Doctor Who executive producer and head writer Steven Moffat has revealed plans for more web based episodes.
The writer suggested that the success of last years mini episode ‘The Night of the Doctor,’ which gave Paul McGann one last outing as the Time Lord has spurred him onto looking at doing more short form episodes of its type.
“I think we now have to accept that online stuff isn’t a spin-off any more,” he said. “We used to treat it as a spin-off that maybe some people would watch.
“And to be absolutely honest, I thought they were bank raids – they’d give me some money to do an online thing and I’d say, ‘Right, what crew do we already have, what actors do we already have, what set do we already have?’ So we’d spend no money on it at all, whack it out in a day, pump the money into the episode and off you go.”
“But then you suddenly realise something like ‘Pond Life’, which we took much more seriously, had an audience of over six million. You think, ‘Oh wait, that’s a TV show!’ That’s just a TV show and a lot of our audience make no distinction between that and the TV show.
“Same with ‘The Night of the Doctor’. What I think is quite exciting about all that stuff is you’re allowed to do a six-minute episode. I actually think ‘The Night Of The Doctor’ is one of the best ones we’ve done, and I don’t think it would be improved by being 45 minutes long. What more storytelling do we need?
“Arguably always the problem with the regeneration show is everybody’s just waiting for the bit when he dies and regenerates – so why don’t we just do that bit? You don’t feel that you’re short-selling it at all.
“So there’s going to be more of that, up until the point when all television is like that. And it will be. All television will be downloadable content. It’s coming.”
