It's tough and it should be tough - it should never be easy to be given millions of pounds to make a drama. The coalition government is doing terrible things to the BBC, but drama will survive even if we end up putting on a play in a backroom of a pub.

I hate the idea that I have to represent any particular section of society; I just write good telly, that's all.

Rose Tyler: Can't you come through properly? The Doctor: Then the whole thing would fracture. The two universes would collapse. Rose Tyler: So?

Harriet Jones: Did you notice when they fart, if you'll pardon the word, it doesn't just smell like a fart, if you'll pardon the word, it's something else. What is it? It's more like, um... Rose Tyler: Bad breath. Harriet Jones: That's it! The Doctor: Calcium decay. Now that Narrows it down!.. Calcium phosphate. Organic calcium. Living calcium. Creatures made out of living calcium. What else - what else? Hyphenated surnames. Yes! That narrows it down to one planet! Raxacoricofallapatorius! Mickey Smith: [sarcastically] Oh yeah, great! We can write 'em a letter.

...The very word 'fiction' implies another world, literally a different place, whereas no one claims that a dedicated sportsman is escaping his life, or a chef or a nurse. But the poor writer - the sci-fi one especially - is seen as running away. Bollocks. This is real, for me, and it's tough, it's fun, it's practical, and it's very, very important.

In the end I sort of though we created a companion who was so alive and dynamic and so wedded to the doctor that you’d need a whole universe to contain her in. The only way to get rid of her is to send her into a parallel world from which she can never return; otherwise she would stay with the doctor forever.

Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.