During an interview with SFX magazine, Moffat talked candidly about the prequels and minisodes that have been a staple of his tenure:

“I think we now have to accept that online stuff isn’t a spin-off anymore. We used to treat it as a spin-off that maybe some people would watch… But then you suddenly realise something like ‘Pond Life’, which we took much more seriously, had an audience of over six million. You think oh wait, that’s a TV show! That’s just a TV show and a lot of our audience make no distinction between that and the TV show. Same with ‘The Night of the Doctor’.”

Further insight on the Night of the Doctor:

“What I think is quite exciting about all that stuff is you’re allowed to do a six minute episode. I actually think ‘The Night Of The Doctor’ is one of the best ones we’ve done, and I don’t think it would be improved by being 45 minutes long. What more storytelling do we need? Arguably always the problem with the regeneration show is everybody’s just waiting for the bit when he dies and regenerates – so why don’t we just do that bit? You don’t feel that you’re short-selling it at all.”

No more prequels or minisodoes though…

“We’ll certainly do some more. We’ll do more prequels and stuff. I’ve been in to talk to the channel controller of iPlayer and say ‘We need proper money for it’, and they’re very keen. And we don’t call them prequels, we don’t call them minisodes, we just call them Doctor Who. That’s all they are. As I say, why not do an episode that’s ten minutes? Or an episode that’s half an hour? It depends what it suits.”

I can’t wait to see what sort of Doctor Who online episodes we get in the future! You can read the full interview on the SFX website or in their latest issue.