Could a creature evolve that hid itself so perfectly, no one ever knew it existed? Could it be the reason we speak aloud when we think we're alone? Is it why sometimes, when we wake in the night in an empty room, we still feel an eerie presence? Driven to answer these questions, the Doctor connects Clara to the TARDIS telepathic circuits in order to travel back to a time when she believed there was a monster under her bed. But Clara is preoccupied with her disastrous first date with Danny Pink, and so she instead catapults them from an orphanage in the mid-Nineties to a capsule stranded at the very end of time...

By the time Steven Moffat reached his fourth season as Doctor Who's executive producer, he was beginning to chafe at some of the constraints associated with his job. Amongst them was the fact that, although he got to write several adventures every year, they were almost always pivotal episodes with expansive plots and outsized budgets. A part of Moffat yearned for the days when he had the opportunity to write small, economical narratives like his acclaimed 2007 story Blink. As such, he became determined to allocate himself just such a script during Season Thirty-Four. It would allow him to further explore the character of the recently-introduced Twelfth Doctor, while progressing the relationship between Clara Oswald and her new boyfriend, Danny Pink.

One of Moffat's starting points was the question of how the Doctor occupied his time when he was alone. This was now more pertinent than in years past, because Moffat had decided that Clara would not take up residence in the TARDIS, unlike most of the Doctor's previous companions. Another was a conversation with his fellow executive producer, Brian Minchin, about what could be done with sound in Doctor Who. This inspired the notion of a story about a monster which was never actually seen by the viewer, but was exclusively presented through the Doctor's perception of it. Moffat also recalled a dream he once had, in which his leg had been grabbed by some unseen entity, prompting an exploration of the universality of such a fear.

Production designer Michael Pickwoad observed that the barn set from The Day Of The Doctor was still in storage

Moffat began writing his script -- ultimately entitled Listen -- during December 2013. His first draft was completed on January 29th, 2014. At this stage, the Doctor's musings about the nature of the putative creature did not take place in the TARDIS, but rather in the Fifty Room, a Victorian library which housed the most dangerous texts in human history. The setting for the latter stages of the narrative was not yet defined to be the barn visited by the War Doctor in the fiftieth-anniversary special, The Day Of The Doctor. This change was made when production designer Michael Pickwoad observed that the set had been retained, and was still in storage. Only added in post-production was Clara's reference to the boy returning to the barn on a day when he would be very afraid.

Listen was to be the fourth adventure of Season Thirty-Four and was paired with episode five, Time Heist, as the year's second production block. The director would be Douglas Mackinnon, who had last made Cold War for Season Thirty-Three; keen to achieve an appropriate atmosphere, he spent considerable time reviewing various ghost stories. Moffat had always intended that Orson Pink would be portrayed by Samuel Anderson, the actor playing Danny throughout the season. However, Anderson himself did not learn of the plan until the day of the readthrough, forcing him to quickly familiarise himself with Orson's sequences while travelling on the train to Cardiff.

The first four filming days for Listen -- February 17th to 20th -- were based at The Rest, a former nursing home in Porthcawl which now lay vacant. It was chiefly used as the West Country Children's Home where the Doctor and Clara met Rupert. On the first day, however, Mackinnon recorded the sequences from the start of the story where sleepers awoke in the night, and shots of various children insisting that their experience was only a dream. On the second day, plate shots were taken of the nearby coastline, which would help represent the surface of the planet on which the time travellers found Orson. The week wrapped up at Roath Lock Studios in Cardiff, where February 21st saw the cameras rolling on the standing TARDIS set.

After the weekend, February 24th and 25th took Mackinnon's team to Mimosa, a restaurant on Cardiff Bay, which was the venue for Clara and Danny's abortive dinner date. Part of the second day was also spent recording the extras who were playing the restaurant patrons; it was now their turn to state that “it's just a dream”. February 26th to 28th took cast and crew back to Roath Lock, where the set for Orson's capsule was the principal focus. The shot of the Doctor sitting atop the TARDIS was part of the first day's itinerary. Much of the last day was spent back in the console room, while the effects shot of Clara looking out on the planet's surface was also captured.

Mackinnon then began to turn his attention to Time Heist; over the next week and a half, only March 4th involved work on Listen. Taking place at Roath Lock, this included more material in the TARDIS alongside various inserts and effects shots. Then, on the 14th, sequences in Danny's house were filmed in the studio. Listen featured more regularly in the recording schedule for the following week. On March 17th, further TARDIS scenes were taped at Roath Lock. The 18th saw a blue screen erected at Cardiff's Bute Park for Orson's return home, the Doctor on the African veldt, and an insert at the orphanage. March 19th and 20th were both spent in the studio, with the set for Clara's flat in use on the first day, and the barn on the second day. Playing the boy in the barn was Michael Jones, who had been cast because it was felt that he resembled a photograph of the First Doctor, William Hartnell, at a similar age. Orson's departure from his own time was then staged at Uskmouth Power Station in Newport on the 21st.

A few outstanding TARDIS sequences were completed at Roath Lock on March 24th, alongside a number of pick-up shots. Finally, more inserts were filmed at the studio on May 6th, and at Park Davies on Pontypool's Mamhilad Park Industrial Estate on July 21st. In post-production, only minimal edits were necessary following the decision to allocate Listen a fifty-minute timeslot for its broadcast on September 13th.

• The Doctor Who Companion -- The Twelfth Doctor: Volume One, June 2019, “Listen” by Andrew Pixley, Panini UK Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #77, 2016, “Story 245: Listen”, edited by Mark Wright, Hachette Partworks Ltd.