RTD Wanted Doctor Who Leaker Arrested After BBC Traced Online Source

Russell T Davies has revealed that he wanted legal action taken against the person responsible for leaking Doctor Who information online during his second era, asking why he didn’t have the right to “get that person arrested”.

The comments come from an edited extract from Davies’ new memoir, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television, published by The Guardian ahead of the book’s release on 8 October.

Davies says leaks became a major problem throughout his latest Doctor Who era, claiming that virtually every major creative decision eventually found its way online.

“Every decision we ever made, every single plot twist, every single moment” was leaked, he writes, including Billie Piper’s surprise appearance at the end of ‘The Reality War’.

Davies believes the constant leaks damaged the way fans reacted to the programme.

“It introduces a cynicism among fans,” he argues, saying leaked ideas were often judged negatively before viewers had seen how they actually worked on screen.

According to Davies, the BBC eventually managed to trace the person putting the information online to a member of the public.

“They were probably friends with someone at some point in the delivery chain of Doctor Who,” he writes.

However, the BBC did not have the legal power to seize that person’s emails and investigate further.

Davies was clearly frustrated by that limitation.

“This was my copyrighted material,” he writes. “Why don’t I have the legal right to get that person arrested?”

He says the BBC was wary of how prosecuting a member of the public over copyright infringement might appear, describing it as potentially “breaking a butterfly on a wheel”.

Despite tracing the person who was posting information online, Davies says the production never established who was actually supplying the leaks from within Doctor Who’s wider production and delivery chain.

“To this day, we don’t know who the leaker was,” he writes.

That uncertainty caused suspicion behind the scenes, with Davies admitting there were “some tricky conversations at work”.

He believes the source may ultimately have been someone relatively far removed from the creative team, working somewhere along the many technical stages Doctor Who episodes pass through before transmission.

Davies says the production spent around two years knowing material was leaking but feeling “absolutely powerless” to stop it.

He also argues that leaking and the online reaction surrounding it have become a wider problem across science-fiction fandom, citing Doctor Who alongside franchises including Star Trek and Star Wars.