Tying up time

Let's untangle Clare and Henry's timeline in the romantic drama series The Time Traveler's Wife.

- GENEVIEVE TERBLANCHE

Steven Moffat is one of the executive producers behind the new drama series The Time Traveler's Wife, Mondays on M-Net (*101) at 21:30 (read more on p51). The romantic fantasy series is based on Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 novel about a life-long love complicated by time travel, and Steven worked on the show with his own lifelong love, his wife of 20 years Sue Vertue, whose projects include the Sherlock series, romantic comedy series Coupling, and comedy series Mr. Bean.

Steven is an old hand at mucking about with time - which was his job as a writer on long-running BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who. Audrey's book even inspired one of his Doctor Who storylines. "I read the book and loved it. But all I'd done in Doctor Who was use the wonderful, fantastical element of an out-of-sequence relationship (in The Girl In The Fireplace episode during the 2010 Eleventh Doctor storyline)," he says. What attracted Steven to this story again wasn't so much the time twists as the opportunity to write about a happy relationship. "Audrey was taking the details of a happy, successful, absolutely monogamous, absolutely mutually nourishing relationship and made it interesting by just adding time travel. It's extraordinary how seldom anyone writes about that," he explains.

With the story told out of sequence, it helps to know where in time our lovebirds Clare Abshire (Rose Leslie, Ygritte in fantasy series Game Of Thrones) and time-travelling Henry de Tamble (Theo James, Sidney Parker in period drama series Sanditon) might meet.

THE TIME WARP

The series juggles timeline of events and about-ages at which things happen just to limit the number of performers needed to play Henry and Clare. Most importantly, Rose (35) plays Clare at ages 16-35, while Theo (37) plays Henry at ages 26-43.