The man who brought Doctor Who’s most persistent enemy back to TV is giving a reading in Liverpool on Saturday. Laura Davis meets Rob Shearman

‘WHAT a tremendous shame,” said Rob Shearman’s wife of his part in one of the most hotly anticipated TV moments of the 21st century.

Having written audio episodes of Doctor Who, the playwright had been brought in to resurrect his most remorseless foe for the first television series in more than 15 years.

But Daleks, his wife told him, were a bit rubbish.

So Shearman asked her to write down all the things that were silly about Skaro’s sons – including their sink plungers and inability to turn around at speed – and tackled each one in the script.

“Every single little thing you could laugh at Daleks about, I tried to make it so you couldn’t any more,” he says.

“They still do, of course, but it felt good at the time.”

An award-winning playwright, Shearman began writing for theatre after a disastrous audition for the National Youth Theatre.

Comedian David Walliams, who went to his school, was there on the same day – “he did rather better”.

Shearman was told, “quite grimly as if it were some sort of death sentence”, that he “wasn’t ever going to be anything more than a really mediocre actor”.

He didn’t like the sound of that, but by then he’d fallen in love with the theatre so he started writing plays instead and turned out to be far better than mediocre.

Before he had graduated from university, professional companies were putting on his work.

Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and acclaimed playwright Alan Ayckbourn have both produced his plays and, in 1993, he became the youngest person to become an Arts Council resident dramatist (at the Northcott Theatre, in Exeter).

Although he’d loved Doctor Who since the age of 11, hoping the Timelord would park his Tardis in the school playground and whisk him off for a spot of intergalactic adventuring, he had not anticipated ever writing a TV episode starring his favourite character because he “thought it would be awful”.

“Doctor Who had achieved this sort of stigma of being light entertainment and it seemed more likely they would cast Ant and Dec in it than a great leading actor like Christopher Eccleston,” he explains.

But then Russell T Davies was announced as the producer and the Timelord’s fate suddenly seemed bright.

“I’d just changed agents and I’d said rather snottily that I didn’t want to be writing anyone else’s television shows, I wanted to be creating my own,” says Shearman, who is giving a reading of his new collection of short stories, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, on Saturday as part of Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall festival.

“I think she assumed I would immediately turn it down and of course I almost bit her arm off. I went into my first meeting with the BBC kind of convinced that when they saw me they would say ‘Oh no, hang on, we’ve made a mistake, we don’t want you doing this at all, we thought you were Dennis Potter’.”

As his stage plays and short fiction are based around “ordinary people in ordinary relationships suddenly being confronted with something that is utterly extraordinary and having to deal with it”, he was a natural choice for the job.

He was given a location – an underground base in Utah – and asked to use a Doctor Who audio play he had written as the starting point for the new episode. At that point, Eccleston and Billie Piper had not yet been cast, so Shearman had to write the characters without them in mind. He also ran into trouble when the BBC announced it had not acquired the rights to use a Dalek from the estate of their late creator, Terry Nation, and the playwright was forced to rework the storyline with a creepy alien child in its place.

A week later, negotiations were sealed and the lone Dalek, which realises its futility after absorbing Rose’s DNA, was back in the plot.

In the meantime, however, Shearman was discovering the discomfort of having a work-in-progress being discussed in public.

“It was the weirdest thing because it almost felt like you couldn’t escape from it,” he recalls.

“I’d go out for a walk trying to clear the cobwebs and I would pass newsagents selling papers all about how there were no Daleks in Doctor Who.”

He still receives the occasional hate letter – sent by email, naturally – telling him he has ruined the Daleks.

And, yes, he does know that they were able to levitate before his 2005 episode, but at the time listened silently to fans’ protests on the subject because the BBC saw Daleks climbing stairs as a major marketing point.

Shearman’s a big fan of the new Doctor, Matt Smith: “What’s great about him is that he’s genuinely nuts.

“I’ve been to a few of the readthroughs and you just hear this strange take on the lines because Matt is actually filtering them.

“What could actually be a fairly formulaic thing to say suddenly, in Matt’s head, becomes quite alien and weird.”

And the new, brightly coloured Daleks?

“They’re like iPhone Daleks, aren’t they?” he says.

“I’m a grumpy old fan so in some ways anything that’s a change . . . but I’ve not seen enough of them yet to decide if I like them.

“I’m just hurt because obviously to make those Daleks work they had to physically exterminate the one that I wrote for.”

ROB SHEARMAN will be reading from his new book, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, at the Contemporary Urban Centre, Liverpool, on Saturday. Details at www. writingonthewall.org.uk