In an extract from his new memoir, the screenwriter bids farewell to the show he helped save – and rails against the constant online leaks that made it so hard to write
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Billie Piper surprised all of us. We knew Ncuti Gatwa was leaving, so I’d written the climax in which the Doctor, having saved the life of a baby in The Church on Ruby Road, Ncuti’s first episode, now departs by saving the life of a baby because the universe is at stake. But we had to make these final episodes not knowing whether the Disney deal would be renewed. That was nothing to do with us at [independent production company] Bad Wolf; it was down to conversations with Disney and the BBC. So we had no idea what was going on. Deep down I thought it wouldn’t. You could tell what I was thinking, because I was already creating new work: Tip Toe for Channel 4, and also setting up the dance version of It’s a Sin with Rambert. In fact, in some ways it would have been a nightmare for me if that third series had come along, but I would have managed it.
As the third series was in flux, the finale was intended to climax with an open-ended regeneration. So we shot that with Ncuti: he smiled and said his last line, and the screen melted into a golden glow … Except when we edited that together, it looked like the death of the show. We said, “Think of children watching that. It’s like a death. We can’t do that to them.”