'HELLO, hello, hello!" chortles the most effusive man in television. Russell T Davies, the wizard behind the curtain of the astonishingly successful Doctor Who revival, chortles quite a lot. Occasionally, when particularly tickled, he'll let out a huge hearty guffaw, like a great hillock of Welsh mirth. He is, I think he wouldn't mind me saying, a very happy camper.
And why wouldn't he be? Even before he almost single-handedly reawakened the pulse of Saturday-night family viewing, the 44-year-old writer/producer had already garnered praise aplenty with TV dramas such as Bob and Rose, Casanova, The Second Co
ming and the landmark Queer As Folk.
Today he is one of the very few TV writers whose name is recognisable to the wider viewing public, and almost certainly the only one familiar to children, that devoted section of the enormous Doctor Who audience towards whom Davies feels particularly responsible.
"There's a great pressure in being successful," he says, between puffs on a cigarette, "which is nicer than the pressure of being unsuccessful. But what we always remember with the show –- it's the great engine, the beating heart of the show – is that kids love it. They literally take it into their hearts on a massive scale, and you've always got to remember what it was like when you were a child and when your favourite programme let you down.
"That's a terrible feeling. I remember that when I was young, when something had an off week and you weren't so entertained. When you're eight years old that feeling stays with you for the whole week. So that is a pressure to really deliver and make it the best that it can be."
Like all right-thinking people, Davies has been an ardent fan of Doctor Who all his life, and is understandably delighted to be at the helm of its spectacular rebirth. He is, after all, the little boy who grew up to play with the glitziest train set of all.
"Isn't it nice to see it successful again?" he beams. "You can't avoid that bloody logo when you walk into a shop! But to see a kid carrying his Dalek, or his Doctor Who comics, that's what it's all about. Never mind what the adults think, never mind what the critics say. It's also self-fulfilling as well, because when they are 28 and 38 they'll be saying: 'Why isn't Doctor Who on television?' They'll carry that memory with them just as we did, and it just guarantees the future, it absolutely cast-iron guarantees it."
One element of the new series which has proved particularly resonant with modern audiences is the addition of a strong emotional layer to the stories and characters, in particular that of the twin-hearted Doctor himself. This, says Davies, was an absolutely essential development.
"I honestly think that if Doctor Who had run continuously right up until 2005 that's what it would've become," he says. "Because actually that's what the whole of television has done.
"We used to be a lot happier just with chase scenes. If you look at that brilliant ITC stuff from the 1960s, even the lesser ones like Danger Man and Man In A Suitcase, we were perfectly happy with them because we were much more impressed by shiny flickering pictures.
"They were still profoundly, culturally new. Now audiences simply wouldn't react to a simple chase if you couldn't have an emotional investment in it.
"That's true of the whole of television now. I find it so funny that we can now sit and talk about Doctor Who, the BBC's lead drama series, and its amount of characterisation, which is a ridiculous conversation to be having about a drama! With no other drama would you possibly start that conversation, but it's a feature of science-fiction that it has lagged behind in that sense.
"Plenty of people like Joss Whedon have come along and shown how it's done with Buffy, but all of these things are natural developments. It's just people dragging the genre up to a level with modern television. It was inevitable that whoever had taken over Doctor Who would've done that."
One of the emotional strands which runs right through not just Doctor Who but Davies' entire canon, is the recurring theme of unrequited love. Why does he keep coming back to that?
"Welcome to my life!" he laughs. "It's true, even Bob and Rose, which is a love story, ended up hingeing on his best friend, Holly, who was unrequitedly in love with Bob. It really is my life in some ways, I'll be absolutely honest, and I think everybody recognises it because everybody has been in that state. Even the happiest married couple in the world had someone once who got into their brain in that way, someone special.
"So I think it's rather a beautiful thing even though it's also a tragedy. I have literally written it a hundred thousand times," he admits. "Even in Casanova, even the world's greatest lover, I sort of wrote him in a state of unrequited love with Henrietta, because I think that every variation on the story is just fascinating and rich and recognisable."
"Do you know what I think?" he muses. "When I was very young, about six years old, I was absolutely obsessed with Peanuts comic strips, and I still am –- I've got a fine print drawing by Charles M Schulz framed on my wall at home – I think it's one of the great masterpieces of modern culture, that strip.
"And Peanuts is entirely about unrequited love, Charlie Brown with the little redheaded girl, Sally with Linus, Peppermint Patty with Charlie Brown, Lucy with Schroeder, everybody with Snoopy, it's a never-ending chain of unrequited love. And I think that sank into my head when I was six, I think it set a template."
His beloved Doctor Who aside – which along with the success of spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures has ballooned into a veritable TV empire – I wondered what Davies was proudest of in his career thus far.
"I suppose Queer As Folk," he says. "Because that was a massive leap for me personally. But it was also a good old leap for television, and I don't just mean in a gay sense. One of my favourite things, looking back on it, is that it's genre-less. Take away the word 'gay' and it's just about a bunch of people. There's no crime, there's no chase, it's just people's lives.
"Because of this big gay banner it looks very formatted and stylised, almost, but actually it was about life. And I'm really proud of that. But Bob and Rose is absolutely the best set of scripts I've ever written. To be honest, it's just about perfect, the way it was directed and cast. Without wishing to bang my own drum – 'nice job, well done there'."
Distracted by the fact that Davies has been smoking throughout our interview, I find myself asking him for advice on how to give up. "Have you tried patches?" he puffs. "Honestly, I gave up for two and a half years with patches before I started again. That was the fault of a script that was going wrong. I'm not telling you which one it was as you might never look at that episode the same way again. But it's quite obvious when you watch it.
"I'm a 40-a-day dedicated smoker and I love it, but I put on a patch and I stopped like that. I never believed they would work, but overnight –- gone. And you get really brilliant, vivid dreams, everything you dream all night is quite extraordinary." Maybe that could help with upcoming Doctor Who storylines? "Oh no, it's all a bit too weird for that."
One last thing that I couldn't resist asking, seeing as it is the question on the lips of every Doctor Who fan at the moment: will Davros, the evil creator of the dreaded Daleks, be returning in the new series? "Ach!" chuckles the earl of chuckling chucklers, and tells me to take my leave. "Go and have a smoke."
Sorry kids, I did try.
Doctor Who starts on 5 April on BBC 1 (6.20pm)
The full article contains 1387 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
