WRITER/CAST EXCLUSIVE
The Long Game
Russell T Davies’s long-lost Doctor Who script Mind Of The Hodiac has been dusted off for an audio drama
Where’s Colln? He recorded his parts remotely, from home.
→ THIS MARCH SEES Russell T Davies’s return to Doctor Who. What, already? No, not as showrunner. We’ll explain. In December 2020, in preparation for a “tweet-along” of “The Runaway Bride”, Davies rifled through a box of old papers and stumbled upon his very first Who script: “Mind Of The Hodiac”, a story for Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and Bonnie Langford’s companion Mel. It’s now been adapted for Big Finish’s Lost Stories range, using Davies’s full script for part one, with his seven-page treatment for part two fleshed out by Scott Handcock.
It was previously thought the first thing Davies sent to the Doctor Who office was an idea he later drew on for 2005’s “The Long Game”. But he now suspects he got mixed up. “Once Doctor Who closed down in 1989, I got a letter from [script editor] Andrew Cartmel, saying he’d read it, liked it and held on to it, maybe with the chance of doing something with it one day,” Davies tells Red Alert. “It felt like so close, and yet so far. I thought it was very polite of him to write and say so. I kept that letter for years, because it felt like a genuine Doctor Who artefact.”