“For me,Doctor Who literally is a fairytale,” Steven Moff at told The Guardian in 2010. “It’s not really science fiction. It’s not set in space - it’s set under your bed.” This guiding philosophy - a desire to imbue the series with what he called a “storybook quality” - would have a huge impact on the way Doctor Who looked during Moff at’s seven-year watch as showrunner. And it started right off the bat, in the opening moments of his first story, The Eleventh Hour (2010). Here, Matt Smith’s Tiggerish Time Lord is introduced via a playful riff on AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928) - the second chapter of which is spent establishing all the things that Pooh Bear’s newly arrived house guest Tigger doesn’t like to eat for breakfast, including honey and haycorn and thistles.
The Eleventh Doctor’s famous “fish fingers and custard” scenes unfold in a slightly tumbledown, mildly spooky house deep in the darkness of the English countryside. Contrast this with the debuts of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, both of which had taken place against the backdrop of a south London housing estate. This grounding of the show in a recognisable urban milieu was a conscious move on the part of preceding showrunner Russell T Davies, who was keen to reflect the everyday visual grammar of modern TV drama - a Bad Wolf in Hollyoaks clothing, perhaps - at a time when no one knew if there was still an appetite for the strange and fantastical on British television.
By the time Moff at succeeded him, that question had been comprehensively settled. But the diff erent styles also played to the two writers’ natural instincts. “If you look at the stories I’ve written so far, I suppose I might be slightly more at the fairytale and Tim Burton end of Doctor Who, whereas Russell is probably more at the blockbuster and Superman end of the show,” Moff at explained. The heavily stylised films of cultish director Burton - Edward Scissorhands (1990), for example - are certainly as good a touchstone as any for the darker aesthetic of the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi years; not just tonally darker, but actually darker.