This is one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes ever, for a number of reasons: the scale of it, the tone of it, the Doctor at Christmas… It’s him at his best. He’s on his finest form.

We felt that such a pastiche suited the retro setting of this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special – particularly as we were able to recast the mother and her two children with the characters in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. It’s our tribute to the Radio Times Christmas covers of old!"

It’s Christmas turned up to 12. It’s the most Christmassy Christmas Special we’ve ever seen. It’s a lovely, heart-warming, touching tale. It’s literally magical. It’s full of the usual concoction of things that spew out of Steven’s imagination. You’re going, ‘How can you have that and that in the same story?’ – and yet it works...

Such an outpouring of grief, the spontaneous grief of people, the extravagance of people saying how great and wonderful she was, sprang out of that shock that we’ve lost part of a culture generated by a programme that goes back… well, she was with me in 1974, and she only died this year. She was a piece of television, wasn’t she? A piece of people’s lives, their childhoods…

Towards the end of this episode, we have one of the most exciting sequences we’ve ever done. While this battle is going on, there are scenes between the Doctor, River, Amy and Rory where the final jigsaw pieces are put in place. Um ... let’s put it this way: there’s a big revelation about River, and River gets a big revelation about the Doctor...

The Doctor Who Companion
The Eleventh Doctor
Volume Three

Your complete guide to the award-winning BBC One series!
Written and researched by Andrew Pixley.

The 2011 season of Doctor Who began in the most dramatic way possible – by killing off the Doctor in the first episode! Unaware of his ultimate fate, the Doctor (Matt Smith) was reunited with his friends, newlyweds Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory Pond (Arthur Darvill) and together they embarked on an incredible series of adventures in time and space. Their journey took them from the Utah desert to beyond the universe, and saw encounters with River Song, President Nixon, the Silence, pirates, a Siren... and even the Doctor’s wife!

Now, Doctor Who Magazine takes you behind the scenes of these astonishing episodes with an in-depth episode guide – including original storylines, deleted scenes, media appearances, ratings information and hundreds of facts about the day-to-day life of the making of Doctor Who – all illustrated with gorgeous, never-before-seen photographs. This collectors’ edition examines the 2010 Special A Christmas Carol, The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, The Curse of the Black Spot and The Doctor’s Wife, as well as the 2010 Doctor Who Prom, the spectacular stage show Doctor Who Live, and the Comic Relief Special Space/Time.

This is your essential guide to the worlds of Doctor Who.
Get ready to discover a wealth of information – and remember, silence will fall...

Matt Smith: It’s Steven [Moffat, writer of Let’s Kill Hitler] being brilliant and mischievous. Also, it’s a direct reference to a line in the episode...

Karen Gillan: Pretty intense laughter from me, too, when Steven told us. It’s just the best title ever… We were, like, ‘Amazing.’ I just love it, because it sounds a little bit controversial. But the subject matter is tackled really well in the episode...

Steven Moffat: Hitler was through and through, appallingly, disgustingly evil. Hitler would be deeply pissed off to know that we treated him as a minor comic character in an episode of Doctor Who. But actually the Hitler story is a bit of a red herring. It’s actually a blatant continuation of A Good Man Goes to War...

Yes, I want to come back! The beautiful thing about Doctor Who is, it’s time travel. Matt’s Doctor could go back before Jack met his Doctor. Or Matt’s Doctor could meet a darker Jack...? That’s fine too. There are ways to do it. When he’s in Doctor Who, Jack is very different to the Jack that’s in Torchwood. Everybody knows my love of Doctor Who, and I would do it at the drop of a hat.

Once you got to know Nick, you loved everything about him. We were a double act. I loved everything he did. I would have loved him as Othello. All other critical faculties were abandoned. You just couldn’t explain yourself. It was almost like someone saying, ‘What an Earth do you see in her?’ or ‘What on Earth do you see in him?’ Once you actually love someone, you just love being with them – and I loved being with Nick.

Right up until the reveal, people are enjoying trying to guess. Is she really on the Doctor’s side? Or is there something more to her? Is she actually not such a good person? Even once we know who River is, I don’t think we’ve lost her potential for adventure.