Doctor Who 50th Anniversary: Mark Gatiss To Write Early Years Drama
BBC2 drama will show the genesis of a TV phenomenon
Mark Gatiss is to write BBC2 drama about the creation of Doctor Who to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary next year.
Broadcast reports that it will be called An Adventure In Space And Time . It’ll be 90-minutes long and feature the key personalities involved in creating the show (so presumably Verity Lambert, Sydney Newman and, you’d hope, William Hartnell). It will be produced by the BBC’s drama unit in Wales.
Steven Moffat will executive produce alongside BBC Wales’ Caroline Skinner.
“The story of Doctor Who is the story of television, so it’s fitting in the anniversary year that we make our most important journey back in time to see how the TARDIS was launched,” says Moffat.
Long-time Who fan Mark Gatiss, a former Gentleman of the League, has both written for and acted in the new series of Doctor Who . He also wrote the comedy sketches for the BBC’s Doctor Who Night back in 1999 which featured a very fanciful planning meeting between a Sydney Newman-type figure and a budding producer talking about a new time travel show the BBC was going to produce.
The real question is… will Gatiss cast himself as Hartnell? Can he resist the temptation?
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Dave is a TV and film journalist who specializes in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He's written books about film posters and post-apocalypses, alongside writing for SFX Magazine for many years.