It's a nostalgia Capaldi himself embraces, putting it in a bracket with "the Beatles and Sunday Night At The London Palladium, and school milk and bronchitis, and smog and little S-buckled belts". For many, there's also a strong emotional attachment to the programme that stems from childhood. Moffat has made it increasingly self-referential (the opening episode, Deep Breath, is littered with allusions to both age and Scottishness), but the show's detailed, complex and eccentric universe has always lent itself to fandom. That a significant portion of the programme's 21st-century regeneration has been created by Doctor Who fanatics is fitting. "I had to be very patient," he says, with a hint of nerdish derision, "because there were always very nice prop guys telling me how to work the Tardis, and I was like: 'I know how to work the Tardis! I've known for a very long time how to work the Tardis. Reminiscing about surreal on-set moments, he remembers the first few times he filmed in the Tardis. Even today during our conversation there are moments when he seems more like the trivia-addled president of a Doctor Who fan club than the actual Doctor himself, talking about the red-lined coat and Pertwee-esque pose in the promotional pictures, and the token William Hartnell lapel-hold he did on the live show ("They applauded for too long. In the live TV announcement, he was presented with a letter his 15-year-old self wrote to the Radio Times praising its Doctor Who coverage, which Capaldi sheepishly referred to as "the full anorak". As a teenager he inundated the production team with fan mail. Like David Tennant before him, and showrunner Steven Moffat (who wrote Doctor Who fan fiction), it's well known that Capaldi was once Doctor Who mad. The pressure doesn't just come from being the face of a powerful franchise for someone like Capaldi, becoming the Doctor has added layers of significance. But once he sits down, his hands, which he's contorting anxiously around the slots in the tabletop, give away at least some discomfort. On approach, he looks a bit like the ageing rock star he might have been (he was famously in punk band the Dreamboys with US chatshow host Craig Ferguson in his youth), wiry in dark glasses and heavy boots. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC/Adrian Rogersįor someone as established and respected as Capaldi, you get the feeling this kind of build-up – and the potential for freefall – is not ideal. ![]() Everybody loves monsters."Ĭapaldi's Doctor in pensive mode. "The sense that there's a bridge, that a hand can be extended, and you can step from the Earth, from the supermarket car park, into the Andromeda nebulae or whatever." He pauses for a second. "It is this relationship between the domestic and the epic," says Capaldi of what appeals to him about the programme. Part of Doctor Who's attraction lies in its imaginative potential: it's held a sense of wonder, awe and terror for generations - not bad for a show whose most enduring enemy resembles a slow-moving bin. ![]() In fact, the grey-blue hangar a couple of hundred metres down the road that houses the Doctor Who Experience – which on my way here I dismissed as a hollow money-spinner – is starting to look positively atmospheric.Īdmittedly, this sort of flagrant mundanity isn't totally out of keeping with the show itself. Even as Peter Capaldi – AKA Time Lord #12 – starts weaving his way through pretend medical staff, it still doesn't feel much like the home of a culturally momentous sci-fi franchise. Instead, they're scrubs-clad Casualty actors, lunch-breaking and lounging in the mid-June sun, overlooked by the cheerily vacant streets of long-running Welsh soap Pobol y Cwm. Not the sort of extinguished alien lifeforms you might expect to see at the home of Doctor Who. T he courtyard of the BBC studios in Cardiff is littered with bodies.
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