SERVING TIME

WHEN WE WERE TOLD on the first of March this year that “The Doctor will return in ‘Revolution Of The Daleks’”, no-one could have known just how far away a festive special would feel.

Sentenced to “whole of life imprisonment” by the Judoon, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor was transported from the TARDIS to a maximum security facility in space, moments after learning that her life as she had known it had changed forever.

Now showrunner, executive producer and writer of the latest instalment of Doctor Who Chris Chibnall, is in the final stages of overseeing what comes next. That means grading the colour – “If you saw a lot of the raw footage when we film it, it still looks like it was shot in the 1970s” – and listening to demos of the score, before, he jokes, “it becomes a fight between the composer and the sound effects and the dialogue”.

It’s mid-November when SFX dials into a Zoom chat with Chibnall – the man himself aptly flanked by a groovy futuristic space background. He says that working remotely has all gone well, after the effects of the global pandemic forced post-production on “Revolution Of The Daleks” into the homes of the cast and crew. “Unless when it turns up on TV it ends up in black and white, in which case it didn’t go well,” he deadpans. “It’s a very interesting end to the process, because obviously it was written in the summer of 2019 and filmed in the autumn of 2019.”

Does that mean that a year of lockdown has allowed him to get ahead?

“No!” he laughs loudly. “Quite the opposite, my again – we make again? It’s literally taken up all of our time. The series that we were preparing, we wouldn’t be able to make – we won’t be able to do any overseas filming. There’s things about how many people you have in a scene, how many crowds you can do if you can do a crowd. We have to reimagine and reinterpret how we make the show from the ground up. And that’s what we’ve been doing, but I think we’re in a really exciting place with it now.”