Storms and Teacups: Russell T Davies, the epic and the everyday

Throughout his television career, screenwriter and producer Russell T Davies has explored potential relationships between the spectacular intensity of epic storytelling and the intricate patterns of everyday life. This investment results in a synthesis of contrasting scales and dramatic tones as the extraordinary and grandiose become fused with the modest and familiar. Years and Years (2019) encapsulates Davies’ approach, as the cataclysmic events of an alternative near-future are given shape and meaning within the domestic context of a family’s commonplace existence. Emphasis is frequently placed upon slight, nuanced aesthetic features which come to express and encapsulate global tensions and traumas. This chapter explores the ways in which Davies builds up layers of meaning and significance through his evocation of the everyday in the epic, and the epic in the everyday. The discussion moves through earlier examples of Davies’ television work, tracing complementary and contrasting patterns across earlier programmes The Second Coming (2003) and his rebooted Doctor Who (2005– ). Attending to moments from the span of Davies’ career in this way reveals thematic coherence in his writing and, consequently, gestures towards a wider sense of his status as a television author. More specifically, however, Davies’ ability to consistently find dramatic potential in the balance between the epic and the everyday might also reveal his especially acute understanding of television itself, which is always small and domestic but also vast and unbound. In this way, Davies’ stories reveal and reinforce aspects of the medium, shaping narrative fiction to the television experience.