Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel - Behind the Scenes (Part Eight)Interview with writer Tom Macr

Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel - Behind the Scenes (Part Eight)Interview with writer Tom Macrae by David Darlington - November 2005 for Doctor Who Magazine 368And how is production going, so far as you can determine?Well, my episodes didn’t get a readthrough, the clocks were kind of against us. Mine are in a four episode block so there was a very tight schedule and we dropped the readthrough. Which is fine because readthroughs are nice, but far from essential. They’re not even that useful for timing, especially if you have a lot of action sequences. But I did go to the first readthrough for the season, and David was brilliant, absolutely electric. Most readthroughs, you hope the actor will put on a bit of a performance, but at the Doctor Who one we had people putting on full-on alien voices, miming their transformations… David doing the whole thing, bang-bang-bang. Absolutely brilliant. And I got sent my filming schedule yesterday, and I’ve got to pick a good day to go down and visit.If you went to an early readthrough, you’ll have met David and Billie by now…?Yes – well, a friend of mine is really good friends with Billie, so I had a connection there. I got on very well with David. When I went up to him and said “David, that was fantastic!”, he wasn’t responding “Oh, I needed that pat on the back”, it was genuinely “I’m really glad you think that, because I’m not too sure and it’s nice to know…”. And David let me play with the sonic screwdriver and everything…How do you think the dynamic has changed with the fact that the leads are different?Well, I watched the first series as a fan and a viewer - I’ve never met Christopher Eccleston - so I don’t have an analytical hat on for that. When I started writing it, I had Chris’s voice in my head… but then we had that first readthrough, and suddenly I got it, and rewrote everything, understanding how David would do it. He’s much more clown-like, and chameleonic in the way that he speaks, his vocal rhythms shift and change all the time, it’s almost like changing the speed on a tape recorder, he’ll suddenly speedupandbetalkinglikethis and then heee’ll sloooow doooown… playing endlessly with the rhythm of the words, and is very unpredictable with that. So you never know how he’s going to read a line. Though I have to say the same is true of Billie – even though Rose isn’t the cleverest woman in the universe, and she doesn’t get the same sort of incredible long speeches as the Doctor gets, Billie always manages to say a line in a way you hadn’t really thought of, that is ten times better. And the way that she laughs as she’s talking, she puts humour into everything, it’s fantastic. I don’t know if she realises how charming she is, or whether it is just natural, but she lights up when she does it.Link to [ part one ] of this set, or click the #whoBtsCyber tag for all parts - or the full Behind-the-Scenes episode list [ here ] -- source link

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