SFX talks to Toby Whithouse

SFX have posted an interview with the writer of Doctor Who: The Vampires of Venice, Toby Whithouse, online.

“I’m going to get a reputation as the go-to guy for vampires,” admits Whithouse laughingly, before going on to explain that originally, story six wasn’t going to have anything to do with bloodsuckers.

“Basically, I was going to write a completely different episode. The Doctor was lost in some kind of labyrinth. And we developed that for a while and everybody was really pleased with it, but then executive producers Steven Moffat and Piers Wenger said, ‘You know what? This is kind of similar to another couple of episodes that we’re doing. Can we think about something else?’”

So instead, Whithouse was asked to come up with ideas for, “a big bold romantic episode” that would also be “a good jumping on point. So that if you’d been in a cave for the last five years, and you hadn’t seen Doctor Who, that episode six would be a good place to start. It’s a sort of reboot episode.

“They said, ‘You can set it anywhere in the world that you want, but it should be romantic.’ So I thought of Venice, which is one of my favourite places in the world. And it’s obviously renowned as being a very romantic city. So that’s how we ended up there.

Click HERE to read the full interview.