Russell T Davies on The Sarah Adventures

Sci-fi and fantasy magazine SFX have published a sort snippet of their interview with Russell T Davies, the writer of the upcoming Sarah Jane Adventures story 'Death of the Doctor' online.

The full interview will appear alongside a feature on the new series of SJA, and a chat with Matt Smith in the latest issue of the magazine, due for publication next Wednesday.

“For the first time ever, I went and watched old stuff,” Russell T Davies confesses. “We used to bring back monsters and I didn’t actually go and watch the old tapes, partly because I think the way you remember them is just as powerful as what they actually were. But I did go back and watch the end of ‘The Green Death’ [Jo Grant’s final story]. And I think it’s really important to preserve the absolute beauty of what [producer] Barry Letts and [script editor] Terrance Dicks did there.”

“We talked about it a lot beforehand,” says Davies. “I know there’s a feeling that she’d have got divorced, and there was a theory that she’d be living on her own in Wales in a little cottage – some of the novels did this – and you think, ‘Nice idea, but actually that’s absolutely betraying the way we left her’. We left her with the promise of happiness, of adventure, of love and joy, and you can’t be cynical and undercut that by saying, ‘Oh, she’s a drug addict now! Her husband left her, she’s lonely, her life is bitter’. That’s just interfering with classic Doctor Who and rewriting what we were promised. So I was absolutely strict about that.”

(Source: SFX)