Russell T Davies - On Dr Who, Grief and Gay Representation on TV

Russell T Davies has spent decades creating some of Britain’s most beloved and groundbreaking television. After studying English at Oxford, he went from writing for children’s programmes and Coronation Street to creating Queer As Folk in 1999 - a show that changed the conversation around gay representation on TV. Since then, he’s written hit after hit, from Bob & Rose and A Very English Scandal to Years and Years, It’s A Sin and his hugely successful revival of Doctor Who. He’s won four BAFTAs and was awarded an OBE in 2008. In this episode we talk about where his obsession and passion for TV came from, how his exceptionally busy mind works, losing his husband to a brain tumour, his love of Dr Who and…finding love again. His new memoir, The Queerest of Folk, is out on 8th October. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 02:35 TV Obsession Origins 03:24 Memoir and Andrew 08:35 AIDS and Its a Sin 10:36 Queer as Folk Shockwaves 12:37 Failure to Drive 16:45 Writing in Images 28:05 Early Illustration Gigs 28:54 Obsessed With Drawing 30:20 Losing the Habit 31:52 Comics and Story Beats 33:54 Writing Geniuses Doctor Who 37:13 Staying a Fan 41:41 Legacy and Family Roots 49:59 Aging Love and Goodbye 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: When I dream I invent people who don’t exist. I’ve saved for decades, I saved for a rainy day, and then one day it rained. Please never get rid of the Tardis. 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Russell’s memoir, The Queerest Of Folk is available to buy now: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-queerest-of-folk-a-life-in-television-russell-t-davies/a290496f474a1f8c Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Phoebe Waller-Bridge - swap.fm/l/gTCOCJUmXX9t22mTABSa Bernardine Evaristo - swap.fm/l/EH5cvO3uPdNCQN9tYyiJ 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Russell answer listener questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://lnk.to/7i0moR Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: askhowtofail.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And if you look at my stuff, look, my stuff breaks down into Doctor Who and gay. And really, that's all I've done. It's quite right that I don't drive. I would murder people. I basically have never left the pram. I always save for a rainy day and then one day it rained.

• 0:12Elizabeth Day?

  How to Fail is brought to you by Arla Lacto Free. Delicious dairy with all the taste, easier to digest. Welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that treats all failure as a learning opportunity. Before we get into this episode, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe to ensure that you never miss a single conversation.

• 0:36Elizabeth Day?

  Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels, but I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me. Ernesta makes designer quality rugs custom cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home. I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples

• 1:20Elizabeth Day?

  for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom. Russell T Davies was born and raised in Swansea, the child of two classics teachers. His home was filled with talk of myths and heroes and the downfall of civilizations, themes he has made central in his work as one of the UK's foremost TV writers and showrunners. Davis read English at Oxford and started out on youth programmes before writing for Coronation Street

• 2:03Elizabeth Day?

  and in 1999 blazing onto the scene with Queer as Folk. The groundbreaking show with its frank depictions of gay sex garnered controversy and popularity in equal measure, attracting 3.5 million viewers per episode. From there, Davis wrote hit after hit. Bob and Rose, A Very English Scandal, Years and Years, It's a Sin, and of course, a wildly successful revival of the long-running BBC show Doctor Who. He was awarded an OBE in 2008, has been nominated for countless BAFTAs and has won four. His work is perhaps best described as radical with a giant beating heart.

• 2:47Elizabeth Day?

  In his new memoir, The Queerest of Folk, Davis himself compares it to battling through fog and soup and sewage, which might lead to a million dead ends. But maybe his fellow writer Frank Cottrell Boyce put it best. When asked what his greatest contribution was to British TV drama, Cottrell Boyce answered simply, saving it from extinction. Russell T Davies, welcome to How to Fail.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Thank you for that good old Frank.

• 3:15Elizabeth Day?

  And a good old Frank.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Checks in the post. Lovely man, really wonderful man.

• 3:20Elizabeth Day?

  It was an education and a joy reading your book, The Queerest of Folk. Because I love TV almost as much as you do.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Almost.

• 3:29Elizabeth Day?

  And not only have you written so much of the TV that has shaped our last few decades, but you love consuming it.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:38Elizabeth Day?

  What is it about TV?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  To this day. The other day, my boyfriend never watches TV. It's all clips and streaming with him. And the other day I made him sit down and watch the afternoon quizzes on ITV, like Tipping Point and then The Chase. By the end, he was completely sold.

• 3:52Elizabeth Day?

  Good, you're doing the Lord's work.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  He was completely devoted to it. He's like, that's one of the best afternoons I've had in ages. So it still works.

• 3:59Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, thank you. Thank you for educating him, quite frankly. What was your earliest memory of television?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  It's literally Doctor Who. I hate to be obvious, but you can look up the dates. I was three years old and William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, the first Doctor, into the second Doctor. I remember that and it's missing from the archives. If you could take a little wire and download my memory onto the screen, we'd recover a lost episode. I genuinely remember it. I was terrified, absolutely terrified.

• 4:27Elizabeth Day?

  What was the experience of writing a book like rather than a TV?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Kind of lovely. I mean, I like, I like writing full stop. I love the fact it's called a memoir. I find that very posh, a memoir. I thought memoirs were written like in Parisian attics with a quill and I'd be dying of consumption. It's a memoir. That's what that makes me laugh. I never called it that. The publishers called it that. It was a memoir. I thought it was just me, really. For example, there's a lot about my husband in there, my lovely husband who passed away eight years ago this month. And it's nice to kind of bring him back to life and memorialise him and kind of inscribe him. He'd be laughing so much at the thought that he was in a book anywhere in print. So yeah, I'm really happy to do that.

• 5:06Elizabeth Day?

  Your late husband, Andrew, I found those chapters so extraordinarily moving to read.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 5:12Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so sorry for your loss and I hadn't realised it was a month, this month, eight years ago.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Weirdly, September's always very strange for me because he'd been ill for years, but he was, started being specifically ill on the 29th of August. About the 29th of September, he was dead. The month literally went like that. So every September is strange for me. I can literally remember the gradations of his illness going down and down and down and down. So yeah, it's forever written into September that.

• 5:42Elizabeth Day?

  How do you cope with that muscle memory?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I like remembering it. I'm glad that it's, I'm happy to remember it. If I went through a September without thinking about it, I think that was rather odd. And sometimes you do, you miss a day. You go, oh, that was the day you went into hospital. And I kind of berate myself for missing things. So I'm always happy to think of it. I think it's like, I don't find that painful. I find it natural.

• 6:05Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. He died of a specific brain tumour.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Glaucoma multiforme, yeah.

• 6:12Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so glad you said it and I didn't have to.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Long words, yeah.

• 6:15Elizabeth Day?

  And we'll perhaps talk a bit more about it later, but he was given this prognosis, which he didn't want to know his prognosis.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  No, never asked. He never knew how long he had. But you look at the statistics, he had about 18 months to live and he lived for eight years. And sometimes I wonder if he lived for eight years because he never had a prognosis. He was never expecting to die, which I don't like to give that out as advice. It's like, that's how it worked for him. If you might be suffering out there from that or know people with it, everyone's different. Maybe for some people, knowing the prognosis helps them, helps them put their life in order. But for him, I think, I mean, there were many, many times in those eight years where we'd end up in casualty at four in the morning and he'd have the worst headache. He'd be throwing up and he never went into hospital thinking this could be it. This is it. He'd just think, oh, this is annoying. I'm in real pain. I've got to fix this. So maybe that helped.

• 7:03Elizabeth Day?

  How is it with your boyfriend now?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:06Elizabeth Day?

  Do you talk about Andrew with him?

• 7:08Speaker 00

  All the time. My lovely boyfriend, Oliver, is completely respectful. And, and when I make him sit and watch The Chase, I'm like, Andrew, love this. Watch this, like that, all the time, non-stop. And there's still, I still sit there going, oh God, there's a million stories, a million anecdotes. And anything in my house will remind me of something that happened on and on. I go, he hasn't complained yet, anyway.

• 7:30Elizabeth Day?

  You cared for Andrew during those eight years. And you've described yourself in various ways as sort of addicted to work and TV. During that time, you did less, but you produced two of my favourite shows for yours.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Oh, right.

• 7:45Elizabeth Day?

  You wrote It's a Sin or It Got Made and Years and Years.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:51Elizabeth Day?

  Both of them astonishing and both of them dark. As well as being warm and wonderful and the classic Russell T Davies mix.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:02Elizabeth Day?

  When you think about those shows now, do you feel, gosh, that was really enmeshed with what was going on in my life?

• 8:07Speaker 00

  I wonder, I mean, you're getting old anyway. It's, when you put it like that, I kind of think my work has taken a darker turn, ending with tiptoe recently, which is the darkest thing in the world. And maybe that's part of it. Maybe that his illness and death has darkened me, but I'm getting older anyway. God, I could sit here and talk for three hours about my arthritis. That's, that's the real bastard thing. So maybe that's aging or maybe that's maturing. Or maybe, I think, I think, I think there was more of a happiness in my stuff that's maybe slightly fading, but maybe that's just being 63. I don't know.

• 8:39Elizabeth Day?

  It's a sin in particular. You write in the book about how it had taken a lifetime for you to be ready to write that.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's funny, when I look at the book now, what I hadn't realised was when I come to write something, how long it's been sitting waiting in my mind. I wasn't aware of that, except as I wrote chapter after chapter, I'd go, oh, I've thought of this 20 years before I wrote it. And that's a constant theme. I go, oh, wow, I didn't know that. And there still is that store of ideas waiting there. I once read somewhere, I once read this great saying that said, you will have every idea you will ever have before the age of 16 and you spend the rest of your life coming to terms with that. Now, whether that's true or not, doesn't matter, it's interesting.

• 9:21Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, it's very interesting.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  And if you look at my stuff, look, my stuff breaks down into Doctor Who and gay. Really, that's all I've done. And that's all there before I was 16. That was there ticking away. All I've done is like, write different versions of that ever since. So maybe there's something in that.

• 9:37Elizabeth Day?

  It's a sin in particular because you were tackling the AIDS crisis. And there was a moment in your memoir, The Queer as Folk, where you quote a friend of yours. And it was, gosh, it was such a strong quote. I actually sent it to a friend of mine who'd lived through the same period.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Which one?

• 9:54Elizabeth Day?

  It was about how you sent your friends back home to die.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  In their childhood bedrooms while their parents kept them hidden from the neighbours. I mean, a five hour drama, and I could have just done that one sentence, actually. What an astonishing time. And that lived with me for 40 years. I mean, the thing about It's a Sin was that when the AIDS crisis came along, I fit that age. I was 18 in 1981. I was leaving home in 1981 when that virus first appeared in Britain. And, and I've lived through that crisis and I've lived through the prep and the invention of medication. And, and now the astonishing world we have now, where you can just take a pill a day and be completely fine. We're untransmittable, undetectable means untransmittable, et cetera. I mean, what a, what a story. And I, I had to address the Manchester Vigil the other day.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  And which is a very sad occasion where we remember all those we've lost and all those who fought. But actually, also, the story of HIV and AIDS is one of the greatest successes in medical history. Because there's still no cure, but it's being beaten. And, and, and that was initially led by the public, by the community. But when the government wasn't paying attention, when the NHS wasn't paying enough attention at the beginning. It was literally a community uprising of people who came together and raised money and demanded research and demanded medicine. And demanded better conditions. It's an astonishing thing to read. Along with, like, we recently had the Covid vaccine, the creation of that was an astonishing success.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  But was piggybacking off a lot of what had been learned throughout the HIV years. So it's a tragic story. It's not only a tragic story. That's what I love about it.

• 11:32Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, that's a, a great metaphor for so much of your work, really.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  I suppose, yeah.

• 11:38Elizabeth Day?

  Queer as Folk. Now, until I read. Absolutely, filth.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Filth.

• 11:43Elizabeth Day?

  There was no scene as linked to rimming. But I want to talk about the rimming scene.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  I know, my career comes down to this in the end. Hello, welcome, everyone.

• 11:52Elizabeth Day?

  I had forgotten that it was 1999.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, a long time ago now, yeah.

• 11:57Elizabeth Day?

  When they were discussing in the House of Lords, lowering the age of consent in the Home of Sexual Couples.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  What a primitive world that was, yes.

• 12:02Elizabeth Day?

  Unbelievable.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  And section 28 was still there then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, amazing.

• 12:05Elizabeth Day?

  And you wrote a rimming scene. Did you?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  I did.

• 12:08Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us about writing the rimming scene and, and whether you thought, gosh, this isn't it. I, I don't know whether this is going to get.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  I, I think, I think a lot of us thought a lot of Queer as Folk would never get broadcast. At the same time, that's not true. Two things are true simultaneously. And also, Channel 4 exists to show that kind of stuff. And, and still has, has, has supported me for many, many, for decades now. So it felt like the right thing to do. But I remember very specifically thinking. I wanted something that was outside Nathan's imagination. Because there's a young, gay boy, completely closeted and silent. He would have been fantasising about all sorts of things. He would have been masturbating over all sorts of things. And he would have had ideals and wishes and hopes and dreams. And I don't think that would have been in his imagination. I needed something absolutely new to happen to him that night.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  And literally bear in mind the lack of access to porn in those days. What a simple world that was. And now, of course, it beamed into the brains of eight year olds. It's like, it's rotting our society right at the heart. But then, it was, it was precious and strange and belonged in London only, in the backstreets of London. So it needed something absolutely new and revolutionary and brilliant to happen to Nathan that night. To just confirm and make him joyous and, and say, yes, you're, you're on the right path now. And, and I wanted that to be a physical. I didn't want to be people talking. It was like, hey, be gay, glad to come out. It's like I needed an explosion in his head. And that's what that was.

• 13:40Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD. Because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable. So you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 14:25Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Your first failure is your failure to learn how to drive.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yes, to this day. Also, I've saved many people's lives, but so this is not a failure, it's a lifesaver. It's like, I can't, and it terrifies me. To this day, I sit in a car, you can drive, I bet. I, I sit there thinking, you're a genius. You're a genius driving that thing. How you do it. It's quite right that I don't drive. I would murder people. On my last, I had three tests. On my last test, right, you're at a junction. Is that what it's called? The things, roads, and I'm at the wheel. So I'm at a, I'm like a crossroads and I want to turn, turn right, says the instructor. So there's oncoming traffic. On the test, I turned into the oncoming traffic.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  All the oncoming traffic had to stop while I turned right. And I thought that was right. That's what I'd be like as a driver.

• 15:26Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  I actually thought that was right, because even on a test, I was kind of distracted. And not taking it seriously or thinking I was king of the road or something. Yes, this is my right of way. Thank you very much. That when, at the end of that test, he said, I'm sorry, you failed. I was, oh, quite right, too. Yes, absolutely. No complaints here. That was my third test. And I got worse with every test. And at that point, I came in at thinking, right, so I must have been about 25 or something, 24. And I came out of that test thinking, right, now you've got to earn enough money to get taxis for the rest of your life. And that's what I've done.

• 16:00Elizabeth Day?

  That's the motivation.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  That's what I've done. Honestly, it's like, and, and I swear, it's like, there must be five or six occasions in my life. Where I've really stood thinking, God, I wish I could drive now. But I think every driver has five or six occasions in their life where their car's broken down, where they wish the same thing. So I think I've kind of levelled out along the way. And I think the money level's out. I haven't had to buy a car, all those taxi fares, and I love a black cab. They're dying now. Won't get Uber, absolutely refuse. Union breaking bastards. Can't bear them, won't, won't allow them in my phone even. Won't even have the app. Give me a black cab.

• 16:34Elizabeth Day?

  Totally with you. Why do you think you're such a bad driver? You mentioned there being distracted, and I wonder if there's part of you that is so interested in other people? That you're constantly looking out the window?

• 16:46Speaker 00

  That is part of it, looking at, oh, that, look at that. God help you, there's a sexy man on the pavement. I'm like, yeah, like that. Also, I was terrified of it. Absolutely terrified. I think because I knew what a bad driver I was. And for me, a lesson was like a test. You know, people scared before their test. I was like that before every lesson. I took no joy in sitting there. I was never happy. I never felt right. Honestly, I hate it. I hate it to this day.

• 17:12Elizabeth Day?

  Do you find it easy to trust other people who are driving you?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't, yes, I don't think about it. Yes, I'm like, I basically have never left the pram. This is what I've done. I've just had a life where I get taken everywhere. Like, that's good for me. Thank you very much. What a lovely day.

• 17:26Elizabeth Day?

  Because you also said you don't ride a bicycle.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  No, no, I ride a bike. It's like, no, I, I tried someone else's bike. I fell off once or whatever. That's a real coward. I am six foot six, it's a long way to fall.

• 17:37Elizabeth Day?

  But it's interesting, you're not a coward in your work. You definitely sort of push things and take risks.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  No, that's true. That's, I'm not going to break my elbow doing it though.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  I'll go headfirst to the windscreen.

• 17:48Elizabeth Day?

  Not yet.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  It's like no physical danger. It's quite, is it timid? I don't seem timid, do I?

• 17:54Elizabeth Day?

  No.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And yet, I am when it comes to, if you put me, if you did a test and put me around a wheel now, that's when you'd see me as timid. I'd be, oh my God, oh my God. What, you press on these things with your feet? I can't believe it all works. The gear? Oh my God. No, no, no, it's terrifying.

• 18:09Elizabeth Day?

  I totally get you. I find it deeply rational to be terrified of driving, even though I do drive.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:14Elizabeth Day?

  I have to make a conscious, I find it easier when I'm driving on my own because I don't have the responsibility of passengers.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:20Elizabeth Day?

  I have to make a conscious effort not to imagine a worst case scenario, which is like a terrible motorway pileup.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:26Elizabeth Day?

  And I can see that image creeping into my head and I have to replace it with a positive image of me arriving somewhere safely.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  So you actually think that? And, oh my God, wow.

• 18:36Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I'm allowed on the road.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  See, I've never driven down a motorway, so I've never, ever done that.

• 18:39Elizabeth Day?

  There we go.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Never ever done it. And thank God, I'd be, oh no, I'd be, I'd be dangerous.

• 18:44Elizabeth Day?

  Talking of imagery, you, you write in your book about how you write, how you write TV scripts. And how you often start with an image and there's a man or woman sitting there.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:56Elizabeth Day?

  And she's furious with him.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:58Elizabeth Day?

  And you just, and that plops into your mind and then you have to explore it. Can you tell us a little bit more about your?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Or it's, it's funny writing. It's like, all day, every day, I'm turning things into dialogue. And I've typed so much that actually I see it in chunks of dialogue. I can hear you talking and it's chunks. Then I reply like this, and then I start to invent, I mean, I'm thinking about what I'm saying now. But if we're out there chatting, I'm kind of absorbing everyone and I'm turning it into dialogue. And I am literally. Imagining imaginary people all the time in my head, not just, not just when I'm sitting at my desk, not just when I'm going to sleep, night and day, there were people popping up. And, and if someone out there had said a funny line about Christmas, I'd allocate that to someone in my head, oh, right, she could say that, that woman, and I don't even know who she is.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  And maybe twenty years later, I'll find a place for that line. I literally sometimes find myself writing lines that I've thought of to say for years. And not just thought of the lines as a piece of, as like a sentence in my head, but someone saying it. It's a bit mad, isn't it? It's like ghost images in my head. They're not even ghostly, they're like real people. I think the most interesting thing in the world that we never talk about is that when we dream, we invent people.

• 20:12Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Do you do that? It's, it's, it's like, I invent people in absolute detail who don't exist. How do we do that? Why do we do that? Why, why not? I'm, I can see people in my dreams with freckles and hair and their clothes and everything. And then they're gone. And, um, so I'm slightly like that waking as well. It's, it's more vague, the image, oh, God, I just sound nuts now.

• 20:35Elizabeth Day?

  You don't at all, you don't.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  And I don't know if it's an argument, oh, my God, I'll be walking around my house, doing the washing up and, or washing the telly or going up and downstairs. And two people come and having an argument in my head, completely unconnected to any script I'm writing. I don't mean it's a script. I mean, it's like they're arguing, I, you'll hear something on the radio. The radio will say it's foggy today or something. And then two people will start playing that like table tennis in my head. It's foggy today. Well, you can't go then, can you? What makes you think I'm gonna go? Where are you going? And off they go. And sometimes, that sounds like nonsense, but sometimes you get to a good line that way.

• 21:12Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Well, I'm going because blah, blah, blah. Oh, good line. Like, and that gets kind of stored as a little treasure in my head then.

• 21:19Elizabeth Day?

  Fascinating.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  It's non-stop.

• 21:21Elizabeth Day?

  It's almost like you're a medium.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  I'm very clearly a large.

• 21:26Elizabeth Day?

  Like the other Ross.

• 21:30Elizabeth Day?

  It's almost like you're picking up on some kind of collective consciousness.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  It is, except there's no such thing. And, you know, it's like, don't get religious with me now, no such thing. But it's like, it is weird and, and it's also, it's in enormous comfort as well. And it does mean that when I'm doing a script, the characters in the script do do that as well. They kind of march to the front.

• 21:51Elizabeth Day?

  You mentioned in the book that Andrew, before he was diagnosed, would get headaches and then sudden, would sometimes get images of people, like a smiling Edwardian lady.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  He would have, it turned out to be a form of epilepsy. He would have, um, when, when we realised he was starting to become ill, maybe, maybe I've got a form of epilepsy. He would see in his mind, not in real life, he would see in his mind, he would see an Edwardian lady smiling at him sarcastically, and he would feel sick. Can you imagine? He'd be like, like, and I'd be absolutely going, what? I mean, as a man full of images in my head myself, I was like, what? What, what, what? And then it's funny, cause I went and did like, it was the feeling sick that was a worry. And then I'd get blinding headaches, do you think that's something strange going on here? I went did my little internet searches and I just used all the wrong words. I used images, hallucinations I typed, idetic images I typed, cause I thought I was clever.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  And the only word I didn't use was seizures. If I typed in seizures, we'd have got to his diagnosis six months earlier. Cause I thought seizures were your classic tonic-clonic fit and the stuff you see on casualty. Seizures can take any form. Seizures can take the form of seeing an Edwardian lady smiling you sarcastically. Isn't that weird?

• 23:05Elizabeth Day?

  It is. I've never come across that.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Never had any idea. And then after his first op- operations, he had to take a lot of that epilepsy medication because it turned nasty as well. He starts seeing people, like they were just people in the garden, trying to get into the windows. And it was like, what? And then even in the shower, he thought someone was standing behind him. That was, that was the worst of his illness actually, and very quickly. And it was funny, cause like his regular doctor was away, so they sent the psychologist who sat there saying, does the television ever talk to you? And I was sitting there going, no, it's not that. And you're supposed to shut up. And the sessions, I was that annoying husband going, shut up, like that. And I said, no, no, he's not going mad. He genuinely thinks there's someone in the shower with him. When the right doctor came back, Dr. McBane, who was just brilliant, who just said, oh, that's, that's a seizure, that's epilepsy.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  So she upped his, uh, epilepsy, epilepsy medication and they vanished. I mean, I was at my most powerless then, like, there isn't, there isn't anyone there. But the nasty different shapes and forms that can take is like, wow.

• 24:06Elizabeth Day?

  Andrew was a civil servant, so a different world, incredibly supportive of you and your career. You sound like you had a wonderful relationship.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Oh, he's lovely, yeah.

• 24:15Elizabeth Day?

  And I know that this is an impossibly large question, but I also know it will help so many people because there are so many people grieving at any given time.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:24Elizabeth Day?

  How did you cope? Are you coping with that loss and that grief?

• 24:30Speaker 00

  You just do, don't you? It's like, and what you realise is everyone does. I mean, actually, finding me someone without grief, they're gonna be quite young. A friend of mine recently said, oh, I've been to my first funeral, he was forty. I was like, where have you been? What's happened to you? What little gilded cage have you been living in? It's extraordinary, isn't it? Forty. It's like, what the hell? And I always kind of say to myself that the day after Hiroshima, everyone went to work. It's like the worst thing in the world happened. Everyone got up the next day and went to work, cause you've got to. And you do, you say, I have no magic solutions to this. I wish, Elizabeth, I could sit here and say, ah, do this and think of that. But there isn't a magic solution, other than the fact that you need to earn a wage, you need to have your tea. I remember when Andrew died, one of his friends said to me, don't forget to eat.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  I was like, not a problem. Really? What a stupid thing to say. I'm not gonna forget to eat. Bless him, he was being very kind. I mean, maybe it helped that he was ill for eight years, so I knew it was on its way. I don't think that's true, cause it's still a surprise when it happens. Even then, the end, you find that, spend that final September going down and down and down. Still, you wake up September the thirtieth, you're dead. That's shocking. Like, you're not ready for that, no matter what. But I'm lucky, uh, lovely family, lovely friends. Um, I always think, as I say in the book, I go on a ridiculous amount about we could afford to be ill. And that's a big, I pay, get paid very nicely in my job. Not only that, but I save. I've saved and saved and saved for years, for decades. I always save for a rainy day, and then one day it rained.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  And in those, we went to the Christie Hospital in Manchester for his treatment, which is one of Europe's biggest and best cancer hospitals. Which we do, you'd sit at the Christie next to people who travelled miles to get there, who'd come to Manchester and stayed overnight. It was like a five-minute drive from our house. We were so lucky to have that place. But you realise the busiest door in that entire hospital is there's a door where they sort out people's benefits. Because people have been told you can't go back to work, you've got to have six months off work, you've got to have a year off work, you're never going back to work. How are they gonna live? We never had that problem, cause I'd saved and saved and saved. And he could have stayed ill for ten years and we'd have been all right. So there's a comfort to that. And so everything you're talking about and like being ready for losing him,

• 26:45Speaker 00

  we'd had the comfort and almost the elegance of being free to imagine that. And still, it hits you like a brick.

• 26:51Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  And still, you carry on. Cause actually, the truth is, what I just described in my job, all those voices in my head, they don't stop. My thinking didn't stop. Actually, after he died, a month after that, I delivered the last episode of Years and Years. Imagine the Years and Years production team, they must have been going, God, like, what do, should we get someone else to write it? I don't think they ever quite told me what a crisis they went through, cause they were waiting for the last episode. And, and they were so lovely, they dedicated the entire show to him on the end on BBC One, which is a really lovely thing to do. But they must have been going, what the hell do we do now? But of course I delivered it. It's like, actually, once he's dead, I had nothing else to do. I wasn't gonna sit in the house, just sitting there. Um, I got on with my job and I love my job. And, and so I, and I wrote a great episode, I think, so.

• 27:35Elizabeth Day?

  You wrote such a great episode. I think about Years and Years all the time.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Do you? Wow, really?

• 27:40Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, I, all the time.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  It's all happening now.

• 27:42Elizabeth Day?

  It's all happening, sadly.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Sorry.

• 27:45Elizabeth Day?

  I started watching it, I just started dating the man who is now my husband.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 27:49Elizabeth Day?

  I remember I was watching it in his flat in Ballam.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:53Elizabeth Day?

  And it was, and it is such a brilliant piece of television.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 27:56Elizabeth Day?

  But I had to take breaks.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:58Elizabeth Day?

  It's.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Tough.

• 27:59Elizabeth Day?

  It's tough.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:01Elizabeth Day?

  In the way that it needs to be, and it's impassioned and it's warm and dark and all of the things. And there's no question there, really. I just wanted to say that to you. It's important for me to say that to you because it's, it's become one of those cultural reference points for me.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Talk about how to fail. That died a death. It died an absolute death. It had the lowest viewing figures in the world. So much so, when it came to the National Television Awards, and I love the National Television Awards, it wasn't eligible for the longlist. It wasn't, uh, for, for best, never mind best drama. It wasn't eligible for the longlist for new drama. No matter what you thought of it, it was definitely new. Because its viewing figures were so low, they had a threshold below which you're not allowed to be nominated. We were below that threshold and that's how low the viewing figures were. And yeah, it's weird, people, well, obviously I've got a bit of confirmation bias, cause it's the one thing people want to talk to me about. But it's, I do meet a lot of people who watched it. I think I've met them all now. You were the last.

• 28:53Elizabeth Day?

  I was the one, I was the last one.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Tracked her down at last.

• 28:56Elizabeth Day?

  That was so interesting. And, and what a good example of how sometimes great art is not valued in the way that it should be at the moment it's put out there.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Well, it's funny, and then years later, it went to Netflix and it worked there. It got into number six on the viewing figures, which was, that's ferocious competition there. So it's like, it's, it's like it waited its turn.

• 29:13Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  And, um, I mean, it terrifies me, isn't it? The one thing that happens in Years and Years is Trump launching a nuclear missile, which I do not believe will not happen. That's gonna happen. How can a man that mad not use the biggest maniacal toy that we have in the world? It's gonna happen. That's on its way. Nice to meet you.

• 29:33Elizabeth Day?

  Let's move on to your second failure.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  That's it, yeah. In the ashes and embers of a dying world.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 29:41Elizabeth Day?

  And moving on. Yeah, so you're.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  What's my second one? Remind me.

• 29:45Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I'm going to change the orders because we mentioned drawing and so.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 29:49Elizabeth Day?

  It's your failure to draw, as you put it. You said to me, I'm a really good cartoonist. I am, I swear. And every day I think I'm in the wrong job.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:57Elizabeth Day?

  Because you started out doing sort of graphic design stuff.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I did, on a very light sense, I illustrated stories for BBC Wales. They had a Jack and Ory type show. I did theatre posters. I was, I did very lightly. I illustrated a series of books about the Confessions of a vicar's wife. Unbelievably, that's there on my shelf until like book number three came along in which she gave advice on what to do if your child is homosexual, which is to pray that away. And, and, and, and I said, I can't illustrate this. I said, I literally sent that back to the publishers going, you're on your own now. Can you imagine? She put that in print. I can't remember her name now, but there's some book that they're still on a shelf somewhere, Confessions of a vicar's wife. So I was kind of like, I did some illustration. I mean, the very first edition of Blitz magazine, do you remember that?

• 30:41Speaker 00

  I'm the issue one, I'm in that, which, and it's a very, I can draw well, but I can cartoon really well. It's kind of asterixy, peanutsey, strong line, heavy shadow strip. Right now, I'm not kidding you, there's nothing I like more than a collar. It's like my mind right now is drawing the shadow under your collar. I'm obsessed with the shit. You've got a lapel, it's a lapel there. And as well as those voices of talking people, I'm like drawing a straight line and there's the line of your lapel. And I cannot not draw the shadow under the lapel. It's like a compulsion. And I'm drawing that in my head all the time, all day. It's like, there's a great line of your hair. It's got a great scoop to it.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  So that underneath it falls into absolute black. And that's in very simple cartooning terms, that's beautiful to draw. It's beautiful hair, full stop.

• 31:28Elizabeth Day?

  I love, thank you. I love how visually you.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  It's non-stop. I cannot not do it. So, and, and it's almost like an itch in my hand. And I'm really sad that I don't do it more because actually when I was really, when I drew a lot, kind of like my late teens into my mid twenties, I would draw and draw and draw all the time. I was allowed to draw. I used to cover my school desk in cartoons and the teachers would let me. It's like, they, they think, oh, they, they were beautiful, these things and, and, and amazing scenarios. And when I went to Granada, I had a fantastic secretary called Vanessa in the days when secretaries were called Vanessa. She wasn't my P A, she was my secretary. And I love Vanessa, we're still mates to this day. And I used to draw so much that she covered my desk in paper. She got huge sheets of, of, of paper and covered my desk. And I had all day, I'd sit there and draw on it.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And then she'd take them away. She said she framed them and put them up at home. And she probably just chucked them in the bin. I do believe that the more you draw, the better you get. But the opposite of that, corollary, is that the word?

• 32:25Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, I never say that normally, corollary. Um, is that the less you draw, the worse you get. And I feel like it's, I really feel like a failure. I feel it's, I feel like I've let it down. I feel like it's decayed. And I feel like it's a physical thing in my hand. I don't think it's in my brain. I think it's in my hand. And I think I can draw and I don't draw. And also I'm getting older now. It's like, if you look at the greatest cartoonist in the world is Charles M. Schultz, the Peanuts cartoon, Charlie Brown and Snoopy, which is a much darker thing than people think. It is a very strange strip. Um, beautifully strange. If you look at his drawing, it kind of got worse as he got older. And, um, and I feel that. I can't quite summon it like I used to. And nonetheless, I think if I locked myself away for a year and drew every day, I'd improve it.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  So I think, why don't I talk about saving all that money so I can do things? Why don't I just go and draw? But I'm a writer, so I go and write. And weirdly, this is the strange thing that doesn't make any sense. I can't do both. I actually, when I, I stopped drawing, when I became a full-time writer, it kind of died.

• 33:25Elizabeth Day?

  How interesting.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  That's mad. It doesn't make sense. But it, that's how, that's what happened. I'm, I, I can't make any sense out of that. I can't tell you why it happened or how it happened, but that's what happened. It's, it kind of withered on the vine. I'm talking about my withered hand.

• 33:39Elizabeth Day?

  Do you draw at all now?

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Yes, I, I do birthday cards to my friends. Um, I do a little caricatures of people sometimes, not much, not enough. Like once, once or twice a month, you should be doing it every day. And I've got kind of like, there's a cartoon strip in my head. What I, what I love best of all are, are, what in French you call bon dessiné, the asterix books.

• 34:01Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, I read them all. I love them.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got them all on myself. Even the new ones are brilliant. You should buy the new ones. They're excellent. They're, because the original writer and, and artist have died. Their, their successors are so faithful to the, the drawings are astonishing. Without being photocopies, they have so captured them. And I think it does, it's, it's a tradition that doesn't exist in Britain, the 48-page hardback cartoon strip. I've got those in my head. I want to draw those. And it's like, um, I've got a story about a wheelie bin that comes to life. That I'm, I'm drawing in my head. It's like, again, as well as in my head, I'm like, if I sat down, I could rattle off the first 20 pages of that. Well, it would take 20 days, about a page a day or something. Why don't I do that?

• 34:43Elizabeth Day?

  I think you should put yourself a holiday and go and do it.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes.

• 34:47Elizabeth Day?

  What has drawing or cartooning, as you put it, taught you about storytelling?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, I think a lot of, it, it's, when you look at those, it taught me a lot about timing. It's like, this is very hard to describe, but there's like, especially peanut strips, which are four panels. Except the very first one, which is three panels, but the four panels, the silent third panel. There's like, it's very hard to describe. You need to see this. And so I think that's in my writing. I think, I think, yes, those beats, it's, it's kind of quite Jewish humour, actually, without, without, I don't, I don't know the, the ethnicity of any of those artists. But, um, it's, it's the kind of humour you see in your Seinfeld sitcom friends world. I could talk forever about peanuts. I could do lectures about peanuts.

• 35:30Elizabeth Day?

  You know who else loves peanuts and Charles M. Schultz is Emma Thompson, who was of course in years and years.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Is she? I didn't know that. We've never had that conversation.

• 35:38Elizabeth Day?

  And now you can have that conversation.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  I'm gonna go and text her. I did not know that.

• 35:41Elizabeth Day?

  And tell her I told you, I interviewed her, I was lucky enough to interview her at the Hay Literary Festival about the books that shaped her. And she chose peanuts as one of her six choices.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Oh my god, me too.

• 35:50Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  I've got them all. I've got them all. Oh my god.

• 35:54Elizabeth Day?

  Talking of writing as a craft, you said something so interesting in your book about writing characters that are cleverer than you.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 36:06Elizabeth Day?

  Specifically as it pertains to Doctor Who.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:08Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, we've come on to Doctor Who, everyone. I've got there in the end. Because Doctor Who is like the cleverest.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:15Elizabeth Day?

  Character on the planet.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:17Elizabeth Day?

  And you have to invent a problem that is problematic enough for him not to solve.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  It's difficult for him to solve.

• 36:22Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. Talk to us a little bit more about that.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I think every so often, um, I think it's true of the peanuts cartoon strip. I think you'll never get a more complicated character than Peppermint Patty. They're quite simple in peanuts. Charlie Brown's always a bit sad and rejected. Snoopy's always a fantasist. Peppermint Patty has a dead mum, her dad's away a lot. She's eight years old. He leaves her on her own all the time. She's in secretly in love with Charlie Brown. She's bossy to Charlie Brown. She's rude to him. She has a little friend called Marcy who's devoted to her. She's always rude. She's so complex, Peppermint Patty. And again, coming to Doctor Who, and I think if you look at the television greats like Sherlock and actually Jane Tennyson, Prime Suspect, or anything like Del Boy, they are, they're cleverer than the writer. The writer has to work really hard.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Imagine having to write Del Boy. Imagine like they decided to continue his adventures not written by John Sullivan. Imagine how hard you'd have to work to make him funny. To actually, and, and it's not a matter of intelligence. It's like, Del Boy's fantastically stupid. But how hard it must be to write him to be that stupid, but still credible and funny and believable and lovable. That's hard work to write Jane Tennyson, to write her being smarter than absolutely everyone, to write Sherlock, who's literally smarter than everyone. It's not all characters on television, but some of the greats are that. They are smarter than the writer. And it's why Doctor Who's so hard to write because he arrives, he's cleverer than everyone else. He is inside a time machine which is invulnerable and the only one of its kind in the universe.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  And he's, he's, he's literally an expert in art and science and history and the human heart. And you've got to present him with something that puts him in danger. It's such hard work. And also, the great mystery of Doctor Who is why in every episode he doesn't just turn around and go back in the TARDIS. But I mentioned that thing's invulnerable and it's like he never does. Actually, the audience never questions it. The audience never sits there going, go back in the TARDIS. And yet as a writer, you're going, it's there. Just walk back 10 yards, close the door and you're safe. It's a really weird thing. Oh, it's hard. But it produces great television when you have to really run and stretch yourself. I mean, I've never written Sherlock, but imagine writing Sherlock where,

• 38:30Speaker 00

  where, I mean, in the end, even Sherlock had to deconstruct himself. We'll never know how he survived falling off that building because he's cleverer than the writers. It's like all they could do was present him with options. And it's your choice. It's brilliant. It's so brilliant. And they're very rare. Because, because the writer automatically understands the character better than the character does. We know what's going to happen to that person and what they're going to say next. You don't know that in life at all. So you are literally in charge of a character and know what they had for breakfast and know how they're going to solve the crime and know how fast they can run and know whether their mum's alive or dead. So for that character to start to outstrip the writer is very rare and always produces magic, I think.

• 39:12Elizabeth Day?

  Wow. You know, they say that when you do an English degree, it sometimes ruins your joy of reading for pleasure. And I know you. Well, I don't know. You did do an English degree.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:21Elizabeth Day?

  But they sometimes say that. Did writing Doctor Who and seeing how the sausage was made and going through all of the pain that you did various channels and streamers, has it lessened your passion for Doctor Who in any way as a fan?

• 39:34Speaker 00

  Absolutely. The truth of it is, if you're a Doctor Who fan, you've been through quite a few ups and downs. I said politely, there's good times, there's bad times, and I just love it constantly. It's like, it's the most gorgeous. I will never, ever tire of that noise coming up and that blue box appearing out of nowhere. I think that's magic every time. The show's about to be kind of put out to tender and probably rebooted. And whatever they do, I just sit there thinking, please don't get rid of that TARDIS. Please keep that blue box appearing. Because to me, that's the magic of the whole thing. I love that moment. So.

• 40:05Elizabeth Day?

  You regenerated Doctor Who through several iterations of actors in the lead role. What do you think each one of them brought to the role in short? Like Christopher Eccleston.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, they all have one thing in common, which is just to be limitless. I've just described the character as being an expert in history and science and, and emotion and, and, and, you know, he's a king and a lord and he's a peasant. At the same time, he's a time lord and yet he's without empire. He's without status, except he's got the most, it's all these contradictions. So as an actor, you just need someone who's limitless. And I think the show's been, actually, actually, that's all any actor ever wants to play. And, you know, we've been, I was gonna say, we've been so lucky to have so many Doctors who'll hit that. But actually, go and talk to that actor who's playing a courtier in the background at Twelfth Night. That's what they want to play. Someone limitless, someone who can be funny and dark and silent and garrulous and all at once. It's like an actor's dream.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  So put that with a great actor and sizzle. It all starts. It's amazing.

• 41:04Elizabeth Day?

  There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up and running quickly, and Shopify Checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one. If Shopify

• 41:45Elizabeth Day?

  had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress, and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the

• 41:55Elizabeth Day?

  of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail. Your final failure is your failure to keep in touch with people.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm terrible.

• 42:13Elizabeth Day?

  Are you?

• 42:14Speaker 00

  You'll never see me again, Elizabeth. I'll be gone, out that door. You know when you just said someone sent you a nice letter of the thanks afterwards, David, I'll completely fail to do that.

• 42:23Elizabeth Day?

  No, I wouldn't expect that either.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  I'll fail. I mean to do it. I actually did a mental look. Oh, must write afterwards. I'll fail. It's weird.

• 42:29Elizabeth Day?

  You've kept in touch with Vanessa, your secretary who framed all those...

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Thanks to Instagram. I mean, I think there was a missing 30 years and a little there. And then that is one of the, actually, I'm not a fan of social media except Instagram, because actually, people haven't spoken to me. And also, it's quite a brisk conversation. It's not essays. It's, hi, hi, how are you? Like that. And she's lovely, Vanessa. And her mum's still alive. I love her. But I'm terrible.

• 42:52Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Decades can pass, and I always mean to. I mean to stay. I mean, I think, I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of the modern world is built around this. But I'm there, working in words, and I'm typing all day, and I'm on my phone all day, and I love all that. And yet, my, oh my god. It's like, recently, I think I've really pissed someone off, simply because I failed to reply to a really nice email they sent me. And I, in my head, I went, oh, yeah, yeah, great. Like that. I think I quite eerily dismissed it, and now she hasn't replied to my, I sent a text of apology. I thought, I've cocked that up. I've really cocked that up. I should have replied. Why don't I? Why? I'm sitting at my desk all day. Why don't I just send that reply? I'm an idiot.

• 43:34Elizabeth Day?

  You're not. It's so interesting. No one's ever chosen this failure before, but I completely relate to what you're saying. Sometimes it's just overwhelming.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:44Elizabeth Day?

  There's so much information and contact to take in. And if you are a creative, and if you are writing, and you're thinking, and you're imagining all of these people who are turning up in your head.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Yes. But I think that's, but I think I'm always thinking, but I think there's a little conscious thought process that doesn't even make sense, but it's like, I'll reply to them when everything's better, when everything's calmer, when everything makes a bit more sense, or maybe when I've lost weight, or maybe when I'm happier, or maybe. It's like, I think it's a little bit of waiting for things to be better. And I think I'm waiting, oh, I'll reach this point, then I'll fix all these things, then maybe I'll learn to drive, then I'll cartoon, then I'll do this. And it's that you just die. Eventually, you just never quite get there. But there's people I love, but I love, I don't stay in touch with. And a lot of people I love are very good with me and maintain friendship and keep going and kind of forgive me for not being in touch over decades now. But I've

• 44:40Speaker 00

  seen it happen over decades. Why? Why don't I just reply?

• 44:44Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think that you have done enough work-wise that you feel you've fulfilled some kind of legacy that you...

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Well, I take your, I mean, no, but yes, I can see what you mean. Like, if I died tomorrow, and that's not what you mean, I know. You're not going to kill me. Kill me. Go on. Good podcast. Imagine if then you got killed.

• 45:09Elizabeth Day?

  That's the next iteration of podcasting, quite clearly.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  That's the years and years podcast, isn't it? Then you get killed. I'm very proud in that I've written stories of gay men. I've written, when I wrote The Grand, I wrote one in the 1920s. I've done Jeremy Thorpe in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I'll come in the 90s, done Queer as Folk. In the 2000s, I wrote Cucumber. Then in the 80s, of course, I wrote It's a Sin. So I wrote, that's 80s to 90s. Now, I've done Tiptoe in the 2000s. Actually, years and years goes into like the 2030s. I'm kind of strangely happy of a century of gayness.

• 45:47Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  And it's very specifically male, white gayness. I get that. That's my limits. Fine, I like the limits. Work well within the limits, within the border, the four-panel border. You see, it's like, I accept that. I'm not saying that's a legacy. I'm not saying anyone's ever going to sit and watch all those things in a row, but I'm happy with that. I'm not going, write if you want a version of the gay male experience. There it is. It's not bad.

• 46:10Elizabeth Day?

  I'm very struck by the waiting to get better, though. I'd love you not to feel that.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Oh, but I think that, well, actually, I just had an interview with a journalist from the Independent, who was very nice at the end. He kind of, and he said, I think you'll get better. I think everything gets better. And I think that's the point.

• 46:29Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  And I think, I think you can't relax, and I work really hard. And I know one day that'll, and I know, actually, my writing's gone like that. The truth of it is, it's like a mountain range. It goes up and down. But actually, the trying, and the ambition, and the wanting to be different as well, gets better. And it's like, now I'm facing Tiptoe. I thought Tiptoe, I was very proud of Tiptoe. I was really proud of what I've said and done. It's a hard thing to follow. But that's fine. No one else is worried about that, except me, really. So I like that. And what could be, what could be better than Tiptoe? That's tricky. Maybe it has to be very different. But then, it's like, I followed, I did It's a Sin, which is possibly as successful as I could possibly get. And I followed that with The Life of Noel Gordon. I did an 80s soap star, played by Helena Bonham Carter,

• 47:14Speaker 00

  which I'm very proud of. So you can duck and dive, and no one cares about this, except me, either.

• 47:19Elizabeth Day?

  The trying is the loving, in many ways.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:22Elizabeth Day?

  I started off the introduction talking about your parents being classics teachers.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:27Elizabeth Day?

  And the influence that that had on you.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:30Elizabeth Day?

  Were they proud of your work?

• 47:33Speaker 00

  They didn't really live to see me becoming what I've become. My mum, I wish my mum had seen Doctor Who, because she loved Doctor Who. She made me sit and watch Doctor Who with her. So, and I wish she'd seen, she'd done it in 2001. So I was just, I mean, and Queer as Folk was hard for her. I took that home for Christmas before transmission, played it to her on VHS, and she thought it was soft porn. She genuinely, not hard, really. It's a disappointment. And that was hard for, that, that, that spring, on March 29th, she was 70 years old. She had a big party in Swansea Rugby Club. There were people who didn't come, because I'd be there, because Queer as Folk had already gone out. And it's like, that's, she didn't tell me that. Other people told me that. And it's like, wow.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  And my father was more hard to please. Maybe I'm spending all this time being hard to please. And I remember, he was tough, my father. He was, he was, he was a good man, but in many ways, we didn't get on. And when I left Doctor Who in 2010, he did say this to me, but he said to my sisters, it was a nurse I was leaving Doctor Who, do you know what he said? Yesterday's man. Yeah. That, thanks, Dad. Wow. I know. It's amazing, isn't it? Well, it's hardly abuse. I was 41 years old. It's like, you survive that kind of thing. But like, wow. So is that secretly why I'm working so hard? Just to impress him? I don't think so. That's kind of cod psychology, I think. And I actually didn't know he'd said that for years, until

• 49:01Speaker 00

  my sister happily told me. Couldn't wait. Couldn't wait to give that bad news to my daughter.

• 49:07Elizabeth Day?

  Was he as tough on your sisters?

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. He didn't, he didn't know how to talk to his kids. He was very much, I genuinely, he was war damaged. He was 16 years old when he went off to World War II. And only in his old age would he speak about the deaths of everyone. He knew people who died swimming in burning oil. He knew people who fell out of planes, whose planes were just, and they just fell to earth. Terrible losses of his generation. He started speaking about that when he was 70, 80. He lived to about 89 or 90. So, and every November the 11th, he'd stand up on the one-minute silence and remember them. I'd give a little salute. He genuinely remembered them. So that's hard. And came home from the war to

• 49:49Speaker 00

  an alcoholic mother who would hide bottles of gin around the house. In the war, he fell in love with a woman on Cyprus. He was based, was it Cyprus or somewhere? And he had a tough war. It was like, they had a hose down boatloads of Jews to stop them coming to harbour. They weren't welcome. They'd hose them down, get away, get hosed them, imagine. And he fell in love with a woman called Margaret Radcliffe, I think is her name. And they actually had a sexual relationship. And when they came, when the war was came back over, they were children coming home, children, so damaged by all this. He thought it was impossible for a Welsh man to fall in love with a Cockney. Impossible. And, and for the poor Margaret Radcliffe, she travelled, imagine a woman travelling

• 50:34Speaker 00

  alone in those days on a train. She came all the way from London to Swansea on her own to turn up at the door and say, I love you. And he wouldn't let her in the house. And he took her to the cafe, the civic cafe down the road, next to the Old Guildhall. And, um, and sat with her and said, every, all his friends, he said, all his friends said, that can't work. You can't marry a Cockney. And you just think that he ended up growing up with a son who's gay and two daughters who both got divorced and a beautiful nephew who's autistic. It's like all the problems of the world and all the complications of the world landed on his head. Whether he tried to stop it or not, you can't stop the world advancing on you, Viv. You, I mean, I'm very glad he married my mother. That's great. But the thought that that was a prejudice, how on earth did we get on to this?

• 51:17Elizabeth Day?

  No, this is amazing.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, what a complicated man. So the point is, he never spoke about that. This is all kind of stuff I glean. It's like, once, when my mother died, he told me the Margaret Radcliffe story. Once. So it's just that generation that just didn't talk about things at all.

• 51:32Elizabeth Day?

  How extraordinary that partly shaped by that, epigenetically or however, you've become this storyteller.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  So it's weird, isn't it?

• 51:42Elizabeth Day?

  Of, of this, like, humanity.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Wow, yes.

• 51:45Elizabeth Day?

  And heart.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Well, yes. Yeah, that is strange, isn't it? That's never occurred to me. Yes. Yeah, yeah. He was also, weirdly, he was also a great storyteller. Publicly, he was, he was renowned as an after dinner speaker. People, they would queue, but he was a big rugby man. They always had dinners. He was famously the best after dinner speaker you could possibly get. I used to remember him rehearsing speeches. And, and, and once or twice I saw it, he was hilarious. He had rooms in raptures of laughter. So, and yeah, it was never like that at home, really. It's like fascinating, lots of contradictions in him.

• 52:16Elizabeth Day?

  What was his name?

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Vivian, Vivian Davis.

• 52:18Elizabeth Day?

  What was your dad's, uh, sorry, your mom's name?

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Barbara. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was gorgeous.

• 52:24Elizabeth Day?

  I always like to ask. I think it's important to remember.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she grew up like, she was poor as a church mass when they grew up. It's like, they lived out in the Gower, in a little cottage that would be worth millions now. But then it was like rural poverty and like, they were so hungry that my grandmother used to take my mother and dangle her over the, by her legs over the cliff tops to get plover's eggs from their nests. So she could come back home with some eggs. And his wife Violet would be going, have you been hanging her over that cliff again? Amazing. What a family. Yeah, bless them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:00Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, I've loved talking to you, Russell. I'd, I'd, I'd like to end this with, you talk there about your parents sort of turning 70. And although you look 25, allegedly, you've told me you're 63.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  I am.

• 53:14Elizabeth Day?

  How do you feel about approaching your, your 70th?

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:19Elizabeth Day?

  I've got 70 years to, for a man.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Yes, I'd like to be more, what I'm getting now is arthritis, and I've actually got severe arthritis.

• 53:25Elizabeth Day?

  Have you?

• 53:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not funny. It's spinal stenosis. It's not funny, anyway. I know. But it's like, um, it's funny because I never really imagined my old age and retirement, except I think you vaguely imagine yourself walking on a Greek beach and every, every so often, or just like visiting places. And I kind of realise now, it's going to be a lot more immobile than that. It's really, really affecting my legs now. So what fun. And the pain is really actually quite extraordinary. And, and painkillers don't work. And, and I don't like to take stronger painkillers because I'll start to get numb. And that's just where it is now at 63. I'm fine now. I really am fine now. But you just walk along thinking, what's this going to be like at 73? Happy note to end.

• 54:07Elizabeth Day?

  I know. No, I'm trying to.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Let's talk about my boyfriend, who's beautiful.

• 54:10Elizabeth Day?

  I was actually about to say, your boyfriend, so he's younger than you are.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  A lot younger. He's 27, which is ridiculous, I know. But, um, he's, he's Australian.

• 54:18Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  They're very, yes, you see, they're, they're very grown up, aren't they, Australians?

• 54:22Elizabeth Day?

  I don't know, aren't they?

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Oh, they are. Oh, my God, they know what's what. It's like, he might as well be 40. It's like, he's, he's kind of, he's had hell of a life, actually. He's seen a lot and done a lot. And, and, and kind of, yeah, he fought his way to get to Britain. So he's, he's just wonderful. And it's a great lease of life in my life. He's just gorgeous. Yeah, so.

• 54:39Elizabeth Day?

  Is that Gen Alpha or Gen Z? I don't know, no. I've lost track.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Alpha, that's too young. He must be Gen Z, isn't he?

• 54:46Elizabeth Day?

  Let's say he's Gen Z. But I'm sure that that gives you lots of inspiration for your writing as well.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  It's interesting.

• 54:51Elizabeth Day?

  To have a fresh perspective.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  It's like, this is a man who's never watched a film. He just sees them all in clips.

• 54:54Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  You say, have you seen this film, Clips? The other day, and he's also, he's Australian. You do have some great conversations. And he's only been here for two years. Because the other day, he went, what's Claridge's? I was like, what? How can you not know what that is? It's like, but there's great gaps in his knowledge. And then, yeah.

• 55:11Elizabeth Day?

  Has he watched any of your shows?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  He does, yes. Uh, which I find a bit embarrassing. It's like, I mean, he likes my shows and, and, and, and, but you can't talk about that for more than five minutes. You go, oh, that was interesting. What's Russell Toby? Like, lovely. Oh, fine. That's it. It's like, let's move on. I don't want to talk about my shows all the time. Despite doing an hour long podcast.

• 55:30Elizabeth Day?

  I've asked you. And the reason I've asked you is because I'm so grateful to you for shaping our culture in the way that you have. And I'm deeply grateful that you came on How to Fail.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Like, an honour. It's like, the list of people you've had on here, I'm really honoured. And I knew this would be lovely. And thank you. Thank you.

• 55:48Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you so much.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  I've talked about things I've never talked about, actually. It's like, yeah, that's really, you've led me down some avenues that need exploring a bit. So, yeah. And I should draw, shouldn't I?

• 55:57Elizabeth Day?

  Draw, draw.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  My legs are going to pack in. Sit and draw.

• 56:00Elizabeth Day?

  Well, you can draw and, I mean, you can do both, even without your legs. You can write and draw. So that's, that's the happy note we can end on.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  It's much of a charity and draw.

• 56:08Elizabeth Day?

  Why don't you go and draw my collar, my lapel?

• 56:10Speaker 00

  It's, I am. It's there. It's gorgeous.

• 56:13Elizabeth Day?

  It's there. Thank you so much.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 56:17Elizabeth Day?

  I hope you got as much out of this episode of How to Fail as I did. Brought to you by Arna Lacto Free, delicious dairy with all the taste, easier to digest. Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.