But I have to write like that. Funny, sad, all at once. That’s how life is. You can have a pratfall at a funeral. You can laugh so much that you choke to death. The Master is dark and genuinely, drum-beatingly insane, and therefore can be funny as hell. Jackie Tyler makes us laugh, but I knew that I’d uncover something sad at the heart of her. Her sadness over her absent daughter is there as early as “Aliens of London,” but you don’t really get to see it properly until “Love & Monsters.” Idiots will say “Ah, that character is developing now” - what, like you were going to play it all in the first 30 seconds?! - but that capacity was always there. It had to be. Even in “Rose,” when Jackie is ostensibly “funny,” telling her daughter to get a job in the butcher’s, Jackie is one of the things that’s holding Rose back - and that’s quite dark, at its heart. “Funny” is hiding a lot of other stuff.
Russell T Davies, The Writer’s Tale (via paralleltoparallel)

(Source: formerlyclaudiajeancregg, via tardisadventures)