MICHAEL PICKWOAD
“Ithought, ‘What on Earth do they want to see me for? I’ve never designed a spaceship in my life…’” In 2010, Doctor Who needed a new production designer. Despite a long and varied career in film and TV, including the cult movie Withnail and I (1987) and an ambitious reimagining of the classic series The Prisoner (2009), Michael Pickwoad was surprised to be approached. Resplendent in brightly coloured bow tie, looking every inch an unknown regeneration of the Doctor himself, he remembered watching a few episodes and coming to the conclusion that he needn’t have worried. “I realised that, actually, less than 25 per cent of THE DWM INTERVIEW Doctor Who is spaceships. It’s diff erent times and all sorts of things. In fact, I’ve probably used just about everything I’ve ever learnt on this show.”
Michael replaced Edward Thomas - who’d overseen the design of almost every episode produced between the series’ revival with Rose (2005) and The Big Bang (2010), the last episode of Matt Smith’s first series as the Doctor. “When they saw me, they explained that they wanted to put a bit more eff ort into the more normal bits of it, which would then make the science-fiction bits even better.”
His first assignment was the 2010 festive Special, A Christmas Carol. “I started off thinking, ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to last doing this,’ but I quickly decided it was quite fun. I’ve never known such a varied job in my life. It’s as if you were making three films at any one time. In any 45 minutes of Doctor Who, there are more sets than Ridley Scott has in three hours.”
He soon found that each new script posed its own unique challenges - and extracting what was required was sometimes tricky. “They’re quite hard scripts to read, whereas something like Withnail, you can read it and make the film, just like that. Who scripts are much more ‘script-like’, written emotionally rather than visually.” For that reason, Michael liked to attend each episode’s readthrough whenever he could: “Sometimes it’s impossible because I’m busy doing something else - but it’s actually quite nice, especially if you’ve already had 14 versions of the script. It’s good to have the final one read to you.”
Michael Pickwoad visited the Whoovers fan group in Derby in 2015. Photos © LWD Productions.
Unemployed actors ‘I’ (Paul McGann) and Withnail (Richard E Grant) in Withnail and I (1987).
A bedroom set from A Christmas Carol (2010), Michael Pickwoad’s Doctor Who debut.