Writer Stewart Pringle said: "For me, Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper will always be the faces of the new series. They brought it back so brilliantly. They're just the most incredible performers. So to have them back together for a set of stories and get to contribute to that, it's just a total dream.

"It was a great joy to be doing the first off-world story for this new run. The End of the World is still one of my very favourite Doctor Who stories. So Cloud Eight was our chance to do a bit of that, stepping out onto another world - although this is a world very close to Earth in some ways, it also feels quite distant and quite sinister."

The episode’s other writer Lauren Mooney further explained the inspiration behind Cloud Eight: "I’m really interested in the relationship between work and sense of self. There's something fascinating about the paradise of a world without work, which was the starting germ of an idea about a future in which nobody has to work, but everybody's minds are colonised by data storage.

"We are all in a world where our attention is being clamoured for, and it's easy to outsource our thinking and our creativity. And it's tempting to do that, and not to think for ourselves or create for ourselves. And so this story is about the perils of doing that, because we need those things!"

Producer Matt Fitton said: "After sticking very closely to the Powell Estate for the first few stories, we wanted to widen the TARDIS net and have the Doctor and Rose head off a little way away.

"Stewart Pringle and Lauren Mooney have written some great Ninth Doctor stories in the past, and I really enjoy all their writing. They can make things that are disturbing and very characterful and very human and very emotional as well. All of those ingredients fit well with the era of the Ninth Doctor and Rose!

“So in Cloud Eight, we pay a visit to High High Wycombe, which is apparently a kind of a utopian paradise where people don't need to work anymore. People have endless leisure time and everything seems to be going swimmingly. But as ever in Doctor Who, there is beneath the surface a price being paid for all of this…"

This is an adventure that gets the Doctor particularly riled up, as lead actor Christopher Eccleston commented: "I took this story as a warning to myself, really. The anger that the Doctor feels, I thought, was really exciting and prescient. He's able to both celebrate and berate humanity, but within, when he berates it, he's going, 'Please do not allow yourself to be controlled. Do not give yourselves up to being mechanised.'"

Laurence Boothman, Felicity Cant, Charlie Condou