THE GREATEST CONTEST IN THE GALAXY

FOR AUTHOR JUNO DAWSON, WRITING DOCTOR WHO WAS AN "ABSOLUTE DREAM

- ROBBIE DUNLOP

BEFORE MY DOCTOR WHO EXPERIENCE, I'D always wondered why Russell [T Davies] came back after 12 years away," Juno Dawson tells SFX. "Now I get it - because it's so much fun!"

An award-winning author and self-professed Doctor Who superfan (her first memory being Bonnie Langford trapped in a giant bubble in Sylvester McCoy's debut "Time And The Rani"), Dawson is eagerly anticipating 17 May. The date not only marks the 69th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest but also the premiere of her very first Doctor Who television episode. To celebrate, she's hired a pub. "Of course I've hired a pub," she laughs. "I might never get to write Doctor Who again!"

Dawson's journey to writing for the series began in bed. "Because Russell is a workhorse who doesn't seem to need → jecoute! sleep, he emailed me at about 1.30 in the morning,” she recalls. “I didn’t see it until my alarm went off at 7.00am. Like any modern person, the first I did was check my phone - like an addict. And I had this email saying, ‘Die Hard meets Eurovision. What do you think?’”

“I handed the phone to my then-husband, and I was like, ‘Am I imagining this?’ He was just, ‘Oh my god’. Like, the call had finally come! It was the easiest ‘Yes’ I’ve ever said,” she adds, her excitement still clear.

From the outset, Dawson envisioned her episode as “a hostage situation at Eurovision.” The real challenge, she admits, was figuring out how to combine those two elements, “because they don’t fit together as easily as you might expect”.

She initially pitched a Marvel-budgeted, The Poseidon Adventure-style story. “I look back now with a slight cringe,” she laughs. “What was I thinking? It was very ambitious. The bare bones are still in the finished product but, god, in one version I had robots wearing lederhosen! They’ve gone!”

SWEET HARMONY