How do you think the style of the show will change in this new series?

"The trick that we have to pull off is stay true to the original spirit of the show and the original character, but make it for the 21st century and a younger audience now who have been brought up watching some fantastic sci-fi films and TV shows. Televisions changed, films have changed so we have to move with the times".

Were you tempted to change Dr. Who radically to update it?

"There's always different vesions of it, but we just wanted to say well look lets go back to the TV original...when you watch it today the stories are great, the characters are great but the young viewers today wouldn't stand for those kind of production values...we need to have film-ic values, we need to bring production values to it that they expect now from shows like "Buffy".

What considerations were made for a new Doctor and when will we know?

Where we're up to at the moment is, Russell [T. Davies] is writing the scripts now and we have some other writers working with him. We'll be making around about 12 or 13 episodes, that's quite a big body of work so that's going to take some time to get right. We want to aim for that quality and make sure we've got good scripts. Then when we've got scripts, then we can start approaching actors.

We've drawn up a long short list of who'd we would like to see in the role - the consideration is that the expectation from the audience will be so high, that the pressure on the actor whoever that may be will be so great to carry off this iconic character that it will have to be someone who can really pull it off....Its probably not realistic to think that we're going to take a chance on someone whose never worked on television before, they're going to have to know what they're doing.

How will the character be modernised?

I think the character remains the same...there's no point redesigning the wheel, its a fantastic character this timelord, it works so why change that. We'll stay true to that, but we'll just make sure the story telling is pacier, that it can be very intelligent...they'll expect us to do quite heavy tough and involving stories that a whole family can watch.

What aspects of the old series will be retained for this?

We don't know yet, as I say he's just now sitting down to write the scripts. We don't just want to do the same old thing, there's no point in doing what's already been done - Russell's going to have a great time inventing some great new monsters, it should feel scary and it should feel fun. We may see some of the old characters from the past coming back but we don't know yet.

When will it hit screens?

We'll be in production later this year, and we hope that it'll be ready for transmission in 2005. Which end of 2005 we're not sure yet. We want to get it right, we don't want to set ourselves a deadline and then rush with the script, the casting and the production and not get it right. We're gonna get one go at this, and the interest already from the media this far ahead has proven that we have to get it right - that the pressure will be great. We're taking our time, putting a lot of time and effort into it and all the best talent onto it as possible.

Any prospect of a lady Doctor Who?

Its been mentioned a few times...we're not ruling out anything, but my taste I think it would probably be male but....we'll just leave it open to the best person for the role.