When Russell T Davies goes walking near his home in Swansea, he follows the same path: over the hill, down to Langland Bay and along the seafront, until he reaches a weathered bench looking straight out to the water.
Of course, when Davies isn’t staring out to sea, he’s creating some of the most acclaimed television drama of our time – his credits include such landmark works as Queer as Folk, Years and Years and It’s a Sin, not to mention his time as executive producer on Doctor Who. It was perhaps inevitable, given where he lives, that Davies’s anxieties about the environment might inspire his work. But how?
“The problem with climate change is that it’s very hard to write about,” he says. “No one has yet worked out how to write about the weather changing slowly while we ignore it.”
It was one of Davies’s neighbours who unwittingly helped him crack the problem. “There’s a marvellous woman who lives three doors down from me who is 70 years old,” he says. “I once met her and she was dressed as a fish with her friends marching up and down the seafront – protesting about climate change and saying, ‘This sea front will be gone in 20 years and these houses will be gone.’
The War between the Land and the Sea, Davies’s new five-part BBC drama, is about climate change, water pollution and the damage being done to the world’s oceans by mankind. But it’s also an enormously entertaining sci-fi series about an ancient species rising from the sea and threatening humanity with destruction. The series has its roots in an episode of Doctor Who broadcast in 1972, which Davies remembers watching as a young boy.
Back to the present day,this more modern story about Homo aqua (as the original Doctor Who Sea Devils are now referred to) has a cast that includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw (see overleaf), Jemma Redgrave and Russell Tovey. This other Russell plays everyman hero Barclay, who, much to his and everyone else’s surprise, is chosen to be ambassador for all humanity. Tovey, who landed his breakout role as Rudge in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys in 2004, was gripped by Davies’s script within a few pages.
This is Tovey’s third collaboration with Davies. They first worked together when Davies cast him, aged 25, as Midshipman Alonso Frame in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned. He returned to the role for a cameo in The End of Time (2010), and their creative partnership deepened a decade later with Tovey’s acclaimed performance as Daniel Lyons in Years and Years. It’s been a long road together, but it’s clear Tovey, now 44, still can’t believe his good fortune.
Tovey recently won Man of the Year at the Attitude Awards, and Davies presented him with the award. “If I could talk to myself when I was a little scared, lost, 14-year-old boy trying to find his safe space in the world and finding Russell’s work,” he says, “and tell him that Russell would be presenting me with an award, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Barclay, the character played by Tovey, is a reluctant hero, who would rather be with his family than saving the planet. “What I wanted with Barclay was someone who knows what it’s like to fail to pay the electricity bill,” says Davies, “who knows what it’s like to not afford Christmas – why can’t someone like that stand for Parliament and make our laws? That’s exactly what we need, and it’s exactly what we never get.”
“It is enormously entertaining,” says Davies. “It is epic and scary and tough and romantic – you’ll be gobsmacked by it.”
Given the environmental themes, it wouldn’t be wholly surprising if some critics on the right of the political spectrum accuse Davies – and by extension the BBC – of trying to shove their green agenda down viewers’ throats. The irony is that while the idea of using Doctor Who to highlight social-justice talking points might feel like a very modern development, Davies’s new series is actually in the spirit of the original 1972 version. The Sea Devils was written by Malcolm Hulke, a former Communist Party member who used Doctor Who stories to smuggle progressive themes into mainstream drama, turning alien races into allegories for class, race and colonial oppression.
One of the challenges of stories about climate change, beyond how to depict it, is to persuade ordinary people they still have reasons to feel positive. “We need hope,” agrees Tovey, “that’s what’s missing – we are told the whole time there is no hope.” So how does Tovey “hope” viewers will leave the series feeling?
It might well inspire some to do something. But given how vulnerable the BBC is to criticism at the moment, I also wonder if Davies ever worried that he might be told that he should stick to entertaining and drop the preaching?
A newly re-edited version of the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils is on Sunday 7 Dec at 7pm on BBC Four/iPlayer
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