the master of my sea
об истории, пессимизме, оптимизме, Докторе Кто, Торчвуде и художественном вымысле))
(интервью 2009 года)
Q: That idea of always being on the bring of a dictatorship, which also comes up in your Doctor Who episode Turn Left, is a bleak one to present in a primetime drama. Do you think you're a bit of a pessimist?
A: Yeah, I think I am. It's funny because I write a lot of very optimistic stuff. Doctor Who is inherently optimistic and so I write it that way. It doesn't mean I'm an optimistic person. Torchwood's more of an adult show, so you can embrace that pessimism far more. You're right though: even with Doctor Who there's a lot of quite unpleasant stuff going on if you look beneath the surface. In Turn Left, most of us would let Mr Colasanto be taken away to the labour camps. And at the end of Torchwood, as Alice says, when you take away 10 per cent of the children, it makes it very easy for the other 90 per cent not to look, just as the whole of Europe let its Jews be taken away in World War Two.
When I was kid, World War Two seemed like a million years away. It was ancient history. Now I'm in my 40s, I realise it was yesterday when those things happened, and those people were no different from us now. They weren't less civilised or less intelligent. It's so arrogant to think that it couldn't happen here, given the right set of conditions. As you get older, history gets shorter, and it shouts its warnings at you.
Having said all that, I still strive towards happy endings, because otherwise, what's the point of fiction if it can't combat all of that? It's very easy to write an ending where everyone's either dead or crying in the rain having lost everything. It's very 'sixth-form' writing to do that. You have to look for the grace in life and the hope in a situation. I'm not sure there exists such a hopeless situation that no piece of fiction can overturn.
(интервью 2009 года)
Q: That idea of always being on the bring of a dictatorship, which also comes up in your Doctor Who episode Turn Left, is a bleak one to present in a primetime drama. Do you think you're a bit of a pessimist?
A: Yeah, I think I am. It's funny because I write a lot of very optimistic stuff. Doctor Who is inherently optimistic and so I write it that way. It doesn't mean I'm an optimistic person. Torchwood's more of an adult show, so you can embrace that pessimism far more. You're right though: even with Doctor Who there's a lot of quite unpleasant stuff going on if you look beneath the surface. In Turn Left, most of us would let Mr Colasanto be taken away to the labour camps. And at the end of Torchwood, as Alice says, when you take away 10 per cent of the children, it makes it very easy for the other 90 per cent not to look, just as the whole of Europe let its Jews be taken away in World War Two.
When I was kid, World War Two seemed like a million years away. It was ancient history. Now I'm in my 40s, I realise it was yesterday when those things happened, and those people were no different from us now. They weren't less civilised or less intelligent. It's so arrogant to think that it couldn't happen here, given the right set of conditions. As you get older, history gets shorter, and it shouts its warnings at you.
Having said all that, I still strive towards happy endings, because otherwise, what's the point of fiction if it can't combat all of that? It's very easy to write an ending where everyone's either dead or crying in the rain having lost everything. It's very 'sixth-form' writing to do that. You have to look for the grace in life and the hope in a situation. I'm not sure there exists such a hopeless situation that no piece of fiction can overturn.