Did God punish Jesus?

One last post on the PSA debate, since I promised I’d write this a while ago. As I discussed before, there’s a lot of controversy at the moment in Christian circles about Penal Substitutionary Atonement – essentially, the idea that Jesus died on the cross to take the punishment for our sins to bring us to God. But what does that mean?

One particularly important question about how we understand and explain the Cross is whether it is true to say “God punished Jesus” (see Google for some examples of people saying this). My opinion is that while Penal Substitution is a true, though partial, description of the Atonement, saying that “God punished Jesus” is to oversimplify and distort what the Bible says about the Cross.

If you’d like to read a case in full for Penal Substitutionary Atonement, then you might want to check out Pierced for Our Transgressions, which attempts to give the Biblical case for it. I’ll just quickly run through some objections to the idea:

Objection 1: Unloving?
Is it unloving of God to punish sin? There’s lots that could be said about this, but I think one of the most important points is that God’s justice is an expression of his love, not something opposed to it.

Firstly, God’s justice is an expression of his love for himself that exists between the persons of the trinity. He owes it to himself, out a love for the justice and goodness that finds its definition in his character.

Secondly, God’s justice is an expression of his love for those wronged. When we hear about a child snatched, an innocent murdered, there is a part of us that longs for justice. Although that desire can become twisted and lead to wrong anger, righteous anger is a product of love.

Thirdly, God’s justice is an expression of his love for the sinner. When God punishes, it isn’t because he has given up on loving someone. His fair treatment of us is a loving action, though it is a saddened love, forced to take the hard decision.

Objection 2: Unfair?
Even if it’s loving, is it fair and just that Jesus, an innocent third-party, sacrifices himself to take our punishment? But Jesus is not someone unconnected for us. We have union with Christ if we have faith in him. Penal substitutionary atonement needs to be understood within the framework and context of Christian theology as a whole. One of the reasons Jesus can die in our place and we can gain the benefits of this is our union with him.

Objection 3: Unwilling?
Is Jesus an unwilling victim? On the contrary, the Father and Son planned together that the Son would sacrifice himself. Jesus is not only connected with us as sinners, but connected with God as Lawgiver and Judge. The unity of the trinity means that he is a willing agent in the process of atonement, and can be the mediator between us and God.

Did God punish Jesus?
As far as I can see, the Bible never speaks of God punishing Jesus. Isaiah 53, speaking prophetically about Jesus’ suffering says that “the punishment that brought us peace was upon him”, but I don’t think that’s saying quite the same thing.

Instead, it speaks in many places of Jesus being sacrificed. Sacrifice is the destruction or giving up of something in place of something else. Sometimes the person described as doing the sacrificing is Jesus sacrificing himself (e.g. Ephesians 5:2, Hebrews 7:26), in other places the Father sacrifices the Son (e.g. Romans 3:25, 1 John 4:10). Jesus sacrificed himself for us; his death was a sacrifice in the place of our punishment. Sin is dealt with by the shedding of blood, as Hebrews says is necessary for the forgiveness of sins, but as a sacrifice instead of punishment.

However, there is a clear penal element to the Cross. Jesus suffered spiritual and physical death (spiritual death being the separation from God he experienced on the Cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), which is the same as the punishment we are due for sin. And Isaiah 53 also indicates a strong penal element.

But two people can perform an action that is identical in content, but different in meaning. For example, I could say “I’ll be back” as a threat or as a promise, depending on the context and situation. A parent might legitimately smack their child if they do something wrong, but if I were to go and smack their child, then even though it’s an identical action, it would have a different meaning – I’d be assaulting that child [Additional note 2023: at the time this was first written smacking hadn’t been banned in Scotland and Wales.]

Similarly, what happened on the Cross was the same in content as the punishment our sin deserves: Jesus underwent separation from God and death, just as we deserve. He did indeed bear God’s wrath, his anger and judgement against sin. But Jesus had not done wrong, he had no sin that needed punishing. The meaning of the Cross was not punishment, but sacrifice. That’s the language the Bible uses to explain the meaning of the Cross, so I think we should do the same, too.

The language of sacrifice also reinforces one of the points made above, the unity of the Father and the Son’s actions. “God punishing Jesus” suggests a false dichotomy of an angry God being placated by a loving Son, or Jesus being the unwilling recipient of cruel abuse. “Self-sacrifice” makes much more sense than “self-punishment”. [Also, there’s a long tradition in Christian theology of talking about the Cross in terms of ‘satisfaction’ – punishment and sacrifice being two parallel but distinct ways of satisfying God’s justice – see Recovering the Classical Concept of Satisfaction by Carl Mosser].

John Stott makes much the same point in The Cross of Christ:

“We must not then speak of God punishing Jesus, or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against one another as if they acted independently of one another or were even in conflict with one another. We must never make Christ the object of God’s punishment, or God the object of Christ’s persuasion.”

Conclusion
This is where I’ve arrived at so far in trying to grapple with the Bible on this subject. I’m not denying the penal dimension of the atonement, only to trying to explain it in a properly and Biblically nuanced way, to do justice to Scripture rather than reduce it to a caricature, especially when there’s a danger of creating a caricature that makes God appear an unloving tyrant rather than loving redeemer. If you think I’ve misunderstood what the Bible teaches about the atonement, please add a comment explaining what you believe it says!

Addendum 1, July 2019: This particular post has continued to get website traffic and generate questions. I’ve always seen penal substitutionary atonement as central to a proper understanding of the Cross, and this was an attempt as a student to grapple with how to communicate that vital truth in a way that’s Biblically faithful and culturally sensitive.

Looking back several years later, I think I overstated parts of the case in the post that follows, as Daniel Hill suggested in the comments. Especially when I said “the Bible never speaks of God punishing Jesus” I was too hasty in putting aside Isaiah 53 in particular. I was relying too closely on a fairly shallow prooftexting – looking for specific phrases in the Biblical text rather than parsing out the concepts implied.

The way I would approach this today is to argue that sacrifice the more dominant theme in how the Bible explains Jesus’ death, but there is a secondary place for explaining it from the Bible in terms of “Jesus being punished in our place” if that’s unpacked carefully. 

Addendum 2, November 2021: I recently read a helpful article Recovering the Classical Concept of Satisfaction by Carl Mosser. It traces similar distinctions to the ones I make below between punishment and sacrifice in terms of punishment and satisfaction, in various theologians historically including Aquinas, Calvin and the Puritans. It’s reassuring for me to discover that my intuitions have some grounding in historical theology – it makes me more inclined to think I was on to something rather than being overly pedantic about terms. So I’d again come back to my original position of wanting to explain the Cross in terms of sacrifice rather than punishment.

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Thought and action in history

From After Virtue by Alisdair MacIntyre:

Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events. There is a history yet to be written in which the Medici princes, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Walpole and Wilberforce, Jefferson and Robespierre are understood as expressing in their actions, often partially and in a variety of different ways, the very same conceptual changes which as the level of philosophical theory are articulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes, by Dederot and Condorcet, by Hume and Adam Smith and Kant. There ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more of less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action…

It is because the habits of mind engendered by our modern academic curriculum separate out the history of political and social change (studied under one set of rubrics in history departments by one set of scholars) from the history of philosophy (studied under quite a different set of rubrics in philosophy departments by quite another set of scholars) that ideas are endowed with a falsely independent life of their own on the one hand and political and social action is presented as peculiarly mindless on the other. This academic dualism is of course itself the expression of an idea at home almost everywhere in the modern world; so much so indeed, that Marxism, the most influential adversary theory of modern culture, presents what is just one more version of this same dualism in the distinction between basis and ideological superstructure.

This chimes very well with my thoughts on history while studying it. As Francis Schaeffer said, “ideas have legs”, and don’t just remain in the abstract but shape our actions, our society, our culture. I argued in my recent exam that the Chinese revolutions between 1911-1949 are best understood as the transition from the dominance of one controlling worldview, Confucianism, to another, Communism. I like Lucien Bianco’s book The Origins of the Chinese Revolution because it carefully considers the role of ideas in the historical events.

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Radio Play: The Emotion Emporium

Last year, I rather hurriedly adapted a short story into a radio play for Xpress Radio in time for their two weeks on FM radio. It was a bit hurried in both script and production, and there are some rough edges that could have done with improving, but I’m fairly pleased with it under the circumstances. I also played the role of Mr Crickfarthing, which was fun!

Mr Crickfarthing is an elderly gentleman, but his old shop doesn’t just sell ordinary sweets. “Cheery Dispositions”, “Bright Sides” and “Hope for the Future” are some of the more popular confections on sale in the Emotion Emporium, but what is the secret behind Mr Crickfarthing’s magical sweets?

Download audio file (Windows Media, 15mb). (I’ll try and get it converted into MP3 format, but had a couple of problems earlier.)

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Quench Articles: Space, God and Dating

Here are some of my articles for Quench’s Debate page over the last few months:

  • Dating: An individualistic, consumerist and self-centred method of relationships? (website, pdf)
  • The Meaning of Life: How the glory of God gives meaning to all we are and do. (website, pdf)
  • Space: The final frontier or a distraction from life on Earth? (website, pdf)

I’ve also updated the Russell T Davies interview with PDF links.

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The dawn of a new era

The time has finally come… I’ve now finished university. On Tuesday, I had my last ever exam. How mad is that? Of course, in these days of lifelong learning and the like, I may well find myself behind a desk scribbling furiously against the clock again at some point in the future, but for now my formal education is done and dusted. Madness, I say!

Some of my fellow students say that university has gone really quickly. But for me, it seems a lifetime ago that I first arrived, a young, nervous fresher from North Wales. So much has happened since then – I’ve done so much, and changed quite a bit, too. And now it’s the end of this chapter of my life, and the start of the next, as I move on into the big wide world of work, and really start trying in earnest to make it as a writer.

I started this blog just before coming to university. Almost three years, three hundred posts and thirty six hundred hits later, I’ve decided that it’s time for a change of blog title. “Student of Life” is now gone! Of course, I hope I’ll carry on learning and being a student of life, but since I’m not a proper student any more, I thought I’d go for something a bit less, er, student-y. So what could encapsulate my eclectic mix of personal ramblings, theology, science-fiction, literature, student journalism and whatever else happened to interest me at the time?

Hmmm… I’ll come back to that one. Let’s talk about one of my obsessions for a moment, the wonderful show that is Doctor Who. Did you see the last two episodes? If not, get thee to someone with on-demand or the episodes on video at once and post-haste, because Human Nature and The Family of Blood were possibly the best Doctor Who story since its return in 2005. It all begins with the Doctor having to take drastic measures to escape a Family who are hunting him down, forcing him to hide by becoming human for a time. It’s beautiful, funny, silly, scary, heart-wrenching and ends with the Doctor at his most wonderfully dangerous in a long time. While human, the Doctor describes his dreams of being a madman, an adventurer in time and space, in a “journal of impossible things”. Now that’s got quite a ring to it…

What do you think of the new design? I’ve tried to smarten it up, but there are still a few teething glitches in the formatting, the “blogs I read” list to rebuild, plus some more changes on the way. I also hope to write those articles I promised but didn’t get around to writing because of my university work. So watch out for thoughts on Life on Mars, whether God punished Jesus and various Gair Rhydd articles yet to be republished on this site!

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Exams

My first exam is tomorrow, on Chinese for Historians. I need to have learned around 240 Chinese characters, and the grammar and vocabulary for the various topics we’ve covered over the past academic year through working through the book Chinese for Historians. Next Tuesday I have an exam on Socialism and Nationalism in the Chinese Revolution. Regular blogging will hopefully resume after then!

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Aleithiometers and Adaptations

The trailer for the film of Northern Lights, the first in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is now online.

I’m rather apprehensive about this film. I love Pullman’s trilogy as much as disagree with his anti-God polemic. Any film adaptation would have to be pretty special to do justice to the books. I’m rather worried about the meddling that’s apparently going on with the film. The reports are that the anti-God angle is being cut out or at least heavily downplayed, which is a bit like trying to have the Bible without any of that messy God business.

Actually, the God I believe in doesn’t bear much resemblance to the God that Philip Pullman doesn’t believe in. The thing that really bothers me is that Pullman identifies his pantomime bogeyman “the Authority” with the Christian God. So it might actually improve the story if the attack is on the abuse of authority in general, rather than just (supposedly Christian) religious authority.

The trailer looks reasonably decent, but hasn’t really put my mind at rest. It looks like it sticks to the story fairly well, which is promising. But the look of the film seems all wrong to me. The cityscapes with zeppelins flying over look pretty, but they look very much like fantasy/scifi settings, rather than “like our world, but different in many ways”. In my opinion, the look ought to be much more like one of a period drama, and be much more rooted in the real world.

It also seems to play up some of the most generic aspects of the novel, such as the whole “She is the prophesied one who must save the world” spiel. There isn’t much hint of the more thoughtful and philosophical aspects of the novel – the only impression we have of the daemons in the trailer is “magical animal sidekick” rather than the fascinating externalised soul of the books.

I really hope the film will turn out well. I guess we’ll see in December.

Another movie adaptation of a fantasy novel currently in the offing is The Dark is Rising. Christopher Eccleston will be playing the Rider, which is promising. Apart from that – well, this quote from an article The Dark is Changing doesn’t bode well:

A joke among the journalists covering The Dark Is Rising set visit in Bucharest over the last couple of days was that the movie has only changed three things from the Newberry-winning novel on which it’s based: they’ve changed the lead kid’s nationality from English to American, they’ve changed the lead kid’s age from 11 to 14, and they’ve changed everything that happens in the story.

It’s a while since I read the book, but I really enjoyed it and thought it would translate well to screen. There are certain moments, such as Will in an avenue of trees in the snow setting some wood on fire with his new-found powers as crows wheel about around him, that have stuck very vividly and visually in my mind (maybe not entirely accurately, I’d have to check).

Anyway, it looks like the best I can hope for this film is that it becomes a decent fantasy film in its own right that just happens to have pinched the title from Susan Cooper’s book, and just disassociate the two from each other.

I sound like a right whinger, all this moaning about films not being as good as the books! To end on a cheerful note, this Saturday’s Doctor Who episode, Human Nature, looks set to be one of the best stories of the new series. The two-part story is adapted by the author Paul Cornell from what’s widely regarded as probably the best Doctor Who novels, and the advance word is that it’s very, very good. Don’t miss it!

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Who News Exclusive – writers for series 4

Well, when I say exclusive, I’ve just posted this to Outpost Gallifrey, so every Internet-savvy fan will probably know within 24 hours!

I was having a look at The Agency website, which has the agents for writers including Russell T Davies, Paul Abbott and many others. It lists their current projects, and according to the site, Tom MacRae and Helen Raynor are writing for series 4 of Doctor Who, which I haven’t seen announced anywhere else.

Helen Raynor wrote this series’ Dalek story, which I loved, and Tom MacRae wrote the first Cyberman story of the new series last year, which I enjoyed but felt could have made its villain John Lumic more interesting.

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Russell T Davies Interview

Update: PDFs of the interview as it features in Quench are now available to download: Page 1, Page 2 & 3.

The latest issue of Quench is out now, and my interview with Russell T Davies at last sees print! The Quench website can sometimes take a while to be updated, so I’ll post the interview on here. Enjoy!

Before the latest series of Doctor Who began, Quench caught up with its executive producer, head writer and all-round Who head honcho, Russell T Davies. Caleb Woodbridge talks to him about religion, sex and why Doctor Who will never die.

“I can come here in the mornings and sit and have a coffee. Just watch the world go by, I love it, absolutely love it,” Davies tells me as we sit down to talk in a café down in Cardiff Bay, just round the corner from where Torchwood supposedly have their underground Hub.

Despite masterminding the media juggernaut that is Doctor Who and its spinoffs, Davies was very happy to find time to speak to his friendly neighbourhood student newspaper about his writing. At an impressive 6’6”, one of Britain’s top television writers is something of a friendly giant. He has a boundless enthusiasm, with the superlatives flowing fast and free.

“We’ve just finished the first three episodes, and they’re the most spectacular things we’ve ever, ever produced,” he says proudly. But as Doctor Who hits its third series, can we expect any changes to the format?
“The format is to be different every week – different story, different setting, different cast, very often a different style every week. With that as a given, you don’t want to change it too much.”
The show seems as energised as ever, with series three taking us across time and space to 1930s New York, a spaceship in the 42nd century, the planet Malcassairo, as well as many other times and places besides.

Series three also sees the introduction of Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones.
“She’s absolutely lovely, we’re dead chuffed with her. She brings a whole new energy with her to the TARDIS,” enthuses Davies. As with Rose, Martha’s family also play a role in the series. So far Francine, Leo, Tish and the rest of the Jones clan have featured less than Mickey, Jackie and Pete Tyler, but as the series approaches the end, watch out for them again and a crucial decision one of them will face.

Rose ended up separated from the Doctor forever in a parallel universe in the previous series’ tear-jerking finale. But if Rose and new girl Martha could ever meet, how would they get on?
“Hahahah! I was thinking about that the other day… you could have a BBC novel about it,” Davies laughs, clearly taken with the possibilities of the idea. “Very like Sarah Jane meeting Rose, I think, like in the story School Reunion. Sparks would fly! They both know who he is, they’d both muscle in on each other’s territory, but both end up getting on brilliantly by the end. It’d be gorgeous, wouldn’t it? But it’s not happening!”

Davies already had a distinguished writing career to his name before reviving Doctor Who. He studies at Worcester College, Oxford, and went on to work in television. But what’s not as well known is that he spent a year studying in Cardiff. I ask Davies about his time here.
“When I came to Cardiff there was this most fantastic course, a Theatre Studies course, which was run by the university but based at the Sherman Theatre… they chose 15 people every year for a year long course and you formed a theatre company, the Sherman Arena Company with set budgets and design budgets and they taught you lighting and choreography and things like that… Really, really lovely, so, that’s when I first came and lived here.”

Do you ever feel like you’re spearheading a Welsh takeover of the television schedules?
“Hahaha! Not a takeover, but I honestly feel one of my most important tasks is getting Welsh people on TV. Before Doctor Who and all this came along, I wrote a series called Mine All Mine for ITV with a highly Welsh cast. It’s very important to normalise it as a voice, as an accent, because television is full of Scottish and Irish characters, and we’re genuinely under-served.
“Things like Torchwood are very strongly Welsh, and I’ve had Welsh accents in Doctor Who. You start to acclimatize, and it’s a very long process. It requires twenty dramas in a row to do it properly. But I’ve got three or four already, and other people will have to keep on doing it. It’s a long process, but you’ve just got to keep chipping away, and I’m very proud of it, very determined.
“There are brilliant actors here in Cardiff who don’t get a look-in from casting directors in London because they’re Welsh. There’s a genuine bias, even if they’re good at putting on an English accent, they’re not seen, they don’t get put on telly. It’s monstrously unfair. So more of it!”

So when did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
“Hmmm… that’s a good question. I was only writing comic strip stuff, theatre stuff, things like that. My own comic strip, not published of course. But it was always boiling away in there. And I never even thought of it like a practical job, because I didn’t know any writers, and in those days – I’m very old! – you wouldn’t see interviews with writers and things like that. The only source of that kind of information, interestingly enough, was Doctor Who. Doctor Who Magazine was my very first insight into television production that just didn’t exist anywhere else. It’s quite a commonplace thing now, to open up The Observer, and there’s an interview with Paul Abbott, Jimmy McGovern or someone. Not so much back then, so writers were like strange different creatures… it seemed like the most impossible job in the world.
“I entered television production and I loved it, just loved it full stop. And I spent a lot of years there, because of that I’d meet with writers and work with writers, but I worked in children’s comedy and stuff like that.”

How did you make the transition from working on shows like Why Don’t You? and Chucklevision to writing award-winning shows like Queer as Folk?
“I was so singled minded in those days, so determined, I look back and laugh at myself. I was working at BBC Manchester and down the road, literally 500 yards apart was Granada, which was a powerhouse in Manchester, even more so then than it is now… so I literally thought I was in the wrong building. I was so determined I left my job at the BBC and went on the dole with no money… I was a producer by this stage, they thought I was mad!
“But I said ‘No, I’m in the wrong job’, and so left that and went to Granada and went making contacts, knocking on doors… Determined as I was, it worked, and it only took about three months. I blagged my way into a job as a script editor, having never been a proper script editor. And on my first day at work, I was on Children’s Ward, with Paul Abbott and Kay Mellor, who now run television drama. It was like the gods were shining on me that day.
“Within a week I’d met, like, thirty writers, all at different stages in their careers. That was really an eye-opener… It convinced me anyone could do it, but it’s hard to make a living doing… The head of Children’s BBC really tried to put me off. She said to me ‘You won’t do it – it’s cold out there.’ But I didn’t believe her! And I was right!”

About the humanism in your writing, I begin… “A proper interview. Hooray!” Davies beams. In The Second Coming, Christopher Eccleston’s working-class Son of God tells humanity that if they want the position of God, then take the responsibility. Do you think humanity can take that responsibility?
“We’re still alive! I think you have to recognise that responsibility, rather than referring upwards. I think that’s something of what religion is… [But also] I think religion is a very primal instinct within humans, a very good one, part of our imagination. It’s as fundamental an instinct as it is to look up at the sun… It’s that in-built, that hard-wired. I think even the most in-born atheist like myself would look up when we talk about this sort of stuff. It’s a solar thing.
“It’s equally clear that the power of the religious over the White House is terrifying. I know when The Second Coming came out, people started saying on Newsnight Review that religion hardly matters in the world any more. Next thing we know, we’re practically in a holy war… It’s going to go on for centuries, unless we deal with it all very quickly. This is so ingrained, this is the axis of power in the world now, and the philosophical struggle in the world from now on. And that is fundamentally based on religion.
“So anyway, yes, I think we have to [take responsibility], but we’re a long way off it. But I’m not an enemy of that instinct that tells us to look upwards.”

In Torchwood, Captain Jack speaks disparagingly of our “neat little categories” when it comes to sexuality, and Bob and Rose upset some in the gay community by having a gay man fall in love with a woman… “Well, they’re idiots!” Davies says. What would you say your view of sexuality is?
“I don’t think my view of sexuality is quite as fluid as I portray it on screen, because what you’re portraying on screen is extraordinary events happening to ordinary people. The fact that it’s a drama means it’s got to be more dramatic! A lot of people are just straight, and equally, I’m just gay. There’s a fair amount of fixedness, within which, you have to look at the possibility that anything can happen…
“That doesn’t mean anything should happen or always does happen. Most times nothing happens and you stay as you are. I think you’ve got to be realistic, and behind that, when I’m writing there’s obviously a big political bias to get this stuff on screen because I believe in that visibility. I believe those stories should be told, and gays are naturally going to like that.”

Do you see yourself as having any responsibilities as a writer beyond telling a good story?
“That’s interesting… No. Not really. I think the story is the thing, because if you start to imagine other responsibilities, then you’re starting to imagine other people’s voices in your head, and the most important thing you can do is keep your voice pure and strong. This doesn’t mean not listening to criticism – actually, it probably does mean not listening to criticism…
“If after I’d written Queer as Folk I’d felt very responsible to that gay audience that was watching, then that could have convinced me not to write Bob and Rose, which is probably the finest thing I’ve ever written. I still think that episode one is just about perfect, and that’s very rare… But you could argue that my responsibility as a gay man then becomes a responsibility not to write a drama in which a gay man becomes straight.”

Speaking of criticism, Torchwood got something of a mixed reaction. Charlie Brooker compared it to Scooby Doo with swearing, blood and sex, for example. What do you think of these criticisms?
“Um, we don’t really pay much attention to it really, equally, when Doctor Who is praised to the skies, we don’t pay any attention to that. Praise is just as unhelpful as criticism. We watch the show, we work on it, we know what’s working and what isn’t, which is not necessarily what you think is working and what isn’t, and never will be, and we’ll work on that.
“And that Charlie Brooker column is hilarious, brilliantly written, the man’s a fantastic polemic writer. But if you turned round to Charlie Brooker and said, ‘So does that mean you think television dramatists should listen to the word of TV columnists?’, he’d run away in horror!
“It’s the same sort of argument that happened about whether we should have a focus group of two thousand people telling us what to do. Absolutely not – it’s just not the way to work.
“So some things worked, some things didn’t, we’ll work on it. There’s new things we’ll see if they work as well, but industry-wise, it’s a record-breaking programme, a huge success… It is seen as a programme in need of a lot of work, and that’s what we do, keep it working.”

Doctor Who is a very optimistic show. Do you think that optimism is always honest and justified? For example, in the episode Boom Town, the Doctor faces a dilemma between justice and mercy – taking the villainous Margaret Slitheen to her home planet, where she will be executed for her crimes, or letting her go in the hope that she will change. (“In that restaurant up there!” Davies says, pointing to where the Doctor and Margaret discussed that question over a last supper together in that story.) In the end, the TARDIS returns her to an egg, giving her a chance at a new life, but it just seems to be a magic answer out of nowhere.
“Yes, I see what you mean, but of course it comes out of magic, because that is our only option, because what is the resolution to the debate around that table up there. What is it? Imagine the outcry if the Doctor had decided one opinion either way. He couldn’t, he literally couldn’t. There is no answer to that debate. Margaret didn’t have an answer, and the Doctor doesn’t have an answer. So magic is the only option for your ending, which is to give the only option that doesn’t actually exist in the real physical world, which is the chance to start again. We all want a chance to start again, we’d all go back and redo things. Only science fiction can give you that ending.
“What I love about that, is you’re having a philosophical debate that eight-year olds can sit there and get involved in, about the death penalty. The whole planet hasn’t come up with an ending to that argument, and we never will. And that’s why the Earth opens and the sky shakes, that is literally a sort of divine intervention.”

“Everything has its time, and everything dies.” When the time comes, should that apply to the Doctor?
“Ooh no, never! He’s beyond that now, If someone took over and the show got axed, and they decided to kill him in the very last episode, you and I know he wouldn’t be dead. In ten years time, someone would come along and say ‘Oh look, he was wearing the Crystal of Gothnar and has been resurrected!’, or they’d just open with scene one in the TARDIS with him flying along.
“I think it’s very important when you’re writing it that you don’t write him as immortal. A couple of times in this series we point out that being able to regenerate doesn’t mean you can’t die. If he were shot through the heart, he’d be dead. He wouldn’t have time to regenerate, to trigger the process.
“But never! I cannot imagine the day. If someone killed him on-screen, it wouldn’t work, like with Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood. I honestly think he’s got that folk-hero status, and I’m very proud of that.”

Everything has its time, and that includes the interview, though after an hour of talking with Russell T Davies, I have more than enough material, and I thank him for taking the time to talk to Gair Rhydd.
“Not short answers, as you can tell, Caleb – a lot of transcribing, I’m sorry!” he apologises unnecessarily. “I hope you can edit me down. This will have to be a special pull-out brochure – Gair Rhydd, 100 pages with Russell T Davies!”

Doctor Who is currently airing on BBC1. Torchwood will return to BBC2 in 2008. For an extended version of this interview, keep an eye on http://quench.gairrhydd.com/

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Doctor Who: 42 Review

The title of last night’s Doctor Who episode was nothing to do with the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, but instead referred to the amount of time before the spaceship which the Doctor and Martha found themselves on plunged into the sun.

Countdowns in Doctor Who are something of a cliché, but I think this is the first time it has formed the entire basis for an episode. It was like the scenes in The End of the World in series 1 where Christopher Eccleston had to get past giant fans to the conveniently inconveniently-placed “Save the Day” switch, only with a more elaborate obstacle course with added trivia questions, plus people talking in deep voices (always a sure sign of possession by an evil force in sci-fi land).

The story was also something of a mishmash of genre clichés. It was obvious a mile off that the Captain would heroically sacrifice herself to help save the day, and ejecting her and the monster out of the airlock was straight out of Alien.

On the plus side, I enjoyed seeing the Doctor being more vulnerable, and the idea of a sentient sun could have been interesting but was completely undeveloped. All told, an entirely generic but moderately entertaining runaround.

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