Matthew Kilburn goes to hear Russell T Davies visit Oxford again

An LGBTQ+ flag flew over Worcester College on the darkening afternoon of Thursday 15 February 2024. It acknowledged LGBT+ history month and the college’s programme of events celebrating it, but it was tempting to think it was flying because, for a few hours, Russell T Davies was in residence at his former college. Not, I suspect, that being seen as a sort of gay king is his style. Nevertheless, if you’d been walking the streets of Jericho for an hour or two that afternoon, you’d have found a good few people in the cafes and in The Last Bookshop, whatever their sexuality, age or gender, who were filling in their time before seeking an audience with someone we didn’t know at the time of his last visit was the Once and Future Showrunner.

For Russell has spoken at Worcester College before. In May 2019 he was interviewed on the same stage in the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre by Worcester’s then provost, Sir Jonathan Bate. James Ashworth reported on the occasion for Tides. Doctor Who then seemed to be part of Russell’s past as far as his career was concerned, although he talked about it a great deal. It’s now his present, and it didn’t take up so much of the evening as it did last time, with perhaps a greater emphasis on Russell’s experience as a gay man and on his wider career. Now that Doctor Who is once again his job, his relationship with it has changed and he has by necessity to be more guarded about what’s coming up.

Once upon a time, we were told, there was a young man who loved television more than anything else in the world, who decades later would be able to recall the smell of the first television studio he ever entered in mid-1980s Cardiff, with its five analogue-era cameras feeding to videotape. He joined the BBC, metaphorically, through a side door, having been turned down several times for a BBC production traineeship, being recruited (after a postgraduate training place at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff) for a particular programme, and then moved with it to Manchester – ‘the best move of his life’.

David Isaac, Worcester’s provost and a former chair of both Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, remarked that this was the 1980s and the time of rising HIV cases. ‘Nice swerve,’ remarked Russell – but the intervention allowed Russell and David to introduce an audience mainly rather younger than them to the forgotten realities of living in the 1980s, gay or otherwise. We didn’t know as much about immunity as we thought. Tales that the ‘gay flu’ or ‘gay cancer’ could render you vulnerable to death from the common cold were dismissed – colds can’t kill you, after all, can they? ‘Our own cleverness fought against us,’ Russell remarked. On the widely-scattered rocks of glib confidence foundered many lives. Nevertheless, Russell was keen not to fall into the narrative that there was a ‘lost generation’ of gay men – there were great losses, but people like him and David survived and so did others, which in no sense minimises the appalling fact that so many died within and without the community.

HIV and AIDS made an early apperance in Russell’s work on Granada’s Children’s ITV series Children’s Ward, which included a boy who had been infected by HIV through a blood transfusion; there was no way in a children’s programme that he could have contracted the infection through sex. It would be Children’s BBC’s Byker Grove which featured the first gay teenage character in children’s television, a first Russell regrets not making at ITV.

That Russell is the person he is today, he said, arose from his boundary-breaking Channel 4 series Queer as Folk, especially its press launch on 23 February 1999, where he faced an assault from across the press, including the gay press. His anger at the line taken by reviewers meant that it was impossible for him to appear on Channel 4’s audience feedback programme Right to Reply – his colleague, a straight woman producer, had to answer for the programme instead. Queer as Folk was deliberately a ‘difficult’ portrayal of gay life, avoiding the spoonfeeding and hand-holding which might have seen characters preach about safe sex, or make space for lesbians who weren’t part of its story. Since then, Russell has met numbers of people who moved to Manchester because they were drawn to the world of Queer as Folk.

Russell once more related how he came to revive Doctor Who, this being a short version of the story hinging around meeting Jane Tranter (then BBC television controller of drama commissioning, now one of the leading figures at Bad Wolf) at the launch party for Linda Green. There was a sidestep in which he emphasised that he keeps getting work because he delivers on time and on budget and that his hit rate is only 50%; but commissioners recognise that even his ratings failures are made with conviction. Doctor Who, however, has to be designed for success, which is difficult.

Russell’s answer to this challenge is to eschew caution and stretch what the series can do, while at the same time never forgetting that there is an eight-year-old watching at home who wants to see the Doctor leave the TARDIS and fight Daleks. Asked how he comes up with new ideas, he replied that that was his job. There’s a ‘constant drama’ in his head, with ideas first germinated thirty or forty years ago still developing. He even observed he talks in dramatic speeches.

Asked about casting the first queer Doctor, Russell observed that Ncuti Gatwa has only been publicly out about six months, and broadened his answer to note Ncuti’s ‘amazing life’ as a refugee from Rwanda growing up in Scotland. He does something new with the Doctor every day, difficult to do after the character has existed for sixty years. We were nevertheless promised with ebullience ‘a good old gay time’ from the forthcoming series of Doctor Who, greeted with cheers from large sections of the audience.

There were other hints too about the future shape of Doctor Who; spin-offs are unlikely to be formats, but one-off serials of three or five episodes telling self-contained stories, but even though it’s something he’s not actively seeking, if someone wanted to commission a new series of Torchwood then it would probably come back – he’s still intensely proud of its third series, Torchwood – Children of Earth. Watch out, he says, for the last three minutes of one episode of the next series of Doctor Who, into which much of his anger at the state of the world has been distilled. The world has changed since he last ran Doctor Who; the need to confront controversial issues is more pressing, and he has to work out the method.

Politics ran strongly through the evening. Russell felt he had to apologise to younger people for the mess in which older people had left the world. He’s not a believer in making one-sided arguments pressing one point of view; this is the methodology of a newspaper columnist and not a dramatist nor an essayist. Nuance is essential to Russell’s writing. Drama tends to be written by liberals, and conservative writers tend to be forgotten, though less so, I think Russell said, in the United States; it’s a feature which could be addressed.

The question of Russell’s activism kept surfacing. David Isaac has spent much of his life in explicitly activist roles, but Russell has rarely taken up campaigning positions except at specific junctures, such as his recent public condemnation of Rishi Sunak’s jibe against Labour’s policy on trans rights in the presence of the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey. Early on, Russell agreed that he was an activist and was happy to be considered a such, but that he had not to be in the moment of writing; while these aren’t his words, he seemed careful to stress that he is not a polemicist.

Following an extensive audience question session, covering topics from pre- and post-AIDS gay culture, his family and his work, Murray Gold’s music, and writing software – Final Draft is essential, says Russell – Russell left the auditorium to be politely mobbed in a very Oxonian fashion. He gradually edged his way to more space over about an hour while generously answering questions and having photographs taken. Having mentioned the William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton regeneration at the end of The Tenth Planet (1966) as his first memory, ODWS member Ethan Yates related how his first memory was playing David Tennant’s Doctor in the playground at school, while his first memory of television is Tennant unwrapping an Easter egg on Planet of the Dead (2009), which entertained Russell to the extent that he later shared the moment on Instagram.

Russell T Davies has told stories which resonate with people to an extent that he has become totemic; we want to hear him and share our experiences with him. He copes with this remarkably well, a consequence perhaps of mechanisms learned successfully amongst nascent queer youth in Swansea, or of being gay at a time when human rights were being denied to homosexuals in Britain. Doctor Who is once again bound up with his distinctive voice and its round sense of moral and emotional reality.

A revised version of this article will appear in issue 50 of Tides of Time, to be published later this year.