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In an extract from this week’s Radio Times, Neil Gaiman sets the scene for his highly anticipated return to Doctor Who, Nightmare in Silver.
Speaking in March at the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in London, Gaiman spoke at length about his return, including this spoiler free encapsulation of the penultimate episodes plot:
“The Doctor has been talked by Clara into taking the two kids she looks after, Artie and Angie, for an excursion, a day out, and he decides to take them to Hedgewick’s World, the biggest, best and most wonderful amusement park in the galaxy, a quarter of a million years in the future, because he has a golden ticket and it gets four people in for free, gets you free ice creams and it gets you to the front of any line, which is great because the lines for the Spacey Zoomer can go on for weeks. And that’s where it starts.”
Naturally, given the Doctors luck with plans, things soon turn sinister:
“Unfortunately, it also starts with them discovering that Hedgewick’s World has been closed for several years and there’s almost nobody on it now except for a small army troop on manoeuvres and a mad old showman named Mr Webley who landed his spaceship there after it closed and is now there with a Cyberman that plays chess. That’s where it begins. This is also 1,000 years after the end of the big human/Cyberman war – where we won.”
While the meat of the episode will be taken up by the Doctor and his recently upgraded foe, there’s also a stalwart cast of familiar genre and TV faces to bolster the adventure including Being Human‘s Jason Watkins, Return of the Jedi star Warwick Davis and former EastEnder Tamzin Outhwaite:
“Jason Watkins plays Mr Webley, this wonderful, slightly alcoholic old showman touring the universe with a waxworks and a chess-playing Cyberman. Warwick Davis is his henchman, who is called Porridge. He’s affable, sweet and helps Webley and cannot wait to get off this planet.
Tamzin Outhwaite is a captain named Alice Ferren who’s in charge of the platoon doing troop exercises on an abandoned amusement park planet and as we discover, as the story goes on, it’s actually a punishment platoon. They’re all people who’ve got into trouble. She was sent there for disobeying orders. They’re not the kind of crack troop you’d want if it so happened that a Cyberman moves in – a new model Cyberman that we haven’t seen, who is absolutely lethal and hyper-intelligent.”
You can read the full interview with Neil Gaiman in this week’s Radio Times (published Tuesday 7 May).
An extended version of the interview will be online after Nightmare in Silver has aired on Saturday 11 May.
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