Doctor Who’s scrapped next season featured script from acclaimed British writer - former showrunner reveals plot details

As Doctor Who fans prepare for a new era of the show, with a tender process ongoing to decide which production company will make it and what form it will take, former showrunner Russell T Davies has offered new details on what he would have done in a third season of his second era.

Davies has long stated he had clear plans for that run of the show (season 16), but these were upended when the show's co-production deal with Disney wasn't renewed beyond its initial order. Following this, the BBC went back to the drawing board, and the new tender process plan was eventually put into action.

Now, Davies has has filled in some of the gaps for fans regarding his season that never was, revealing plots he had developed, three scripts which had been completed and a number of guest writers who were on board.

Writing in his newly released memoir, The Queerest of Folk, Davies said that "Three scripts were fully written" for the now cancelled season 16 (the third of his new era), and said that "it breaks my heart they won't be seen".

Davies revealed: "We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything.

"And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia - look it up, it'll make you shiver!"

Trypophobia is a disgust or fear of a pattern of holes.

"There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester," Davies continued. "That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who's lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks."

The episode written by Clark and Thorne would have no doubt been of particular interest to fans, given the latter's pedigree when it comes to British theatre, TV and films.

His work includes TV shows such as the This is England series, His Dark Materials, Adolescence, The Hack, Lord of the Flies and Falling, while his film work includes the Enola Holmes trilogy and the upcoming Beatles movies.

In 2019, Thorne revealed he had tried out writing for Steven Moffatt's first series, which aired in 2010, and while he assured there were "no hard feelings" over the parting of ways, he said he just "couldn't get it right".

Meanwhile, Adetunji is known for writing on the series Noughts + Crosses, while Angel-Walfall wrote the season 15 Doctor Who episode, The Well.

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In his memoir, Davies revealed he was also talking to other writers for the next season, including some who had written previously for his second era, including Juno Dawson (The Interstellar Song Contest) and Kate Herron and Briony Redman (Rogue).

Herron and Redman's new episode would have brought Jonathan Groff back as Rogue, and was originally meant to be a part of season 15, although it got pushed back.

Davies said: "We were talking about Rogue in an eighties story, maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre."

He also added: "So we had a lot of fabulous ideas, some fully fleshed out, with a Dalek four-part epic to end the series. We were ready to go."

Gatwa notably never faced off against the Daleks during his run, although one of the creatures did very briefly appear in his final episode, The Reality War.

The Queerest of Folk by Russell T Davies is out now.

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