Doctor Who: 13 Cool Details Steven Moffat Just Revealed About The Girl In The Fireplace

12. The Episode Was Being Written Before Series 1 Aired

Doctor Who The Girl in the Fireplace TARDIS
BBC/Twitter: @StevenWMoffat

Getting a full season of Doctor Who on the air every single year is an enormous challenge, especially during the Davies and Moffat eras, when they had to make thirteen regular episodes - and one special - per run.

So many original ideas have to be thought up, so many crazy sets have to be built, so many costumes have to be created, and so many special effects shots have to be rendered. It's a very complicated show to make, and because it needs to be produced relatively quickly, there's often a bit of overlap between the production of separate seasons.

Case in point: Moffat was actually writing The Girl in the Fireplace before Christopher Eccleston's 2005 series had started airing.

Rose - Eccleston's first episode - aired in March 2005, while The Girl in the Fireplace was filmed in October 2005. This means that Moffat had a good six or seven months to write his script, which is quite a long time for a single story.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!