ROBERT SHEARMAN
The author of Dalek tells SIMON GUERRIER about revisiting the original television episode – and discovering what lies beneath the surface…
Above left: Author Robert Shearman.
Photo © Alex Romeo.
Above right: Rose (Billie Piper) and Adam (Bruno Langley) attempt to escape a relentless foe in Dalek (2005).
“D
alek
has quite a history,” says Robert Shearman. “It started with an idea for an animated webcast.”
As it turned out, Real Time (2002) was produced instead. But, as Robert observes, the initial idea “led to the Big Finish audio story Jubilee in 2003. Then Russell T Davies [executive producer of TV Doctor Who from 2005 to 2010] asked me to adapt some of that for the screen, and I think we went through 14 drafts of the script. For this novelisation, I had to offer something more than what we saw on TV. My first thought was to go back to those earlier versions.