Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat has revealed that he believes there’s “no point” in the show trying to compete with Star Wars.

Discussing the special effects in last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Moffat told DWM: “There’d certainly be no point [in Doctor Who] going into direct competition with Star Wars or whatever, because you’d fall flat on your face.”

He continued: “The  differential between us and the big Hollywood movies – not just Star Wars, but also the new Star Trek movies, or the Harry Potter movies – is probably greater than in ’77, ’78. But people watch Doctor Who for Doctor Who, not Star Wars.”

Moffat explained: “We’re always trying to show audiences something they haven’t seen elsewhere. If we do a dogfight in space, it’s not going to look as good as Star Wars – so don’t do dogfights in space.”

He added: “One of the reasons that Rose Tyler hanging from a barrage balloon during the Blitz [in ‘The Empty Child’] still looks amazing is, you haven’t seen that anywhere else. Or a horse jumping through a mirror [in ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’]. Or a train in space, like in ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’, or those drawings coming to life in ‘Flatline’, or death by bird in ‘Face the Raven’, or a man made of snakes in ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’. These are things that only Doctor Who has done. They’re brand new visuals. We don’t look smaller than anything else, but no-one else is doing precisely what we do.”