Chris Chibnall talks to SFX about his Silurian two-parter, here are some excerpts:
It’s been a couple of years since you finished on Torchwood. How was it coming back to the Doctor Who universe?
It was great and it was unexpected –I thought I’d done a lot of Torchwood and a Doctor Who and moved onto other things, so when Steven [Moffat] emailed it was very out of the blue. He just emailed saying, “the Doctor needs you!” one Saturday morning.
So was bringing the Silurians back your idea or his?
Piers [Wenger, executive producer] said we’ve got one word to say to you, come and meet us next week. I was thinking, what on Earth is that word? Then they said “Silurians” – and that it was a two-parter. That was kind of it, really – Steven said, “I want Silurians and I want a big drill, off you go.”
Was that the extent of your brief?
Yeah, pretty much, so I went back and read the original novel, Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters, and watched the original story, and tried to get a sense of what [writer] Malcolm Hulke had envisioned for it, not just on screen but also when he had the complete freedom with the novel – where he took the Silurians, how much more developed they were, how much more characterised they were than had been possible on screen. First of all I said we have to have a big city, and from then it was very much that I wanted a tiny community on the surface against a huge Silurian city underneath the Earth.
It’s over 25 years since the Silurians last appeared on TV. Does that mean you have to write assuming none of the audience has seen them before?
It’s not like with the Daleks and Cybermen where you can perhaps assume that there is a certain degree of knowledge or awareness among the general viewership. We start from the basic position of knowing nothing about them, and then introduce them in the most exciting and scary way possible for people who’ve never seen them before. It’s such a small percentage of your viewers who’ll know the Silurians that you really have to be thinking for the mainstream audience, and hopefully there’s enough to keep the old fans going. The whole brief from Steven was to bring them to a whole new audience, so you have to write for the new audience, but equally I’ve seen that story, I love that story, I love those creatures, so you have to find a balance while telling it for a seven o’clock audience on a Saturday night on BBC One.
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