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The Sarah Jane Adventures: Writing for my childhood heroes

2010-10-11T10:08:06+00:00

Set your sonic lipsticks to thrill - The Sarah Jane Adventures is back. And I don't care if I've already seen the scripts (even written some) - I'll be on the edge of my seat watching them all over again. Just as I adore Doctor Who, I love this show.

When I was a kid Lis Sladen was my Doctor's companion. That was the suave Jon Pertwee, and then the barmy be-scarfed Tom Baker. Why wouldn't I love this show?

Now I've written four series of adventures for her. I am the biggest kid in the playpen and I'm playing with my favourite toys. Being a writer who gets to write for his childhood heroes is the best of the best.

When I wrote my first Sarah Jane, The Eye of the Gorgon (the one with the nuns who drove around in a hearse) people said it reminded them of Doctor Who from way back. There's no greater compliment. Now we are on the fourth series and the show just keeps getting better.

And scarier. I like the scary stories. My favourite episodes have been last year's haunted house story, The Eternity Trap, and The Day Of The Clown from the year before. Bradley Walsh, who played Odd Bob, scared the pants off me on set.

This year, Joe Lidster's Nightmare Man is right up my scary street. Gareth Roberts' Empty Planet is just about as big a mystery story as you can get - complete with robots. And Goodbye Sarah Jane Smith, which he has co-written with Clayton Hickman is both emotional rollercoaster and action-packed gobsmacker.

Rupert Laight's Lost In Time is three stories in one and then there's Russell T Davies' return to Sarah Jane writing duties with a story that not only features Matt Smith but Katy Manning returning to her role as Jo Grant, the Third Doctor's other companion.

Then there's my Vault Of Secrets, which sees the return of a familiar reptilian face and some sharp-dressed villains with something nasty up their sleeves. It's going to be so much fun.

It's a bit different from Waters Of Mars - the Doctor Who special that I co-wrote with Russell last year. We visited a very dark part of our favourite Time Lord with that one.

People ask me about the differences in writing something like Waters Of Mars and Sarah Jane's adventures with Luke, Clyde and Rani. Is it a different process? No. It's just about writing the best story I can.

Instinctively you pitch the story differently, but I'm still using the same parts of my brain - the bits that get scared, the bits that laugh, the bits that get fired up by adrenaline, and the bits that cry,

Because stories are all about emotion. And I guarantee this year you will laugh, cry and hide behind the couch. I know, because I'll be there with you.

Phil Ford is lead writer and co-producer on The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Series four of The Sarah Jane Adventures starts on CBBC on Monday, 11 October at 5.15pm.

To find out times of future programmes, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Until Friday, 5 November you can press the red button to test your knowledge of the show with a Sarah Jane Adventures Quiz.

Enter the City Of The Daleks in Doctor Who's new adventure games

2010-06-04T09:57:28+00:00

My kids love CBBC - they play it all the time. Sure, they like the TV channel as well, but it's the website and the games that come first. That's not to say that TV doesn't matter to them any more.

Once a week, the programme we all sit down for, as a family, is Doctor Who. But that's not enough for them - they want to play as well as watch. That's why we've created the Doctor Who Adventure Games.

In our house, given a choice, my kids will always head for the computer first, the games console second before turning on the TV - books sadly come a distant fourth, which is why they rarely do get a choice.

My four-year-old can easily navigate and play on the CBeebies site; the older ones choose the worlds of Little Big Planet, Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters over most the TV has to offer. When they do watch TV, they want to watch programmes which have games they can also play, such as the brilliant Horrible Histories.

Our aim with the Doctor Who Adventure Games is to enable all Doctor Who fans - kids and adults, experienced and uncertain gamers - to enjoy four new episodes where they can play and interact with the action, rather than just watch.

City Of The Daleks, the first interactive episode is available to play now on the Doctor Who website and will be followed a few weeks later by the second and third episodes. You'll get to play the fourth and final game later in the year.

We know that our audiences are demanding and if we do something on this scale, it has to be high quality, it has to be innovative and it has to work as a game.

So we joined forces with experts from the games world. We put Charles Cecil, creator of titles such as the Broken Sword franchise, and Sumo, a Sheffield-based games development company together with the writers and producers of the new series of Doctor Who - Phil Ford and James Moran. They were overseen by Steven Moffat and the producers of the TV series.

The results have been extraordinary - both teams have learned from each other. The TV teams have had to learn about how storytelling works in game environments.

The game developers have had to deal with a hero who breaks many of the rules of traditional game play - he won't use violence, must rely on ingenuity and stealth to achieve tasks and effectively already has a skeleton key to open every door he encounters - his sonic screwdriver.

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan have learned all about rotoscoping, as their real-life movements and actions have been captured for use in the game.

Set designs on TV have been influenced by the game designs and within the Adventure Games we've have been able to take audiences to environments which would be impossible on TV - frozen worlds, underwater worlds, inside the Tardis and in the first episode, to a devastated Trafalgar Square in London and then to the Dalek home planet of Skaro.

You'll be able to download them, for free, from the Doctor Who website (unless you're abroad in which case we're making arrangements for other sites to offer them).

We've tried to make this process as simple and painless as possible and one that will work on as many computers as possible (the Mac version will unfortunately be a week or so late but be assured - it's coming!).

We think we've created stories and an extension of the Doctor Who world and mythology that can proudly sit alongside the best episodes and storylines of the past and present - but this time you control the action, you are the Doctor (except when you're Amy!).

I hope those new to games will take their first steps in an environment which will show that games are a wonderful creative medium in their own right.

And, a place where occasionally they might like to join their kids for some good, old-fashioned playtime.

Please do let us know what you think.

Simon Nelson is controller, portfolio and multiplatform, BBC Vision

Doctor Who: The return of the Weeping Angels

2010-04-22T16:32:03+00:00

Good Doctor Who monsters have to come back - it's a rule. But my feeling is that you always have to bring back a monster and do something different with it. So although Blink was a very popular episode, it was also a very spooky, cerebral episode.

These Weeping Angels episodes are really the polar opposite, these are like a big action movie - albeit an action movie with bad guys that can't actually move! It's a very different feeling.

Last time, the implication was that they were hiding out on earth, as scavengers who are just surviving - they didn't have a big terrible plan. This time there really is a big terrible plan which goes beyond mere survival, and is almost like a war.

The best way to explain the difference between Blink and these two episodes would be to say that I think the best conceived movie sequel ever was Aliens following Alien. It took the same monster into an entirely different type of film.

That is very roughly the model for this. Blink was a small, low-key one and this is the highly coloured, loud, action-movie one.

Filming this scene (above) was a completely surreal experience. I'm used to the fact that in television the first day of filming will probably be something fairly inconsequential and involve a minor character getting shot, or a close up of a hand or something. It's not usually something big and iconic.

But, by sheer chance, the very first scene that we shot involved The Doctor and Amy arriving on a planet with River Song and looking at the crashed spaceship.

So it couldn't have been more iconic - the Tardis was there! It was also perfect paparazzi fodder because it had everything you could possibly have, which wasn't intentional actually.

I vividly remember arriving on that beach. I saw the Tardis in the distance, which was very much the culmination of all that time waiting to get started - which you could argue was two and a half years, or 40 years for me.

First walking onto a big, grand, typical Doctor Who location and seeing the bright blue box waiting was so odd for me. We'd be so careful up to that point, and not put the Doctor Who name on any of our signs but still the paparazzi and fans found us within about 20 minutes!

I was stood on set with my phone, looking at pictures of myself which fans had taken already on the web. On one occasion I saw a photograph of myself watching the filming, which had been uploaded so quickly that I hadn't moved from the position I was in by the time it was on the web!

My other memory is of this day ending early because the tide came in unexpectedly. I did slightly wonder if this would be the shape of things to come.

That scene on the beach was about three pages longer originally. The rain on the second day of filming was so torrential that I suggested I could cut three pages, provided I could relocate them in a new Tardis scene.

I ended up adding the scene which sits immediately after the credits, with River flying the Tardis better than The Doctor. That's a lovely scene, and a much better start to the show, but it's all a consequence of torrential rain and the tide coming in.

On the second day I ended up sat in the production van, very grumpy, hastily rewriting scenes. The story of those two days is really about the plunge from the extraordinary romantic beginning with the Tardis and the big iconic scene, to the reality of actually trying to film it. It was a great lesson in having to cut pages and deal with the reality of the challenges we face.

Later on in the episode there's a really nice accidental moment where The Doctor hangs from the strap on the ceiling and it breaks. The very first time Matt did it, it was an accident - he wasn't supposed to do that, it's just typical Matt, breaking everything - but the director liked it, so he kept it in.

The version we see on screen isn't the real accident, it's him doing it on purpose, but I do think it is very funny. I think particularly the looks from the girls and the fact that he doesn't mention it at all - he just tries to carry it off as a sort of Stan Laurel moment. It's extremely charming.

I think the thing that has come back with Matt is the idea that The Doctor is a bit silly at times. He's a slightly silly old buffer in a few ways.

We find out he's a bit rubbish at flying the Tardis and he trips over his feet and breaks things. Both Chris and David were quite cool Doctors, and while Matt certainly isn't short on cool, he has an amazing clumsiness. He's halfway between Indiana Jones and Stan Laurel.

The Doctor has a belief that he is cooler than he actually is. For instance in that first episode where he yells "Who da man?" and everybody cringes.

It's those moments that really show where the old man comes through in Matt's performance, because there is nothing wrong with a young man shouting that, the awkwardness is when your dad tries to say it. That's The Doctor through and through.

Steven Moffat is executive producer and lead writer for Doctor Who. The Time Of The Angels can be viewed on iPlayer. Part two of the story - Flesh and Stone - will be broadcast on BBC One at 6.25pm on Saturday, 1 May