Gaiman’s Doctor Who story, set to air as Episode 4 when the show returns for Series 6 later this month, stars Suranne Jones (Coronation Street) as a character named Idris.

Speaking to Newsarama at WonderCon in San Francisco, Gaiman revealed: “…what’s glorious about the finished episode for me is, I don’t look at it going, ‘Oh my god, I miss that scene’ or ‘I miss this bit’ even though I know we don’t have… I know that there were scenes that we shot, the finished episode from the first cut was 56 minutes long and they had to take it down to about 43.”

He continued, describing the lost scenes: “Uncle and Auntie, played by Adrian Schiller and Elizabethe Berrington, they were wonderful, they were so funny, they were so brilliant, they had all this great stuff and it’s not really there anymore. There’s a flavour of it and you can get to see it, but their scenes wound up going because other stuff was more important. But there’s no sense that you’re going to walk away from the episode going, ‘Ah, I wish with had more Uncle and Auntie stuff’ – you walk away going, I hope, ‘What a great episode!’”

The episode’s title, which contains a major spoiler, was announced last week.

The author also discussed adapating his script for the Doctor Who‘s budget: “There’s a lot of CGI. I remember handing in the first draft to them and having a dinner afterwards at Steven Moffat’s place where they said, ‘Look Neil, we love the first draft. It’s brilliant, it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s wonderful. Just so you know, each episode of Doctor Who has…’ – I forget what the exact numbers were, I think they basically said 100 man-hours of CGI – ‘You have 640.’ So there was a level on which lots of things went away.”

He added: “They still wound up essentially taking other episodes out around the back of the bike sheds, beating them up and taking their lunch money and giving it to me. All I know is the finished episode looks beautiful and it has, like I say, it has everything I would have wanted and it takes you places you’ve never been before.”

Gaiman has described the finished episode as “scary and it’s exciting and it’s heartbreaking”.