Stephen Greenhorn interview - Radio Times, May 2007

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Stephen Greenhorn interview - Radio Times, May 2007

The Doctor, Martha and her family in Doctor Who © BBC

Stephen Greenhorn tells Nick Griffiths about the genesis of one of Doctor Who's scariest monsters.

"How often do you get the opportunity to create a monster?" says Stephen Greenhorn, writer of The Lazarus Experiment. The first thing Who regenerator Russell T Davies said to Greenhorn was: "Mad scientist". "It was a bit confusing," says Greenhorn, "because I thought he was interviewing me for the writing job, not giving me it!"

So the two started trading reference points: comic-book heroes and villains and superhero movies. "We talked about tone and style," says Greenhorn (who wrote Glasgow Kiss and Wide Sargasso Sea), "and I started thinking about themes and what experiment we wanted to go wrong. I homed in on this notion of a rejuvenating machine."

The machine's owner is Professor Lazarus (Mark Gatiss). The monster is a CGI creation from The Mill, based on Greenhorn's notes, but what they dreamt up astonished the writer. "I'd written a bit about the scientific theory behind where this monster comes from, and a vague idea of how I thought it might look," says Greenhorn. "The guys at The Mill saw that and thought, 'We can do better than that!' They regard themselves as the torch-holders of 'behind-the-sofa' moments - and they reckon this is one of the scariest things they've done."

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