The Frank Skinner Show - Frank Skinner in conversation with Russell T Davies

Episode Date: September 19, 2017

Russell T Davies drops in to chat to Frank about his brand new book, Dr Who and Cucumber. Frank Skinner's on Absolute Radio every Saturday morning and you can enjoy the show's podcast right here. Radio Academy Award winning Frank, Emily and Alun bring you a show which is like joining your mates for a coffee... So, put the kettle on, sit down and enjoy UK commercial radio's most popular podcast.

Hello and welcome, this is Frank Skinner. I am sitting with, I'm going to be straight, one of my heroes, Russell T Davies. Stop it, stop it. No, no, I'm not going to stop it. Thank you. You always say that, Russell. Every night. And you know me, Nick. Russell, of course, has written many fabulous TV dramas. I'm including Doctor Who.

Yes. But lots of other stuff, which we'll talk about. Thank you. But I'm always happy to bump into you, but I didn't expect to bump into you on what I would call the poetry book tour. Even odder. I've illustrated a poetry book. I didn't even write the poems. I've drawn the cartoons,

which surprises me. No one's more surprised than me, Frank. Well, I thought I was a bit of a fanboy of you, but I didn't know you were a uh an artist well i've kind of scribbled and i started out my very first job was in bbc graphics at bbc wales drawing jackanory type stories and and and in the welsh language um and so i'd always drew in the welsh language that took some doing with those double l's um so i did that but then life took over,

and I worked in telly, and then the writing took over. So it's always been there, I'm not going to say as a skill, but as a hobby. So you've continued to draw? If I had a pen in front of me now, I would just naturally be scribbling and drawing. I have to cover my school desks with stuff. Because I have a five-year-old child,

and I was leaving the other day and he said you're going to come back i said i won't see you tonight i'll be back a bit late and he said do you want me to do i'll do a quick drawing of me and for you to remind you what i look like and i thought at what point do we stop drawing all the time because we stop playing i know somewhere in those yards we tell people to stop people People say to me, why do you write? And you go, well, we all do when we're kids. We all play war and Doctor Who and Off-Ground Touch and whatever. They're all stories, aren't they? And somewhere we stop that.

I'd like to identify that point. I think the hormones stop it. I think boys and girls. I do, I think you reach that age and suddenly bigger stories are much more interesting and take us away from our sex destroys creativity let's lay that out there as a theory i think coleridge said that as well so did you say it as well as me though no no and he said it of course through a haze of laudanum yes which always muffles the tone drugged um so are you one of these celebrities who can draw who includes a little drawing in your autograph

I love that yes you've seen into my soul I'm horrified yes I would scribble a little TARDIS normally an autograph is a Doctor Who autograph a Queersfolk autograph would be filthy we've all got that in our minds now.

I was going to ask you to autograph my cucumber. But that will be explained, by the way. Well, of course, I will be asking you to autograph my copy of Now We Are 600. Yes. Which is currently available. It's a beautiful little hardback as well. Yeah, it's a lovely book.

I like that. And it's written by James Goss, the poetry, but as you say, you did the drawing. There is a particularly fine double-page spread in which you've drawn every Doctor Who companion thus far.

That was a nightmare. That was my last weekend. I called that one because they asked me to illustrate this book. I said, yes, of course. And there's all sorts of drawings in it, but one poem by James in there lists every single companion. Oh, my horror, when that arrived on email. But actually, oh, how much I loved it, sitting there.

Because, of course, now, how people used to draw in the old days, they'd just do a library and sit there and look at reference books. Now you just summon it all up online and you find your best five pictures of Vicky from 1965, Maureen O'Brien, the actress, and what's the most iconic costume you could possibly use. I loved it. I had such a good time. I mean, I've never in my life...

You know I'm a Doctor Who fan. I've never in my life spent a whole two hours thinking about Vicky from 1965. When you go to draw her, you do. You find yourself thinking about the actress and the stories and the costumes. I loved it. It was like a little bit of time travel for me.

Can I say I'm slightly disappointed that you needed photo references at all for the companions. I thought you'd just know them so well. Some of them. Rose Tyler, my ones. I didn't need to look at my ones. I knew exactly what they were.

But it's funny you think you know them, but do you know how Barbara'sara's collar works you don't know maybe not yeah it's all a bit blurry you realize but that surely that double paid spread of the companions will come out as a poster i think it should be a tea towel it's a good tea towel great tea towel isn't it it's actually james goss uh the author did print it off as a tea i've got one tea towel. It's a great tea towel, isn't it? Actually, James Goss, the author, did print it off as a tea. I've got one tea towel with all those companions. Oh, right. It's prized. Honestly, I think the poster would be a big seller.

Please do it. I could colour it. I'd love to see it in colour, actually. These are all black and white illustrations. If you coloured those, they'd be gorgeous. Thank you. I'm glad you like it. You always have to top my ideas. That's what I'm here for. Just before you arrived, by the way way my phone went and my phone is the tardis um sound and we said wouldn't it be great if russell walked in

immediately on that materialized life is never quite that simple so i should give a little taste of the uh of the poetry in the book um um it's based on the A.A. Milne. Yeah. When we, when we, now we are six. Now we are six. Which many of our listeners will know, I'm sure, if only via Google in the next 30 seconds. But that has got a thing.

When I was one, I'd just be gone. When I was two, I was nearly new and so on. And this does it with the doctors. Yes. Which I like. When I was eight, I'd just be gone. When I was two, I was nearly new and so on. And this does it with the Doctors. Yes. Which I like. When I was eight, kissing was great. When I was nine, I fought time. Yeah.

Which Doctor Who fans will know that the eighth Doctor, Paul McGann, kissed his companion. First Doctor to have a snog. It was a shocker. Were you shocked? I was shocked. And she was lovely. I wanted to kiss her. Grace, gorgeous, yeah. But It was a shocker. Were you shocked? I was shocked. And she was lovely. I wanted to kiss her.

Grace, gorgeous, yeah. But I was shocked, yeah. And then, particularly poignant, I think, when I was nine, I fought time because Christopher Eccleston, of course,

was the ninth Doctor, scarred by the Time War. Scarred by the Time War, yeah. Because he destroyed both the Time Lords and the Daleks. We thought until we discovered

they'd all just missed each other. Turns out... Were you in any way miffed that you'd invented this fabulous piece of Doctor Who folklore and then Stephen Moffat thought, no, I don't like it, I'm going to rewrite it? You have to take... When you leave Doctor Who, you have to take a deep breath and think,

it's all up for grabs now. It's all there to be rewritten. But not retrospectively, surely. You're very clever. It was an interesting evening. I love that episode. I love that episode. It wasn't so much, oh, stop it, this is naughty.

It wasn't so much the time was disappearing, it was all the Daleks shooting themselves. Couldn't any of them dodge that? No Dalek, just go, go whoops out the way the daleks for all their fear and terror they strike in the universe have always been basically a bit clumsy and incompetent well that's because you have to beat them in the fifth doc in the five doctors i remember them being overturned by the first doctor and his granddaughter yes you shouldn't be able to do that with a cane and a mirror, basically.

Yes, exactly. Can I say, and I don't want to get too hardcore Doctor Who on this, but I was so impressed that there were two drawings of the first Doctor and one was clearly Richard Herndall, the man who came in when William Hartnell died. Many of illustrators wouldn't have had that eye for detail. It is. I mean, the poems

are for everyone, and it's great to get kids reading poems and discovering more poems. It's also a very fan-ish book. There's stuff in there for us. Yes. The elite, as we're known. It is, well, the master race. It's, um, I still regard, I know Stephen Moffat splits Doctor Who

viewers into fans of the show and students of the show. Oh, that's good. So I think I still don't have the confidence to call myself a student, but certainly you are. No, I think we're all students. Students are just learning.

If you're a professor of the show, we wouldn't have the nerve to say that, but students, nice. Oh, OK. Students off to electrics. I'll go with that. Yeah. I should also say that there's Eeyore

from The Donkey from AM and has become Time War. Yes. I'm pushing it. Doctor Roo, of course. Doctor Roo. And the Effelomp has become the Gallyfromp. Yes.

Because some Doctor Who was from Gallifrey. I'm not to blame for any of the puns. Any of the puns. I loved it. And the drawings are great. I had no idea. I did have fun. It's just a lovely book to hold in your hands.

It's sweet, isn't it? I do think kids can read it. A lot of kids. I say it's fan-ish. Everyone's a fan now. Everyone is. They're all steeped in it. Some kids love more than going and exploring that 50-year history.

They love exploring the history of Harry Potter. You can't have enough Harry Potter books explaining Quidditch and stuff. So I love that. It makes students of them. Student is the word. It makes students of kids. And you're still happy to talk about Doctor Who and stuff because some people... There's no choice.

You know, I once interviewed Ringo Starr. We got in the lift on the way to the studio and he said, I'd rather you didn't go on about the Beatles. And I thought, this is going to be a brief. Did you just send the lift back down? Or you opened your Thomas the Tank Engine book? No, once I got in front of a camera, of course, I ran riot all over it.

You were so trapped. That was the rest of my life and I love it. It's Doctor Who. I love it, I love it, I love it. And Lord knows, I've had a good time with it and fun. No one loves it more than me, so I'm absolutely... I will be doing these interviews in, I hope, 30 years' time and happy to do so. Love it.

Good. Well, we will always be grateful to you, of course, for... If it had come back and it had been bad, it might never have come back again. That's why we worked so hard on it. The fear of failure was a great engine behind the success of that show. The thought of it. That moment when Christopher Eccleston says, Ron, I'm tingling now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. March 2005. You know what sticks in my mind a lot from those days, which is not a moment that people really... And it's when Toxic by Britney Spears suddenly kicks into the soundtrack. And for some reason, I felt then... Because there's always pressure

if you bring something back to make it current. And it can often be done very clumsily. And I thought, you know what, this is... There's a wink with this as well. There's a bit of a nod and a bit of a... It is current, but we don't care. We're't care we're enjoying it you gotta be careful with that stuff because it was current but it wasn't absolutely current toxic was a few years old by then so you weren't faking it say look that's in the charts this week yeah also it's a great song you can't go wrong if we're toxic in

something it's a truly great song you know what i agree with that yeah and i don't think i realized what a good song it was until I heard it on the Doctor Who soundtrack. And the video is, at the time I used to, I was great, I am still a great consumer of that stuff. It's like, we had adventures set in Downing Street, because Girls Aloud did

the jump video from Love Actually where they break into Downing Street. Do you remember that video? They break into Downing Street and they're walking past, they're sneaking past Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister. And I sat watching that thinking, what a great idea for a Doctor Who video? They break into Downing Street and they're sneaking past Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister. And I sat watching that thinking, what a great idea for a Doctor Who story. You break into Downing Street,

which then became that Aliens of London story where they're trapped in Downing Street. There's a lot you can do. And in the toxic video, she's kind of escaping laser beams and it's quite Doctor Who-y. So at the time, you know, I was watching all these visual images

and thinking, let's make Doctor Who look like that. So then it fits. The soundtrack really, really fits because it wasn't just slapping a song on it. Those images had been in my head right from the start. Did you leave Doctor Who with a lot of ideas for Doctor Who that you never got around to using?

No, to be honest, no. I kind of would have done them all in a year before. I mean, I'm not saying I ran out of them, but a year before I knew I was leaving, my mind just moved on to other things, to write other things. So even now, today, people say, have you got an idea for a story? I'm like, no, I haven't.

Would it be fair to say that when you left Doctor Who, you decided to become the sort of gay Shakespeare? And, er, Gagspere, let's call it. You know what I mean? Because then you seem to... You seem to focus mainly on writing stuff about gay people. Yes. Not that you hadn't done that before, obviously.

No, I'm quite passionate about that. And I think the surface has barely been scratched. And I even did that in Doctor Who. We had and yeah and all sorts of gay characters as well but um no i think if anything you know people always say do you mind being called a gay writer i love it i love what i am and i think i love it when when you're writing i love it when you're writing and you feel like you hit this territory you hit ground there's no one else around it's like being on a prairie you think who else is writing this stuff you look around no one that no one. That's not quite true. There are lots of other gay writers. But you discover a story

or a character or a man, you think, no one else is writing this. And I love that. Those open skies and the horizon ahead of you thinking, oh, I could just run for that horizon and write brand new stuff out there. So, yeah. You see, for us heterosexuals, it's such a well-trodden path. They're still churning out stories.

Let's be honest. But they're not so good. They're still churning out stories. Let's be honest. But they're not so good. They're wearing thin. That's why there's a great, I think, 2017, 2016, there's a rush, isn't there, towards multicultural stories, multisexual stories, because actually maybe we are wearing thin and we're realising with our intelligence there are thousands of stories that haven't been told. I have to mention Cucumber at this stage.

Yes. Which was a drama on Channel 4. And it still makes me angry, Cucumber, that it isn't regarded as one of the great TV dramas. The people don't talk about it like I, Claudius. Wow. Honestly, me and my partner, who is probably one of the most hard to please

television viewers on the planet, we watched it. And we used to watch it in utter silence. There was one particular episode, which was, I'm not going to give anything away because I want everyone to go and find it, but about Lance, where we didn't even speak during the commercial break. We were so... This is an odd question. Why isn't everyone still talking about how brilliant it was? Thank you for that.

And I did win a BAFTA for writing it, but still the viewing figures were tiny and suffered. And you've been very nice to me before about Cucamonga, and I love you for that, because it genuinely feels wounded and like a nice to me before about Cucumber and I love you for that because it feels it genuinely feels wounded and like a failure to me and you once very very kindly

said to me don't feel like that about it that some people respected it I think you can be misled by criticism at times and forget trust me if you have any value in you know me well but if you have any trust in my opinion at all

you wrote something incredibly special in Cucumber, if you quit tomorrow I mean I think I said to you that Lance episode was the best hour of drama I'd ever watched and I was including your Doctor Who's which is upset me. I love it no one loves Cucumber more than me

and I think there was, is there something so honest about it? It drove people away. It's unflinchingly honest in a way that is not comfortable. Yeah, I'm not recommending it to our younger viewers. No, and even... Because it's a grown-up drama. Maybe on a Tuesday night, you want to have a cup of tea

and you want to watch a detective solve a crime. Oh, come on. They love a bit of... I watch people getting killed every five minutes. Yes, it's... I wish I knew. If I knew what had gone wrong, I'd correct it somehow. But I'm still very proud of it. Nothing went wrong is the answer.

It's really good to hear. Thank you. The question I have... I heard it was being remade for America. Is that true? There's a version sitting there on a development. You know what that's like. It might happen. It might happen. It's called adult behaviour or something. Yeah, I'm kind of leaving them to it. It gives them a bit more of an inkling of what that's like. Okay. It might happen, might happen. It's called adult behaviour or something. Yeah, I'm kind of leaving them to it.

It gives them a bit more of an inkling of what they're going to get, I suppose. Maybe. There's a question I feel I've got to ask you, and it's the Jodie Whittaker question. What do you think? How exciting. How excited are you? It's great.

I'm on this book tour for this Doctor Who book, so last night, 200 fans, and no one in any doubt about it. I'm really tired of the objections being, you know, when a journalist does an article, they'll start it by saying, Twitter is an uproar over the casting of a female Doctor. And it's outrageous to me that actually you meet these fans and they're very, very happy that this is happening. They're completely happy and excited about next year.

And it gets misreported. Maybe 10 people online under 50 different aliases are spouting up saying you've ruined the programme. 10 people. And it's all that gets reported. And I think it's a real, real... Do you think they're all Ian Levine? I couldn't name names.

No, we have got into hardcore Doctor Who stuff. Are you excited? I am a mixture of excited and afraid, like I am with every Doctor that's mentioned. Because I have the old man's malady that I think it'll be bad and the BBC will decommission it. Yes, that's bred into us as fans. Which is ridiculous.

Because I'm... I think they know that on the team. They're not daft, Chris Chippenall. They know they've got all of this riding on their reputations, on Jodie Whittaker's reputation. It was like that in 2005 when you had Chris Eccleston and Billy Piper. It's like, if this fails, Doctor Who will go down the pan. It'll affect Chris, it'll affect Billy, it'll affect my career.

When you've got that devil on your back, it's a great impetus to work well. And they'll have that again here. These doubts and these fears, no matter how confident they are, will be chasing them. That will make it brilliant. And I assume that she's going to be Northern. I've no idea. Don't ask me.

I've never met her. I've never even met her. You broke the mould of these sort of posh and Scottish Doctor Whos and made Chris Eccleston a Northern Doctor Who, which I loved you for. As he said, every planet has a North. Exactly.

And I'm guessing that she'll do that. I wonder if it's kind of... I bet they're having those discussions in Cardiff Bay right now. Yes, with Bradley Walsh sitting at a table in a... You can go back. I'm guessing a mother of pearl. You're alive in the Doctor Who world? I am. I am

alive. Are you emailing them? It's official. I have emailed Chris Gibbon a couple of times. Just, you know, just to say hello. Begging. Begging. You're working on I'm going to call it

more gay stuff. That sounds dismissive. But it's a fair summary don't worry yes you're doing a thing called The Boys maybe that's not commissioned that's a script it's hard work that one it's about the age crisis in the 80s

it's taken a while to get right there's a million ways you could tell that story and I haven't found the right way yet so that's in development the wrong word because that sounds too formal. It's gestating. That's the word, I think. I tell you what surprises me.

You know, you're talking about this open desert of unwritten stories. That seems to be, that would be like a pyramid-sized obvious thing. Yes. I'm not dismissing your inventiveness, but why isn't there already when I started I kind of felt that I was racing to get there before someone else did

and surprisingly no one snapped up the script yet which I've got to accept and therefore that script needs work it's kind of tricky you're telling the story of a whole decade you're telling the story of a whole race actually you're telling a massacre.

There's many ways to tell that. Obviously, I haven't found the right way yet. There was a film, I think, in the 80s, late 80s, an American film about AIDS. And I went to see it with my girlfriend at the time, whose brother was gay. And I remember her sobbing in the car after with fear. Was that an early frost?

Maybe. The man who comes home and tells his parents. It's a great film. It's a great, great, great film. In the meantime, though, I'm still doing The Gays. I'm doing Jeremy Thorpe. Still with The Gays, Russell T Davies. Jeremy Thorpe.

Now, what a name from my youth. I have been dying to write this story for years and years and years. And a very brilliant journalist called John Preston wrote a book about it called A Very English Scandal. And we got the rights to the book and that's being adapted now and that starts filming in October. And I'm very excited. Very, very excited. I should say to our uninitiated listeners that Jeremy Thorpe was the leader of the Liberal Party. And the story broke that a man had had his dog shot.

He'd hired a hitman, it seemed, to threaten a man who'd had an affair with him to keep it quiet. Yes. A man who, can I say, whenever he was announced on the news, the other man, he was called Norman Scott, and they didn't like using words like gay or even homosexual. So he was always described as a little hint, as

former male model Norman Scott. Former male model Norman Scott. Played by Ben Whishaw in this. It's very exciting. It's properly exciting. So he went and threatened him and the hitman shot his dog. He was caught with, charged with incitement to murder and Jeremy Thorpe was actually

found not guilty. Which was kind of an establishment scandal at the time because genuinely, a hitman was there. It was said that the hitman was there to kill Norman Scott. I personally, I think he killed the dog first because the dog was a great

Dane. Do you realise that? I always thought he was a little terrier. It wasn't as good a shot as I thought. But maybe it was a wiser shot, because if I was killing a man who's got a Great Dane, I'd kill the dog first in case it went for him. Oh, yes. It's always thought of as a mistake that the

dog was shot. I'm not so sure. I'd kill the dog. I like to think that he was going to shoot Norman Scott and the dog leapt in front and took a bullet for him. You romantic. And also you sadist. You sit watching Marley and me laughing.

Do you hope with what I'm now casually referring to as your gay stuff, do you hope to change the world? Is it for gay people to say, this is my life, it's great to see it on screen? Is it for people like me, and maybe people a bit more narrow-minded than me, to think, you know what, this is...

I've had wrong views about all this. I think that was the case with queer as folk. Now I think they're just stories that I naturally tell, because I'm gay, and I am a gay writer, and I love writing gay stories, and so, like any drama, no straight writer has to sit and worry about that. Could I write a gay drama?

Yes, of course you could. Would that be acceptable? Well, I'd write a straight drama. I'd sit and write Wuthering Heights. I'd sit and write Romeo and Juliet. Gladly. Seriously. Okay. Yeah.

I'm going to use that as my imprimatur, that if anyone asks me, I'll say Russell T Davies said it was alright. Can I read it? I must say, this is completely sincere. When I was a kid, I watched an ITV drama called The Naked Civil Servant. Oh, amazing. And I'll be straight

with you, with a capital S. I was casually homophobic, certainly at that time. in the 1970s in the birmingham i mean i hadn't even questioned that um and it really did change it changed me i fact i when i met john hurt before i mentioned doctor the fact that he was in doctor who i mentioned the naked civil and he said i still get people saying this to me. Absolutely. And very rarely does TV really change you like that, but

it made this gay character, who looked in many ways sort of foppish and ridiculous, heroic, and above all witty, funny character, much funnier than all the guys who were threatening him and stuff, and that's what really won me over. And it it was amazing how he was a dog because i was in school when that was

transmitted me too i must have been about well i can't think i will but and kids loved him kids loved quentin crisp there was a story about quentin crisp uh walking down the street in all his finery and foppery with his cane and a man stood in front of him and said, you fairy. And he lifted up the cane and went, disappear. And we should tell that story in school. I couldn't have been in school if you were in school, could I now, unless I was a caretaker. Or just hanging around. Take that back.

But it was the fact that, I'm in a great big Welsh Swansea comprehensive school. It's a tough old school, man. The fact that kids were sitting there swapping Quentin Crisp anecdotes seems impossible now, but we did. No, I went to see him live off Broadway probably 30 years later because of that.

It's really... TV can change the world. And that piece of television was made by Verity Lambert who produced Doctor Who, the very first Doctor Who. Yeah, and do you know who wrote it? The grandfather of Pearl Mackie. Yeah. Philip Mackie. Philip Mackie.

Amazing. It's dripping with Doctor Who. And the war doctor as Quentin Crisp. Doctor Who was behind everything. Yes, exactly. Well, yeah, so it can change the world. I look forward very much to the very English scandal because it was a pretty amazing thing.

Can I say as well, if anyone fancies themselves as a writer, I think they should read The Writer's Tale, which is your book about writing Doctor Who. And it paints you as a slightly

mad, crazed, tortured soul. But hey, it's a good book. Who isn't? If anyone wrote how they feel at two o'clock in the morning, we'd all come across as mad, tortured souls. But if you are interested in writing, there's a lot of writing books that are all technical

and they divide plots into ABC and subplots and main plots and character arcs, which isn't my experience of writing at all. Writing is a job. It's a job under pressure. So this book is me actually writing, actually at two in the morning, with a budget and a deadline, to the real job.

And it's me moaning, but getting on with it. And actually, there's a lot of fun in the book as well. So it's how writing really is. It makes me feel better about my own writing, because there's ones when you've got, like, an episode of Torchwood that's got to be done, so you go clubbing. Yes. that yes and smoking yes i really like

that element of it it's i so i would certainly recommend that um i think our time is up it's so good to see you and again the book is called Now We Are 600, a collection of Time Lord verse. And it's available now in its pretty little, slightly sepia tinted hardback, which I like a lot. Russell, I love you. Continue to write brilliant stuff, please.

Thank you. I will, I promise.