I was queuing up to see a talk on Oscar Wilde at the Hay Festival last year, when my flatmate nudged me and whispered, “don’t get too excited, but Steven Moffat is just behind us”. Needless to say, I did get a little too excited as I turned and saw the man who had penned the TV of my childhood just casually strolling by only a few feet away. In retrospect I don’t think he made the connection between the William who wrote him a letter later that day and the rather-too-enthusiastic young man who had yelled out “oh my God it’s Steven Moffat!” earlier that morning. Perhaps if he had done so, he would have been a little less keen to return to his Alma Mater for an interview.

Nevertheless, less than a week after this incident, having in the meantime penned him a letter and handed it to the marketing team at the festival to pass on, I received an email in my inbox which read as follows:

“Do I have the right email address for William Caldwell who contacted me at the Hay Festival? Steven.”

If I had been overly enthusiastic earlier that week at merely seeing the man, that was a mild precursor to the storm of energy that I expelled from every limb, from every hair, from every pore of my body at realising that he had in fact responded. I was corresponding with my childhood writing hero. I was on a first name basis with the mind that had dreamt up the Weeping Angels. I had in my hands the email of the former showrunner of Doctor Who, co-creator of Sherlock and an all-round British legend! I mean, the feeling of knowing that I had established first contact - can you imagine what it must feel like for the Doctor’s companion to enter the TARDIS for the first time? Because it felt exactly like that. My universe had just expanded, and, oh, I felt like a God!

Of course, the feeling very quickly wore off, and over the next few months, what had seemed like a moment full of infinite opportunities became a drag. Every fortnight or so I would email Steven with something to the effect of:

“Sorry to nag you Steven - by the way, every time I called him Steven as though we were buddies, I felt just a little extra jolt of excitement - Sorry to nag you Steven, but can I try and pin you down to a date to come up to Glasgow. Thanks. William.”

And he’d always respond with:

“Let me check my calendar and get back to you. I do want to do this. Just keep on nagging me. Steven.’

And so, on and on it went for what must’ve been the best part of nine months; just every two weeks, the same old conversation. Until. Sunday the 25th of February I finally got an email in my inbox that changed the game.

“March the 5th should work. Let me just check one thing.”

Ah. Ok. I hurriedly messaged the other members of the Screenwriting committee (who were faintly aware that I had been back and forth with Steven for some time, but unaware of any precise details) that we had less than 10 days to put together what would be the single biggest event any of us had ever organised. What were we feeling? Well to be blunt, panic is putting it mildly. This was terrifying. How would we market the event in that very limited amount of time? Could we secure a room? Surely, we would need others to help out. How many people would be interested in attending? Not to mention, I had no idea what time he would be arriving, how he would be arriving, if he would need for us to cover travel and accommodation expenses; we’re a small society, so we would have had little way to pay for him if he had wanted that. So, yes, to put it at its absolute mildest, we were absolutely f*cking freaking out.

With this in mind, I suppose you can imagine the relief when, just four days later, a new email dropped into my inbox from Steven letting me know that he had been unable to get aeroplane tickets for that day, and so could I possibly posit another date? Ok, good, fine, this gave us a lot more time to prepare.

In the end, as I’m sure everyone who attended the event already knows, the date we settled on was the 19th of March. That was good, it gave us plenty of time. I believe it was a Thursday when Steven confirmed this, and I just so happened to have my Renaissance Literature seminar that day, so the first official announcement about this upcoming event was that afternoon at about 15:00. It was my turn to present on a topic that week, and as I was messing around with the computer trying to get Google Slides to work, I sort of let it slip that I’d organised for Steven Moffat to come up, and that the event would be taking place very soon.

The silence that followed was of two kinds. The first was from those who’d never really cared for Doctor Who and probably never watched Sherlock in their life. Their silence was of course very much of slightly confused indifference.

The other kind of silence, the one I appreciated rather more, was that of the Doctor Who fanatics who had watched every episode countless times and could probably recite entire scripts off by heart. My seminar tutor Dr Richard Stacey fell very much into this latter camp. I believe that at first he thought I was joking. But when it became clear that I was most certainly being very serious, he became almost as, if not more excited than I was. The seminar, in brief, was utterly derailed.

But this was a very useful moment for me, because for the first time I now had the support of the academic staff in organising (what was shaping up to be) a very challenging event to put together. It was no longer simply the case of me and a couple of friends trying to organise this single-handedly, but rather I could turn to my tutor for guidance and counsel. And by the way, Doctor Stacey, if you're reading this, thank you so very much. The event would not have come together quite so smoothly without your support and advice.

The next two weeks flew by. We had freely ticketed the event to get an idea of numbers, but when 250 seats sold out in under four hours, we very quickly realised we’d need (to steal from Jaws) “a bigger boat”. In this case, the hulking behemoth of JMS 438. Seating 500 students, we could think of no better theatre on campus in which to hold the event, and sure enough, once we explained our situation, it was easy enough to upgrade to this larger venue.

The day of the event came, and I believe we had most things in order. I’d recruited six friends to help as ushers on the doors, Constantinos from the Screenwriting Society committee oversaw everything technological (including filming the event) and my flatmate Felix, who had helped me to get in contact with Steven in the first place, was coordinating everything else. My role was to look after Steven. A simple job, I might add. What could go wrong? Well, I lost Steven.

I’d left him alone in a seminar room (which we hadn't actually booked but instead we had just blu-tacked a sign to the door) to work on a script or whatever. I didn’t particularly want to pester him for an hour before the event, so I left him by himself with a small mountain of sandwiches. About ten minutes later I get a call from Jon (the head usher) informing me that apparently, we had lost Steven. He had been seen heading down the escalator towards the ground floor, and now was apparently wandering around totally lost on the 5th.

I want to make this perfectly clear; I had one job. Just one. Look after Steven until the event, and don’t, I repeat don’t, under any circumstances lose him. This should have been so simple, but apparently (and Steven good-naturedly explained this to me later when we did at last locate him) he has a habit of sort of wandering off at this type of event. He jokingly recounted that at multiple interviews he would wander off, and herds of terrified interns would be sent out to try and locate him. In this particular case (as I learned later) he had headed down to meet his guests - his father, his sister and two friends - and due to the very strange layout of the JMS couldn’t quite work out how to return to the 6th floor. Anyway, all was safely resolved, and that was, of course, the most important thing.

At about 18:55 we headed down to the lower doors of room 438 - the venue. The room wasn’t quite full, but it wasn’t far off. I knew that people had been queuing from up to an hour before the doors were due to open, but seeing the crowd in person was certainly quite intimidating. Steven and I were mic-ed up, Felix gave a brief spiel (addressing you know, fire exits, thanks to insert-names-here, etc) and then we were on.

I honestly don’t recall anything from the interview at all. I have watched it back on YouTube since, but it’s quite surreal because I genuinely have no 1st person recollection of the actual event. My memory pauses the moment I entered the room and continues from the moment that the crowd applauds at the end. Everything in between is a total blank. I’m sure some very clever sciencey person with the brain the size of a planet could explain to me precisely the reason for this, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d put it down to nerves.

Nevertheless, the event came to an end. Applause, cheers, I thanked Steven. A hundred bloodthirsty Doctor Who fans surged forwards, draining signatures and selfies from the poor man. I believe that the President of the Doctor Who society had even brought along some kind of society banner for Steven to sign. But after all of this (and I must clarify it went on for a good half an hour) we eventually led Steven down to University Avenue, he got into an Uber, and that was it. Ten months or so of work, of back and forth, of nagging, and nagging, and nagging, of careful provision and planning had ended.

I can’t quite put into words the feeling at that point; whatever it was, it had its edge blunted by the many drinks we shared in Dram that evening (none of which I had to pay for myself). It was triumphant, yes, I mean of course it was. But I was certainly melancholy when it was over. You know, for ten months I had been excited by this, obsessing over this, carefully planning and working towards this thing, and now it was done, just like that. But with a little distance of a few weeks now, I’m honestly just relieved that I don’t have to worry about it anymore and that we have the footage of the night to stand as a testament to what we achieved. It was huge, but now I suppose we look to the future. Who knows, maybe Peter Capaldi’s email will find its way into my inbox.

 

 

First published: 9 May 2024

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