Churchill (Ian McNeice), the Monk (Rufus Hound) and the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) feature in the cover art for Subterfuge
Of all the scripts that I’ve written, this one gave me such a headache!” says Helen Goldwyn, laughing. “I had yellow Post-it notes all over the walls, and I would sit for hours on end with my fingers on my temples thinking, ‘Hang on. Who knows what, and who could have told them that? Who’s seen that person in order to have that bit of evidence?’ It really fried my brain!” The aptly titled Subterfuge revolves around the 1945 general election, in which the incumbent Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was defeated. Helen was asked to involve the Seventh Doctor and one of his Time Lord adversaries, the Meddling Monk, in the real history.
“It was quite a challenging set of parameters,” she says. “To be given those guidelines really entailed a huge amount of research, and getting my head around how to make all of those characters lead characters.”