The Time Of Their Lives

New adventures, new companion, new beginning - but the end is in sight for Doctor Who's star and showrunner. Nick Setchfield gets that Saturday feeling with Steven Moffat

- Nick Setchfield

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO STEP INSIDE DOCTOR WHO?

It feels like this.

You leave a chilly, prefabricated corridor in the BBc’s roath Lock complex in cardiff Bay. Into the dark warmth of the studio you go, through the big, serious door, past the cables and the monitors, the crew and their hushed conversations, the telltale paint-and-glue tang of television make believe in your nostrils.

Look, there’s Mars, just ahead of you. You’re about to walk on Mars.

“Don’t wear your best shoes!” a crew member warns you, a wry smile in the half-light.

Too late, mate. the dust of the red planet is already caking your best shoes, the ones you wore because this is a special day, the day you step inside Doctor Who. It’s in the ridges of your soles, the colour of rust. “the cleaners are cursing us,” says producer Nikki Wilson, waiting there on set. “there are red footprints all through the building!”

You push through the jagged mouth of a Martian cave. there are pebbles scattered in the soil, tall ochre stalagmites just ahead. the rocky walls rise to touch the banks of studio lights above. this is a huge, immersive build and the obvious sweat-and-graft of it all makes it no less dreamlike. Just a few weeks ago, Nikki tells you, this space held Blackfriars Bridge and the thames riverbank of regency London. Worlds within worlds, times within times, an infinite police box of possibilities.

This isn’t just any old Mars, of course. It’s