Russell T Davies argues new Doctor Who spin-off tackling climate change is only political because it has "no choice"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

When Russell T Davies goes walking near his home in Swansea, he follows the same path: over the hill, down to Langland Bay and along the seafront, until he reaches a weathered bench looking straight out to the water.

“They’ve just rebuilt the sea wall there,” he says, “but you watch them, thinking they’ll have to rebuild it again in a few years’ time because of rising sea levels. You can’t live next to the sea and not be aware of this stuff.”

Of course, when Davies isn’t staring out to sea, he’s creating some of the most acclaimed television drama of our time – his credits include such landmark works as Queer as Folk, Years and Years and It’s a Sin, not to mention his time as executive producer on Doctor Who. It was perhaps inevitable, given where he lives, that Davies’s anxieties about the environment might inspire his work. But how?

“The problem with climate change is that it’s very hard to write about,” he says. “No one has yet worked out how to write about the weather changing slowly while we ignore it.”

It was one of Davies’s neighbours who unwittingly helped him crack the problem. “There’s a marvellous woman who lives three doors down from me who is 70 years old,” he says. “I once met her and she was dressed as a fish with her friends marching up and down the seafront – protesting about climate change and saying, ‘This sea front will be gone in 20 years and these houses will be gone.’

“So I started thinking about that and put that together with my Doctor Who mind, which is always looking for new ways to invade the Earth, and it all coalesced into this story.” Enter a whole load of men and women in much more impressive, screen-ready fish costumes.

The War Between the Land and the Sea, Davies’s new five-part BBC drama, is about climate change, water pollution and the damage being done to the world’s oceans by mankind. But it’s also an enormously entertaining sci-fi series about an ancient species rising from the sea and threatening humanity with destruction. The series has its roots in an episode of Doctor Who broadcast in 1972, which Davies remembers watching as a young boy.

“It’s a child of a Doctor Who story called The Sea Devils, which is well known as one of the most famous stories ever,” he says. “My generation thinks of it as ‘the one with the monsters coming out of the sea’. It’s an absolute classic.” In line with the new series, the BBC is also releasing a re-edited, 90-minute version of The Sea Devils, with new music. “The War Between the Land and the Sea is in many ways the 2025 version of that story,” adds Davies.

Back to the present day, this more modern story about Homo aqua (as the original Doctor Who Sea Devils are now referred to) has a cast that includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw (see overleaf), Jemma Redgrave and Russell Tovey. This other Russell plays everyman hero Barclay, who, much to his and everyone else’s surprise, is chosen to be ambassador for all humanity. Tovey, who landed his breakout role as Rudge in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys in 2004, was gripped by Davies’s script within a few pages.

“Whenever I read scripts, dialogue is a thing that really makes me instantly connect to a character,” Tovey explains, “and after the first few lines I knew I wanted to play this guy. I just fell in love with him: he’s someone who has drifted into his late 30s and has no ambitions and desires – nothing but his pay packet and being a good dad to his child. And suddenly he’s thrust into this amazing position.”

This is Tovey’s third collaboration with Davies. They first worked together when Davies cast him, aged 25, as Midshipman Alonso Frame in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned. He returned to the role for a cameo in The End of Time (2010), and their creative partnership deepened a decade later with Tovey’s acclaimed performance as Daniel Lyons in Years and Years. It’s been a long road together, but it’s clear Tovey, now 44, still can’t believe his good fortune.

“He’s my hero. I look up to Russell,” he says. “I remember watching Queer as Folk and in equal measures it terrified and exhilarated me. I felt like I was seeing myself on screen and that was so important to me and so many other queer people of my generation.”

Tovey recently won Man of the Year at the Attitude Awards, and Davies presented him with the award. “If I could talk to myself when I was a little scared, lost, 14-year-old boy trying to find his safe space in the world and finding Russell’s work,” he says, “and tell him that Russell would be presenting me with an award, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

I ask Davies how it feels to hear Tovey speak about him like this. “It’s funny – we don’t hang out inbetween shows with each other,” he says, “but we’ve got a lovely, great professional working relationship that goes back almost 18 years, to when we first worked together on Doctor Who, then Years and Years. I love him as an actor. I love him as a man.”

Barclay, the character played by Tovey, is a reluctant hero, who would rather be with his family than saving the planet. “What I wanted with Barclay was someone who knows what it’s like to fail to pay the electricity bill,” says Davies, “who knows what it’s like to not afford Christmas – why can’t someone like that stand for Parliament and make our laws? That’s exactly what we need, and it’s exactly what we never get.”

There are some scenes in The War Between the Land and the Sea that are pure, fantastical sci-fi, while others feel pulled from the headlines. With references to pollution in the Thames and the amount of plastic thrown into the oceans, it might be politically engaged – but this drama is by no means a piece of worthy-but-dull social realism.

“It is enormously entertaining,” says Davies. “It is epic and scary and tough and romantic – you’ll be gobsmacked by it.”

Tovey nods in agreement. “When people watch it, they’re going to be really taken aback that this is a show that’s on the BBC,” he adds. “Because of the gubbins that we’ve been able to play with.”

Given the environmental themes, it wouldn’t be wholly surprising if some critics on the right of the political spectrum accuse Davies – and by extension the BBC – of trying to shove their green agenda down viewers’ throats. The irony is that while the idea of using Doctor Who to highlight social-justice talking points might feel like a very modern development, Davies’s new series is actually in the spirit of the original 1972 version.

The Sea Devils was written by Malcolm Hulke, a former Communist Party member who used Doctor Who stories to smuggle progressive themes into mainstream drama, turning alien races into allegories for class, race and colonial oppression.

“In drama, messages get out clearer than articles in newspapers or alerts on the news,” suggests Tovey. “You humanise the plight and see the empathy and the struggles through characters that you recognise as yourself. We’ve seen it so many times through Adolescence, Mr Bates vs the Post Office… people are held accountable and the drama has allowed you to see yourself in their position. That’s one of the greatest gifts that art has.”

One of the challenges of stories about climate change, beyond how to depict it, is to persuade ordinary people they still have reasons to feel positive. “We need hope,” agrees Tovey, “that’s what’s missing – we are told the whole time there is no hope.” So how does Tovey “hope” viewers will leave the series feeling?

“I would want them to feel activated and angry,” he says. “I hope that there will be a whole generation who will watch this and feel that this is going to inspire them to do something. I hope, through the humanising of what the hell is happening on our planet, it will do what David Attenborough does, but through drama, to compel people to wake up and recognise that we have to do something about this.”

It might well inspire some to do something. But given how vulnerable the BBC is to criticism at the moment, I also wonder if Davies ever worried that he might be told that he should stick to entertaining and drop the preaching?

“One of the most boring things you can ever say to a writer is, ‘Don’t be preachy,’” he replies. “Quite a few religions have been based for thousands of years upon preaching. It’s not bad as a system, it works. The truth is, I don’t have to get on a high horse at all. If I’m writing about the oceans in 2025, then they really are filthy and stinking and half-destroyed. I would be lying if I didn’t mention these things. It’s only politically engaged because it has no choice.”

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