Steven Moffat says 'lost' TV show ideas may still see light of day
The writer of BBC One's Inside Man explains that many concepts were "quashed" when he was too busy working on Doctor Who and Sherlock.
Having penned screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula and The Time Traveler's Wife, Steven Moffat's latest project is his first purely original creation in over 20 years: BBC One thriller Inside Man.
The four-part drama follows a small-town vicar (played by David Tennant), a death row inmate (Stanley Tucci), a teacher (Dolly Wells) and a journalist (Lydia West) as their lives are surprisingly and inexorably drawn together.
"I wrote the first episode just on spec," Moffat told RadioTimes.com. "I didn't even pitch it to Sue [Vertue, TV producer and Moffat's wife], I just wrote it while we were doing Dracula to pass the time on set, bored at the monitors, frankly."
Though it's his first project not based on any existing source material since 2000's Coupling, it was never Moffat's plan to become a serial adapter. "It was certainly not an intention of mine to do that, at all. I never really think of myself as someone who adapts things – but yeah, I think it is my first absolute original [since then].
"I mean, I never know if that means anything at all. It would be ridiculous to suggest that it somehow limits your creativity if you've got to write a Doctor Who. Jesus Christ, it doesn't! I mean, f**king hell... that's a monster. So the fact that you exist sometimes within existing frameworks is not taking a day off – it really, really isn't. No one who thinks that has ever tried to write the bloody Doctor!"
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Having served as showrunner on both Doctor Who and Sherlock (the latter alongside Mark Gatiss) from 2010 to 2017, Moffat revealed that he had plenty of ideas for original projects during that period – but simply no time in which to work on them.
"There's a pile up – I occasionally find them written on scraps and think, 'Oh, I should do that!' –it's one of the nice things about no longer doing Doctor Who and Sherlock all the time, which is what I did for 7-8 years.
"Every time I had an idea, I had to stand on it unless it fitted into one of those shows. I just quashed it and threw it away, so it's nice now, you can just think, 'Oh, that's an idea, I might go and do that, I might sell that.'"
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Though his next writing project is yet to be revealed, Moffat serves as executive producer on the upcoming Prime Video series The Devil's Hour, starring Doctor Who's Peter Capaldi and written by Tom Moran, which launches on 28th October.
Read more:
- David Tennant almost missed out on Inside Man role
- Steven Moffat reveals how his new TV detective is different to Sherlock
- Steven Moffat doubts Doctor Who return: "It's quite recent for me"
- Inside Man review: A dark, gripping thriller which earns its secrecy
Inside Man airs on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Monday 26th September at 9pm. Steven Moffat and Dolly Wells will also feature in the new behind-the-scenes podcast Obsessed With... Inside Man, available on BBC Sounds on 27th September.
Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
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