最后一点 “Magician look?” he says, more defensively. “I think it’s quite a hard look. I always wanted him to be in black. Matt’s a really young cool guy — he can wear anything, but I wanted to strip it back and be very stark” “Well, Craig was great,” he says, “but he was from Cumbernauld so he thought Glasgow was a metropolis. None of us were pop stars... we had no money. No one signed us and we were never on the telly.” We will never know if the Dreamboys’ big break was just around the corner because Capaldi got his own break at 21. Returning to his flat one night after a gig, he found the film director Bill Forsyth chatting to his costume designer landlady in the hall (“an extraordinary piece of fate”). Half an hour later, he’d landed a part in the film Local Hero, starring Burt Lancaster. Ferguson went off into drug and alcohol addiction. Capaldi gave up the booze, the drugs and the eyeliner to become an actor. Would he have followed the full Johnny Rotten arc from anarchy to butter adverts if it hadn’t been for that break? “I’d have liked that, but it was just getting too tough,” he says. “It was getting hard to be so unsuccessful. The great thing about being in a band is that you create your own world, your own kind of palette, but I don’t know if I had the stamina to hang on in there.” The rest is history. Or the future, depending on the direction in which we’re time travelling. Whichever it is, we have reached the point in the day when Capaldi swaps T-shirt and jeans for the full Doctor. On goes the waistcoat, the DMs, the magician’s jacket. On too goes the signet ring, specially constructed to hide his wedding band, which he doesn’t ever like to take off. (“I see you don’t have a wedding ring,” he says, in a tone so gently disapproving that I decide I’ll buy one on the way home. “Very modern.”) As he changes, a strange thing happens. He’s not on set and our camera is clicking rather than rolling, but his whole body language transforms. By the time he’s got all the clobber on, he's grown beyond his 5ft 9in. His eyes are firing lasers around the studio and, well, he’s no longer the very relaxed, very happy Glaswegian will-o-the-wisp. He’s a full-on Gallifreyan nutjob. But in a good way. “Do you feel like the Doctor now?” I ask. “I do,” he replies, twirling. “I do.” “Are the twirls a punk thing?” “It’s graphic shapes,” he says, twirling some more. “That’s why being in black is so great. You can make these spidery shapes. It’s like German expressionism or Sixties caricatures. They’re very graphic lines.” We have 27 days to wait to see if his German expressionist Doctor, the one conjured from a book of thoughts and half a lifetime of enthusiasm, is a success. Today, I’ve had a sneak preview. I’ve seen the madness behind the eyes, and the joy too. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t become the most compelling Doctor to date. For now though, he’s back to his T-shirt and jeans. He leaves quietly, via the stairs, not a Police Box.