Torchwood returns to our screens in July with Miracle Day, a ten-part co-production with US network Starz, which explores what happens when suddenly, one day, people stop dying… Back in February, while the production team were shooting scenes for episode one in Cardiff Bay, we caught up with showrunner Russell T Davies. You can read some choice cuts from that interview in SFX 210 (on sale now), but here’s what else he had to say.
SFX: The basic concept of Miracle Day – the end of death – is massive. It changes religion, economics… You could run with that in a hundred different directions!
“You’re right, and we sat in a room for a long time all talking about those consequences.”
SFX: No death means no consequences, so I could imagine a three-minute-warning scenario where everyone’s looting and having sex in the streets!
“Well, in episode three there’s a great scene where Gwen and [CIA analyst] Esther walk through Washington at night, and it’s kind of a wild atmosphere, because half of the world is out drinking and the other half are at home praying, so we are acknowledging that sort of stuff. But at the same time, I think you should never forget that during the greatest national crises people just go to work, and go home, and get on with it. If this really happened, you and I would just carry on as normal. If something conceptual and huge has happened, nonetheless, you’ve got a deadline tomorrow, and I need to go to work and write a script tomorrow, and if our granddad is ill in bed, he’s still ill. So it’s a very unusual concept, in that it’s hard to dramatise in many ways. That’s why I like it. It’s a very powerful concept, because it takes hold subtly, and you have to find ways to dramatise it, because it’s not immediately obvious. The overpopulation isn’t obvious – it’s not like an extra 200 million people land on Earth today. So it’s unusual in that sense, and it’s been fun to dramatise and really challenging. And we’re still telling a great big rattling thriller, so you find ways to dramatise that.”
SFX: Are there similarities with Children Of Earth in terms of looking at how quickly “civilised” society can take a turn for the worse?
“Well I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that we think we’re so far away from Romania, or Rwanda, or Kosovo… and we’re not! We don’t have better instincts than Rwandans do. It’s fascinating how paper-thin it is. We were getting at that with Children Of Earth – we showed it there. That purposely ended with children being taken from homes to be killed, which you see happening in Rwanda and think, ‘It’s a million miles away’, but it’s not, it’s next door. So that’s continuing into this, because I loved that.
“Y’know, you sit in every drama launch where they’re going, ‘What this show is really about is what it is to be human!’ [laughs] What the f**k’s that?! I don’t even know what that question means, but I do think you can look at how society works, and how we are responsible for each other, and what responsibilities you have for yourself, against your family, against your friends – it’s fascinating.”
SFX: How long is the mystery about what’s caused it all sustained?
“It’s not one of those things that’ll annoy you! Round about episode six you start to get concrete answers, and episodes nine and ten finally explain it all properly. But all the way through Jack’s kinda ahead of the game in working out what’s going on. It’s a mystery, but in a way it’s not that mysterious. Obviously something’s happened to the world, but the most fascinating thing about what happens in terms of science fiction plotting is that it happens instantaneously. It’s not a virus, it hasn’t spread, it didn’t take a day for it to travel from the North pole to the South pole; it’s literally a flick of the switch and it’s happened. To Jack, that instantly suggests what has happened, and that takes a few episodes to evolve. It’s more about explaining what has happened to society while this has happened, that’s the real meat of the story. But it is explained in the end, and finding it out… this story goes back in history as well. We’ve got episodes that go back to 1927, so it’s a broad story covering continents and covering time as well; it’s one of those stories with a plot that’s been planned for decades, so there’s a lot of expanse and muscle in the story. The 1927 stuff is beautiful. I’m giving away too much!”
SFX: In terms of the story, how much takes place in America and how much is in Wales?
“Oh, it’s about 95% America… well, 90%. We’ve got three weeks here and we’re shooting scenes from nine episodes – I think episode seven is the one that doesn’t have any Welsh material at all.”
SFX: Could you ever do this show without it having one foot in Wales?
“I would never want to. Whether I do any more Torchwoods I don’t know, because I think I’ve saved the world often enough – I’ve done it enough now. But it’s a BBC Wales production as well, it’s part of its DNA, so yes, I would think if there was a new series you’d start with something being dug up here, something mysterious… those are the building blocks, it would always work.
“And it’s great. You see scenes of Mekhi [Phifer] walking into the Gower, and it really has a size to it, y’know? We take this American CIA character and put him in that landscape and it’s really good. You’ve seen CIA agents in Buenos Aires and Rio, you’ve seen that a million times, you expect them to be in those settings, and then to play Wales as one of those places is really powerful – it just works.”
