As the man who revived Doctor Who, Russell T Davies knows a thing or two about time travel.
So perhaps we should not be surprised that he has found love with someone almost four decades his junior.
I can disclose that Davies, whose hit television dramas include It’s a Sin and A Very English Scandal, is going out with Australian waiter and aspiring model Oliver Cole.
To celebrate Oliver’s 27th birthday last month, the scriptwriter treated him to a spin in the Tardis on the Doctor Who set, sparking ill-founded speculation among the show’s obsessive fans that he could be the next Time Lord.
Davies, who turns 63 in April, shared a festive selfie with Cole online, wishing their social media followers a Merry Christmas.
A close friend of the couple tells me: ‘Oliver has brought a great deal of joy into Russell’s life and they make each other genuinely happy. Despite the age gap, they’re very much on the same wavelength – this relationship feels like one for the long haul.’
Russell T Davies, right, with new partner Oliver Cole
It’s Davies’s first serious relationship since the death of his husband, Andrew Smith, from a brain tumour in 2018. The couple had been together for more than 20 years. Davies took two-and-a-half years away from work to care for Smith, a customs officer, during his battle with the terminal illness.
‘I was surprised by how many people were surprised that I did that,’ he later reflected.
Davies has often said that, given a time machine, he would travel back to the night he met his late husband. ‘If I had a Tardis, I would go to Canal Street in Manchester and be a bystander in Cruz 101 on April 12, 1998, as I was standing by the railing, and he [Andrew] was standing at another railing with his friend, and we caught eyes,’ he said.
King Charles receives bags of letters every year, and now he wants someone to help him reply to them all. Buckingham Palace is seeking a senior correspondence officer on a two-year contract, starting on £32,000 per year. ‘It’s drafting a letter that someone will never forget,’ says the advert on the royal website. ‘Thousands of letters are addressed to the Monarch and Royal Family every year… Your challenge will be to ensure that each one receives a timely and well composed response.’
