10 HUGE Revelations About Disney Doctor Who In Russell T Davies' New Memoir
There’s no Doctor Who Christmas special this year. But you can read all about it in RTD’s new book!
Towards the end of his first stint as Doctor Who showrunner, Russell T Davies shared his experience of the job in a book called The Writer’s Tale.
Unsurprisingly, given the breakdown of the Disney deal and RTD's premature exit from the show, there hasn’t been a Writer’s Tale for RTD2 (yet).
But while he’s not been showrunning Doctor Who, RTD has taken the opportunity to write a memoir, The Queerest of Folk, covering his 40+ years working in television.
While it’s by no means a Doctor Who book, it does contain some interesting new tidbits about RTD2 and the Doctor Who Disney deal, and how it might have continued, had things gone differently.
Fom last-minute rewrites and unmade stories to the reality of working with Disney and the truth about the 2026 Christmas special, RTD is finally breaking his silence – and needless to say, there are plenty of fascinating details to chew on...
10. RTD Wanted Doctor Who To Be More Like Stranger Things
RTD has previously spoken openly about his Doctor Who influences, like how his 2005 reinvention of the show took cues from Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
More recently, Ruby’s Season 1 arc was a reaction to Rey’s arc in the Star Wars sequels. And UNIT literally got its own Avengers Tower!
But what inspired the show’s recent move into fantasy and the supernatural? As it turns out, Stranger Things, which he’d been watching around the same time he was approached to return to Who. He said:
"[I was] envious of the way [Stranger Things] used fantasy more than hard science-fiction, wishing that Doctor Who could stretch more into the fantastic and make up the rules a bit more. So all of these thoughts were spinning away when they said: will you come back and run it?"
It’s a nice thought but what RTD missed is that the fantasy in Stranger Things still had a really dark edge, like the gruesome Vecna and Demogorgons creatures.
And rather poetically, both Stranger Things and RTD2 culminated with incredibly polarising finales, so in the end I guess Russell got his wish!