Doctor Who: 14 Cool Details James Moran Just Revealed About The Fires Of Pompeii

3. The Inspiration To Save The Family Came From A Course That Showrunner Russell T Davies Did At School

Doctor Who The Fires of Pompeii David Tennant Catherine Tate Donna Noble
BBC/Twitter: @jamesmoran

In a few different tweets, Moran mentioned that he's always been fascinated with the subject of Pompeii, and that certain inspirations for the episode came from the Cambridge Latin course, a series of textbooks used to teach Latin to school students.

In particular, some of the character names - like Caecilius, Metella (Caecilius' wife) and Quintus (Caecilius' son) - came from one of the books in the course.

Unlike the episode though, this book kills off Caecilius and his family when Vesuvius erupts. And so, when the time came to write The Fires of Pompeii, Moran - along with then-showrunner Russell T Davies, who did the Cambridge Latin course at school - used this opportunity to give the family a happier ending.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.