“What a beautiful thing.” Benjamin Cook goes behind the scenes on the Whoniverse’s brand-new making-of show, to meet the cast and crew of Doctor Who Unleashed.

Steffan Powell, who presents Doctor Who Unleashed.

The taxi driver who drops me off, in the rain, outside a disused power station surrounded by TV trucks and catering vans asks me, not unreasonably, what the hell is going on here. “A mayonnaise commercial,” I tell him. (I panicked. I’m under NDA.) What I can’t say is that this mothballed, former coal plant deep in the Welsh countryside – at Uskmouth, near Newport – is harbouring monsters from outer space, a crashed rocket, a poor, vulnerable Meep, a Noble dynasty, and the last of the Time Lords. And where Time Lords and monsters tread, so now does Doctor Who Unleashed – a new behind-thescenes spin-off series for BBC Three and iPlayer. It’s about to become one of your top two favourite TV shows.

“It is amazing what we get to do,” says Ally Francis, Unleashed’s cool, collected assistant producer, “but people have this idea that working in TV is all glam and showbiz. It’s really not.” She grins. “Except when it is. But since we started filming, we’ve been rained on, windswept… we’ve had something like three weeks of night shoots on Special 1” – this is the first 60th Anniversary Special, The Star Beast – “in a Wembley carpark, an Uskmouth power plant… and at least those are indoors. But we’re having the best time,” she assures me.

It’s 26 May 2022, and DWM is heading behind the scenes… on the behind-the-scenes. There are ‘DANGER! Demolition in progress’ and ‘KEEP OUT’ signs all over the Uskmouth site. As I walk up the drive, around a muddy patch of wasteland, a Tannoy system crackles to life, its metallic, Dalek-y voice piercing the empty silence with an unsettling warning: “You are under surveillance.” Maybe it’s something to do with Doctor Who Unleashed. (It isn’t, Ally assures me.) I keep walking.

“This is all part of the plan,” Russell T Davies, Doctor Who’s returning showrunner, tells me later. “When I came back, I wanted new Doctor Who – I wanted to deliver Doctor Who annually – and I wanted a behind-the-scenes show again. Absolutely, that was part of the condition.

“You go into edit suites and TV studios up and down the land,” he continues, “and you’ll meet editors and runners and boom operators who work in the industry because they used to watch Doctor Who Confidential.” This is the documentary series that arrived with the revival of Doctor Who in 2005 – broadcast on BBC Three immediately after each episode of the main show on BBC One – and lasted till 2011. “I can see why it disappeared,” says Russell. “There’s only so many times you can explain a green screen. But then a whole generation passes. A new generation comes along. I genuinely think, it’s time.”