Steven Moffat has been talking to Doctor Who Magazine about season 8 of Doctor Who, and his logic behind casting Peter Capaldi in the title role.
“I think it was time for the show to flip around a bit. The new version of the show is quite old now. It’s very old… We need the kick-up-the-arse Doctor, in a way, to frighten you and make you think, oh, it’s a different show again.”That kick-up-the-arse Doctor would be Peter Capaldi, who Moffat acknowledges is quite a bit different to what we've all been used to these last 8 years.
“There would be little point in making as radical a change as we’ve made unless you’re going to go quite different with the Doctor. The last two Doctors have been brilliant, and have been your ‘good boyfriend’ Doctors. But the Doctor isn’t always like that. There is the sort of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston end of the spectrum, where he is mad and dangerous and difficult. If we’d cast Ben Whishaw, you’d know what we were doing. You’d think, ‘Well, that’s another quirky young man with entertaining hair!’ And he’d be a brilliant Doctor, but Clara would just think, ‘Okay, you’ve rearranged yourself a bit…’”He also clarified that season 8 will definitely be an uninterrupted one, and hopefully we won't have to wait two years for season 9...
“We’re not going to do splits, and the same format will repeat exactly the following year like that. So it will be the traditional form.”Well that's good news indeed because we feared that we might only get a splattering of special episodes in 2015, before a full season in 2016.
Doctor Who Magazine issue 469 is out now.