TICKET TO RIDE
DIRECTOR BEN CHESSELL TAKES THE TARDIS BACK IN TIME IN HIS TWO EPISODES
WORDS: DARREN SCOTT
Ben Chessell in the present day, for a change.
What can you tease about the episodes?
◆ I got sent scripts and I read them and went, “These are crazy. These are wonderful, ambitious, in some ways quite nutty scripts.” Episode two is madcap and bold and unexpected, and loony in a really sharp and interesting way. We’ll have sequences that you’ve never seen in a Doctor Who episode before. Episode six is a more classic Doctor Who episode, but it’s romantic and funny and frightening.
Is filming in real world situations complicated?
◆ Recreating ’60s London is tricky. Most of the location shooting is done in Cardiff – it really wouldn’t have been helpful to shoot in London anyway, because London doesn’t look like that any more. So we found streets that gave us some features – you can get streets that’ll give you maybe six good buildings and then you have to use visual effects to remove the buildings that wouldn’t have been there, and you can bring in foreground elements.
The Doctor and Ruby visit the swinging ’60s.
So there’s a scene where the Doctor and Ruby leave the TARDIS and cross the road on the way to Abbey Road Studios, and there’s a shot that looks right down the road. We picked that particular intersection because in the foreground, a lot of those buildings were genuine ’60s buildings.