote, and he used its basic plot for the brief
storyline which he gave Rob as his starting point for reviving the Doctor's
arch enemy.
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The Daleks, pitiless metal-clad creatures hell-bent on conquering the
entire universe, first appeared in the show in 1963 and remain its best-known
monsters. But they don't scare everyone...
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Rob recalls: "When I told my wife that I'd been given the Dalek episode
she wasn't impressed because, as she remembered them, they weren't anything
to be that afraid of, and in a way she's right.
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"So the way I approached it was to focus more on the creature inside
the machine, to make it a proper character who elicits our sympathy
at first but then displays all its evil and cunning.
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"What Russell has done so well is humanise the series and make it more
emotional. So to have the Dalek as the Doctor's biggest foe, it needed
at least some of the depth of character that the Doctor now has in Christopher
Eccleston's portrayal."
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When we first encounter the Dalek, it is in a wretched state - isolated,
imprisoned, tortured - but it still unnerves the Doctor.
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Rob says: "There was always something a bit clinical about the previous
Doctors - they never showed fear. But Russell said 'Who wants to watch
a hero who's never frightened of anything?'.
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"Hence the Doctor's terror when he realises he's in a cell with a Dalek.
I think Chris has made him far more real, in a way, than his predecessors."
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An accomplished writer for the theatre, TV and radio, Rob enjoyed "replaying"
his childhood in the new series, having become a firm Doctor Who fan
at the age of 11.
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"I was too scared to watch it before then," he laughs. "I've been taken
aback by all the excitement about the Daleks' return," he adds.
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"People seem to have high expectations. I hope, in the nicest possible
way, they manage to traumatise a whole new generation of viewers!"
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