Steven Moffat’s time as Doctor Who boss came to an end on Christmas Day, with the transmission of his final episode, Twice Upon A Time. Moffat has now passed the mantle over to Chris Chibnall, who is hard at work on series 11 of the show. And as part of his farewell interview to The Doctor Who Fan Show, Moffat has also revealed that he planned to leave the show back in 2013.

“I’d always sort of assumed that I would leave with Matt [Smith]”, he said, but didn’t because he was “so insanely busy I didn’t have time to leave”.

This all happened in the midst of the working on series 7 of the show, putting together the 50th anniversary special Day Of The Doctor, and planning Matt Smith’s farewell in that year’s Christmas special. Moffat recalled that before he knew it, people were asking him who the next Doctor would be. “I’m going ‘yes, better find one’, and before I know it, I’m auditioning Peter Capaldi”.

It was the casting of Capaldi that reinvigorated Moffat, too. “That’s when I suddenly got excited. I thought ‘my God, Peter being the Doctor! That’s a whole new Doctor. That’s going to be a whole new sky for us to fly through’”. And fly through it they did, with Moffat overseeing Capaldi’s three series on the show.

The full interview can be found here.