In his new memoir, former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies described a planned third new series of of the program.

“It’s such a shame we never got to make Series Three, though. Three scripts were fully written for it, and it breaks my heart they won’t be seen.”

Davies went on the describe the three scripts – and their writers.

“We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything.”

“And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia – look it up, it’ll make you shiver!”

“There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester. That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who’s lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks.”

Davies further expounded on his plans for a third series.

“I was talking to a lot of other writers as well, and I wanted to bring Juno Dawson back for another story after her amazing Eurovision episode.”

“I was also talking to the writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman about bringing Jonathan Groff back as Rogue, which would have been glorious. That sequel was forever getting postponed. It didn’t appear in Series Two, but I would have tried for it in Series Three. We were talking about Rogue in an eighties story, maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre.”

“So we had a lot of fabulous ideas, some fully fleshed out, with a Dalek four-part epic to end the series. We were ready to go.”

But it wasn’t to be because the deal to make Doctor Who content for Disney+ was only for three 60th Anniversary specials, two Christmas specials, five episodes of a spin-off, two 8-episode series and no more.

“We tried our hardest, but for Disney in particular, we just didn’t get the numbers.”

Davies’ new memoir, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television is now available.