it was easy to imagine them

TV Neil Gaiman's posted a FAQ about Doctor Who's The Doctor's Wife and it's invaluable in these dark days without podcast commentaries:

"I think my very first draft was for a sort of a neutral doctor who probably sounded a lot more like David Tennant's Doctor than anyone else because he was what I was used to (see the dialogue above) - but then, Matt hadn't been cast when I wrote it. So I just wrote it as best I could for "The Doctor" and tried not write it for any particular Doctor. By the time I got onto the second round of rewrites, putting Rory in, I'd seen a series of Matt and Karen and Arthur. I knew what they sounded like. So it was easy to imagine them as I wrote and revised. Some of the Doctor's lines changed a bit -- I wrote the "bunk beds are cool" stuff here for example, -- but not as much as you'd imagine. A lot of the Doctor's dialogue you saw on screen was there in the first draft."

One of the banner headlines is that although he knows they exist, he hasn't explored Big Finish or the novels so any similarities to something like Chimes at Midnight are purely incidental, which is a shame because I think he'd giggle at the coincidences.