In 1879 Scotland, the Doctor and Rose join Queen Victoria's retinue as she travels to her Balmoral estate. They stop for the night at Torchwood House, the residence of Sir Robert MacLeish, whose father was a friend of Victoria's late husband, Prince Albert. However, they are unaware that the premises have been taken over by an order of corrupted monks, who are holding Sir Robert's wife hostage. The monks serve an alien force which can inhabit a host body and transform it into a werewolf under the light of the full moon. And now it plans to infect none other than Victoria herself...

Executive producer Russell T Davies left himself little margin for error when he assembled the scripts for the initial season of Doctor Who's twenty-first-century revival. It was intended that Davies would write seven episodes, with Steven Moffat handling a two-part story, and the remaining four scripts assigned to Mark Gatiss, Robert Shearman, Paul Cornell and Paul Abbott. However, other obligations soon compelled Abbott to abandon his untitled storyline, forcing Davies to write Boom Town in the midst of production and with hardly any time to spare. For 2006's Season Twenty-Eight, Davies decided to commission extra scripts which could be kept in reserve. This approach would have the additional benefit of allowing a potential writer to experiment without any obligation on the part of the production team.

Since 2004, Davies had been toying with the idea of an adventure involving Queen Victoria. The monarch had helped reshape the geopolitical landscape of the world during the nineteenth century, when she reigned over the British Empire for an unprecedented sixty-three years. Davies was very happy with Mark Gatiss' use of Charles Dickens in Season Twenty-Seven's The Unquiet Dead, and he felt that the appearance of a well-known historical figure should become an annual Doctor Who event. Producer Phil Collinson suggested that a storyline about Victoria should involve her possession of the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond. Ceded to Victoria upon the annexation of the Punjab at the end of the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849, the enormous gemstone was re-cut in 1852 on the orders of her husband, Prince Albert, following a lukewarm reaction to its public unveiling at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The process resulted in the Koh-i-Noor losing more than two-fifths of its mass.

Russell T Davies thought that a brotherhood of kung fu monks would provide interesting visuals

Taking a cue from the presence of ghosts in The Unquiet Dead, Davies was enamoured with the notion of having Queen Victoria encounter another iconic monster of the supernatural. He discussed the matter with The Mill, who handled the bulk of Doctor Who's computer-generated effects, and they indicated that they were keen to tackle a werewolf, having already worked on such a creature for the 2004 feature film Harry Potter and The Prisoner Of Azkaban. Davies also took inspiration from the recent popularity of sophisticated martial arts movies such as Ang Lee's Wo hu cang long (2000; known in English as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and conceived a brotherhood of kung fu monks, which he thought would make for an unexpected addition to the narrative and provide interesting visuals.

Davies offered this storyline to a writer who was a veteran in the television industry but new to Doctor Who; a commission followed in early 2005. However, the resulting untitled adventure incorporated neither the werewolf nor warrior monk elements, and was not what the production team wanted. The storyline was rejected -- but, unfortunately, an extra script was in fact now needed for Season Twenty-Eight, to fill the void left by Davies' decision to promote The Runaway Bride from the sixth episode of the season to the year's Christmas special. With time scarce, Davies decided to take on the commission himself, and the assignment became official on June 15th.

The adventure was given the interim title “Queen Victoria”. During July, it was positioned as the season's second episode, taking the spot vacated by Steven Moffat's The Girl In The Fireplace, which would now be broadcast fourth. This meant that “Queen Victoria” could be used to establish the Torchwood Institute, which would have a recurring presence throughout Season Twenty-Eight in a manner similar to the words “Bad Wolf” the year before. Davies also considered having Victoria die at the episode's climax, with this ahistorical event provoking the creation of the parallel universe which the TARDIS would subsequently visit in Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of Steel. However, he soon concluded that this would introduce a layer of complexity which might deter casual viewers.

Seeking a less functional title for the episode, Davies considered “Empire Of The Wolf”. Ultimately, however, it became Tooth And Claw, in reference to Alfred, Lord Tennyson's description of the natural world from Canto 56 of his 1850 poem In Memoriam AHH. Composed over a period of seventeen years, the poem embodied the grief Tennyson felt following the premature demise of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833. It was much admired by Queen Victoria, who found that it gave her solace as she mourned the death of Prince Albert in 1861 -- an event from which she would never fully recover. To translate the incantation spoken by Father Angelo, Davies sought the assistance of his father, Vivian, who had been a Latin teacher. Davies was careful to structure his script so that the werewolf animation would not overburden The Mill; this was a lesson learned from 2005's The End Of The World, when the constraints imposed by the computer-animated Cassandra had forced Davies to make a number of last-minute changes to the script.

Mackeson and Ramsay were the surnames of the men who actually transported the Koh-i-Noor from the Indian subcontinent

An historical in-joke could be found in the names Mackeson and Ramsay, given to the soldiers who fetched the Koh-i-Noor from Victoria's carriage: these were the surnames of the men who actually transported the diamond from the Indian subcontinent. Davies originally planned for the Doctor to introduce himself to the monarch using a Scottish equivalent of his typical “John Smith” alias. He had difficulty finding something suitable, however, and instead opted for the pseudonym James Robert McCrimmon, really the full name of Scottish companion Jamie McCrimmon, who had first appeared in 1966's The Highlanders.

Tooth And Claw was initially scheduled as part of the season's first recording block. However, it was soon recognised that the logistics of making episode three, School Reunion, demanded that it be filmed as early as possible. To this end, Tooth And Claw was pushed back to Block Two, which had the additional benefit of affording Davies more time to work on the script. As such, it was paired with The Girl In The Fireplace under director Euros Lyn; he had handled The End Of The World and The Unquiet Dead the year before.

To represent Torchwood House, Lyn used no fewer than seven locations, in addition to studio sets. The first of these was Penllyn Castle in Penllyn, where the courtyard combat between the monks and Sir Robert's men was filmed on September 26th. The next day, sequences on the moors were taped on Gelligaer Common near Fochriw. The 28th saw the recording of Victoria's arrival at Torchwood House, with another castle -- Craig-y-Nos, at Pen-y-Cae in the Brecon Beacons National Park -- posing as the manor. On September 29th and 30th, material in the cellars was recorded at Headlands School in Penarth. The week's work concluded on October 1st, when cast and crew travelled to Llansannor Court at Llansannor to film the dining room scenes.

October 3rd and 4th were spent at Unit Q2, the main Doctor Who studio space in Newport, with Lyn concentrating on action in the observatory. The fifth Torchwood House location was Treowen Manor in Dingestow, where recording on October 5th focussed on the estate's elaborate staircase. The 6th was again a studio day, this time at HTV Wales Studios in Cardiff, and involved sets representing several spaces in Torchwood House -- chiefly corridors -- in addition to various inserts.

The only protracted shoot for Tooth And Claw took place at Tredegar House in Newport. It began on October 7th and then continued after the weekend from the 10th to the 12th, with the work primarily encompassing scenes in the library and the study, as well as cutaways of the monks on the grounds of the estate. The seventh and final Torchwood House location was Dyffryn Gardens at St Nicholas. While filming The Girl In The Fireplace there on October 20th, Lyn captured Lady Isobel's perspective of the monks outside Torchwood House. Lastly, Unit Q2 hosted the TARDIS scenes on October 26th, and the modelwork of the Endeavour telescope the following day. David Tennant thoroughly enjoyed making Tooth And Claw, relishing the opportunity to speak with his natural Scottish accent -- although he had become so used to portraying the Doctor with English inflections that he found it difficult at times to remember to break the habit!

For his Tooth And Claw TARDISode, writer Gareth Roberts drew inspiration from the various prologues which former script editor Terrance Dicks had written for his Target Books novelisations of classic Doctor Who serials. Roberts depicted the alien entity arriving on Earth -- dated in the script as occurring in 1552 -- and then attacking a crofter on the moors three centuries later. The scenes were filmed on February 1st, 2006, on the Cefn-y-Crib moors at Hafod yr Ynys, and ran to 53 seconds.

Season Twenty-Eight's intended debut story, New Earth, had endured a rocky production. As a result, some consideration was given to dropping it back a slot and running Tooth And Claw first -- especially since the latter had proved so popular with the cast and crew. However, there was some concern that the werewolf adventure was too dark for a season premiere, as well as a wariness about provoking too many changes to the already-troubled New Earth. In the end, the planned story order was preserved. The TARDISode for Tooth And Claw was released on April 15th; the episode itself then debuted on the 22nd. Strictly Dance Fever, which had preceded New Earth, was rescheduled to the slot after Doctor Who for this week, to accommodate an edition of Match Of The Day Live featuring the FA Cup semi-final between Chelsea and Liverpool.

• Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #14, 9th November 2006, “Episode 2: Tooth And Claw” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #51, 2015, “Story 169: Tooth And Claw”, edited by John Ainsworth, Hachette Partworks Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Inside Story by Gary Russell (2006), BBC Books.