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Russell T. Davies was born in 1963 in Swansea, Wales. After studying English literature at Oxford, he started his television career in the 1980s behind the scenes on the children's program Why Don't You. Here he initially mainly did graphic work, but later also focused on writing. The first series he wrote himself was Dark Season from 1991, a children's series in which a student (played by a very young Kate Winslet) has to stop an evil teacher who wants to conquer the world with the help of computers. His next project Century Falls from 1993 pits a teenager against demons and other supernatural evil in a rural town. At the time, Davies was also on the writing team of the children's hospital series Children's Ward.
His first adult drama series was from 1994. The soap opera Revelations followed an English priest and his family. This became his first series in which he incorporated a number of major storylines surrounding homosexuality. That theme would later become leading in many other series of his. The most famous of these from that era is the original British version of Queer as Folk from 1999, which follows the lives of three gay men from Manchester. This series was given a successful American-Canadian remake that ran for five seasons on Showtime.
Davies' best-known work is probably his contribution to Doctor Who. He was one of the people who worked in complete secrecy on a comeback of the science fiction series in the early 2000s, and the code name Torchwood (anagram of Doctor Who) was frequently used. During the first four seasons (between 2005 and 2010), he served as showrunner and head writer. This period saw Christopher Eccleston as the ninth Doctor and David Tennant as the tenth Doctor. He also worked on two spin-offs during that time: Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Torchwood is aimed at a more mature audience and follows the secret organization Torchwood that protects Cardiff against alien threats, with the immortal time traveler Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) as the main character. Davies had been thinking about the idea for a series called Excalibur for a while, a kind of crime/science fiction series in the style of The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but British. This was eventually cast in the form of a Doctor Who spin-off. Torchwood started on BBC Three in 2006 and was a modest hit. However, the success became greater with each season and the popularity grew. The success was so great that the fourth and final season from 2011 became an international collaboration between BBC One and Starz.
The Sarah Jane Adventures was aimed at children and follows journalist Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), who, together with a group of teenagers from the neighborhood, investigates extraterrestrial phenomena. Sarah Jane was a traveling companion of the Doctor during the 1970s, but returned in 2006 for a guest role. The series started in 2007 and was a huge success on CBBC, but was canceled after Elisabeth Sladen's death in 2011. As a replacement, Davies co-created the children's series Wizards vs Aliens (the title is an exact description of the story) with Sarah Jane Adventures writer Phil Ford in 2012, in which the writers were able to express a number of ideas for never-made Sarah Jane episodes.
After Doctor Who, Davies started working again on more adult series. In 2015 he made Cucumber, Banana and Tofu, three related series on LGBTI themes. In 2018, A Very English Scandal was released, a miniseries based on a true story about a politician who plotted an assassination attempt on his former lover in the 1960s. The miniseries Years and Years followed a year later. In it, Davies sketches a dystopian future full of natural disasters and wars and we see how an ordinary family from Manchester deals with this. In 2021, It's a Sin was released, a drama series about the AIDS outbreak of the 1980s and its impact on London's gay community. It sounds strange, but Doctor Who influences seeped into all these series.
It became clear last year that Doctor Who was still in Davies' heart. When showrunner Chris Chibnall announced his departure, it was announced shortly afterward that Russell T. Davies would be returning. From November 25, we can enjoy three specials in which David Tennant returns as the Doctor. And a full season will air sometime next year, with Ncuti Gatwa as the next Doctor.
