Appearing on CBS' The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson last night under the pretense of promoting the tenth anniversary edition of his novel American Gods, writer Neil Gaiman instead spent most his 14-minute segment talking about the world's longest-running science-fiction series, Doctor Who.
Gaiman, of course, wrote the recent Series Six episode "The Doctor's Wife," which featured the soul of the TARDIS being downloaded into the body of a woman called Idris. Ferguson, who has proven to be quite the Doctor Who fan in recent months, admitted that he hadn't seen "The Doctor's Wife" yet but that the episode was on his DVR.
The two gushed over Matt Smith's performance as the Eleventh Doctor. Gaiman remarked, "He's wonderful. He actually plays this thing of being nine hundred years and eleven at the same time." He also mentioned Smith's considerable chin and gave Ferguson the small spoiler that there was one chin joke included in his episode. "It was a feeling of such peculiar power getting to write Doctor Who."
Gaiman then reminisced about watching classic Doctor Who as young as the age of four, recalling how other kids at his nursery school would bend straws in their bottles of free school milk and go around saying "I-will-kill-you. I-am-a-Da-lek!" "I don't know what this is..." said Gaiman, with Ferguson finishing his sentence, "...but I have to be a part of it."
"And three weeks later," Gaiman continued, "I'm watching it from behind the sofa, because there was a shared children's knowledge that they couldn't see you if you were behind the sofa. We knew that the television was a window and monsters could look out of it, but if you were behind the sofa, they'd just think, 'There's nobody there -- It's just a sofa.'"
The writer also mentioned that the first mythology he ever loved was Doctor Who and that for him, he's always preferred the Daleks over the Cybermen. After a brief discussion about his beekeeping hobby, he ended the segment by opting to go with the very British awkward pause but asked that the TARDIS model on Ferguson's desk be included in the shot.
If you're interested in checking out the full segment, you can view it below thanks to the kindness of YouTube user Someoddstuff...