Thursday, 31 December 2009
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Breakfast
David will be in the BBC Breakfast studio tomorrow morning to discuss his last epiosde of Doctor Who. Tune in to see him on BBC One between 6am - 9am.
BBC Five Live Breakfast Show
David will be a guest on Radio 5 Live's Breakfast Show tomorrow morning.He will be chatting about his last ever episode of Doctor Who. You can listen online at www.bbc.co.uk/5live
Allons-y! Trailer
Doctor Who Confodential: Allons-y! will air on New Year's Day at 19:55pm on BBC Three.
Alan Carr Chatty Man
It will also be repeated on New Year's Eve. Check the diary on the main site for full repeat details.
The End Of Time Part Two Pics
His time's almost up and the poor Doctor is looking more than slightly the worse for wear in these new shots from The End Of Time Part Two.
See how his final story unfolds on New Year's Day at 18:40pm on BBC One.
The End Of Time Viewer Ratings
The End Of Time Part One was the third most watched TV show on Christmas Day with a whopping 10 Million people tuning in to see the first part of David's final adventure as the Doctor.
EastEnders and Gavin And Stacey made up the top three.
EastEnders and Gavin And Stacey made up the top three.
Hamlet Viewing Ratings
David Tennant's reworked stage outing as Hamlet attracted 900,000 viewers to BBC2, as the BBC took the honours on Boxing Day with the fallout of Archie Mitchell's death on EastEnders the biggest rating show of the day.
Tennant, who had a day earlier starred as Doctor Who on BBC1, received rave reviews for his performance of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The three-hour TV adaptation, managed an audience share of 4.5% across the 5.05pm to 8.10pm slot. BBC2 followed up with the final of Victorian Farm Christmas, between 8.10pm and 9.10pm, which attracted 1.1m viewers and a 5.1% audience share.
The development of the EastEnders whodunit saga, which started on Christmas Day when Archie Mitchell was killed in the biggest-rating show of the day, delivered an audience of 8.1m for BBC1. This represented a 37.9% share of the audience between 7pm and 7.30pm.
The BBC beat ITV into second place with Ant & Dec's Christmas Show the second highest-rating show of the day with 6.8m viewers and a 30.8% share between 7.30pm and 8.45pm.
BBC1's 7.30pm challenger, Pirates of the Caribbean: at World's End, was seen by 6.1m viewers. This was a 27.3% share in the 7.30pm to 10.05pm time slot.
ITV followed up Ant & Dec with a double header of All Star shows. All Star Family Fortunes managed 5.8m viewers, a 25.8% share in the 8.45pm to 9.30pm slot. This was followed by The All Star Impressions Show, from 9.30pm to 10.30pm which attracted 3.1m viewers and a 14.2% audience share.
Earlier on ITV1 Harry Hill's TV Burp Review of the Year managed four million viewers and a 19.6% share of the audience between 6.30pm and 7pm.
Channel 4's Decoded: Dan Brown's Lost Symbol managed 1.4m viewers from 9pm to 10pm, a6.2% share. Follow up The Real Da Vinci Code, where Tony Robinson debunked assertions made in the book, attracted 1.2m viewers, a 6.3% share, between 10pm and 11.05pm.
Over on BBC4 the new Wallander managed to attract 229,000 viewers and a 1.1% share airing from 9pm to 10.30pm.
Source: The Guardian
The End Of Time Part One Screen Caps
We've uploaded over 400 screen caps of David from The End Of Time Part One to the photo section of the site. View them here.
Sunday, 27 December 2009
Nan's Christmas Carol
Watch David's appearance as the Ghost Of Christmas Present on Nan's Christmas Carol above and view pics from the show here.
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
New Pics From The End Of Time
To get you in the mood for The End Of Time we've updated the gallery with even more lovely pics! Click here to view them.
GM:TV Interview Postponed
The interview with David scheduled for tomorrow's GM:TV has been moved to 31st December 2009.
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
A Cheeky Surprise For The Doctor
The Doctor gets a cheeky surprise from pensioner, Minnie Hooper this year when she plants her hand on his bum during a scene in The End Of Time!
Minnie is played by veteran actress June Whitfield. Tune in on Christmas Day at 18:00pm on BBC One to see the episode.
Nan's Christmas Carol
Nan is the star of this year's seasonal special from Catherine Tate.
The festive show sees Nan's acid-tongued insults catch up with her when the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, along with a dead husband, pay an unexpected visit, in this comic re-telling of Charles Dickens's tale A Christmas Carol.
Is it too late for Nan to swap her Scrooge-like misery for some seasonal goodwill?
The Christmas special sees Mathew Horne return as Nan's grandson, Jamie, and features appearances from special guests including David Tennant, Ben Miller and Only Fools And Horses actor Roger Lloyd Pack.
The Christmas special sees Mathew Horne return as Nan's grandson, Jamie, and features appearances from special guests including David Tennant, Ben Miller and Only Fools And Horses actor Roger Lloyd Pack.
Monday, 21 December 2009
Bedtime Stories
There's a Christmas treat for young story-lovers when Doctor Who star David Tennant swaps the Tardis for the CBeebies Bedtime Story chair and breathes life into the enchanting seasonal tale of The Christmas Bear by Henrietta and Paul Stickland. David Tennant reads four more stories during the festive season: How High Is The Sky by Anna Milbourne, illustrated by Serena Riglietti; Small Mouse, Big City by Simon Prescott; Emily Brown And The Elephant Emergency by Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton; and Miki by Stephen Mackey.
David reads the bedtime story on the following days: 21st December, 22nd December, 23rd December, 27th December, 28th December, 29th December, 30th December and 31st December at 18:50pm on CBeebies.
Learning Zone
BBC Two have been running a series of programmes during their Learning Zone slot about Hamlet. The final show, From Stage To Screen, is broadcast tomorrow morning at 00:50am.
Why I'll Miss Playing Doctor Who At Christmas
"Christmas television was a big deal when I was young. It was the only time of the year that my mum would buy the Radio Times and the TV Times, and I used to love poring over them – I think that’s quite a common British experience.
“So I’m thrilled to have been part of that for the last few years. We’ll have done five Christmas Specials and Doctor Who seems such an obvious fit for Christmas television, doesn’t it?
“This year we’ve done something different again – partly because we’re telling the stories of the end of the Doctor’s time. It is still set at Christmas but it’s perhaps not got quite as much Christmas cheer as before.
“It was a bit sad for me too, filming it. Of course, the way filming is, the last things I actually filmed were weird green-screeny things with me hanging on a bit of wire.
“We’d done all the big emotional stuff way, way before. I think if we’d done my very last scene on my very last day I might have been in a bit of a state.”
Credit: The Telegraph
“So I’m thrilled to have been part of that for the last few years. We’ll have done five Christmas Specials and Doctor Who seems such an obvious fit for Christmas television, doesn’t it?
“This year we’ve done something different again – partly because we’re telling the stories of the end of the Doctor’s time. It is still set at Christmas but it’s perhaps not got quite as much Christmas cheer as before.
“It was a bit sad for me too, filming it. Of course, the way filming is, the last things I actually filmed were weird green-screeny things with me hanging on a bit of wire.
“We’d done all the big emotional stuff way, way before. I think if we’d done my very last scene on my very last day I might have been in a bit of a state.”
Credit: The Telegraph
David Tennant: It just feels scary… all the time
David Tennant: It just feels scary… all the time
He's been voted the best Doctor Who ever, but David Tennant's rule as the Timelord is coming to an end. So how will he cope with life outside the Tardis? Johnny Davis, who has spent the past year trailing him, talks to Britain's most popular actor
Last month David Tennant sold off his bed. It was, he admitted, "not the most delicious piece of furniture". It sat in reception at London's Absolute Radio looking every one of its 15 years in age, its wonky wrought-iron headboard accessorised by a Dalek bedspread and a handwritten sign: "Do not sit on this: prone to collapse".
Tennant was hosting Absolute's Breakfast Show alongside regular presenter Christian O'Connell. By 10am he'd played ping pong in the back of a Ford Galaxy, answered a series of questions from 12-year-olds and encouraged the actor Anthony Head to call in and sing "Lean on Me". Then there was his bed, being auctioned off for Children in Need. Fiona from Tadworth had pushed the bidding to £2,001, but off air O'Connell had a confession to make. The previous night he'd hosted a corporate do for the show's sponsors, British Gas. Things had got a bit carried away and everyone had climbed on the bed for a photo. "And it just sort of went 'poot'," O'Connell explained. "It was 10 of them. They were all trashed."
"There's never been more than two people on that bed," said Tennant.
Now its slats were snapped, the frame buckled beyond repair. "It's not the kind of thing you can just bend back into shape," noted Richie, the show's producer. "I felt bad; I told them it was for Children in Need," O'Connell said. "But you've seen the state of that bed – it's got 'Prone to collapse' all over it!"
"It wasn't prone to collapse," Tennant said.
On air O'Connell came clean, and someone from British Gas called in to do the honourable thing: take the now-useless bed off their hands for £5,000. "How's your head this morning?" Tennant asked.
Four hours of breakfast DJing behind him, he signed off with the Proclaimers' "King of the Road" and went outside to sign autographs and accept gifts from fans. Some had been waiting in the rain since 3.30am.
"That's quite good," he said, unwrapping one in the car that sped him towards his next appointment, at Radio 1. It was a Housemartins T-shirt, one of his favourite bands. "I bet it's extra large – they always think I'm big. And I'm only little."
Tennant was spending the day promoting his final three episodes of Doctor Who, the culmination of which will see him "regenerate" into a new Doctor, played by Matt Smith. After a chat with Radio 1's Fearne Cotton, there was a round of interviews with the TV listings magazines. Tennant asked his publicist which journalist would be attending from one particular title. "Hmm," he said. "She'll always go for the 'Who-are-you-shagging?' type question."
At Radio 1, he bumped into Chris Moyles. "So handsome," Moyles said to him by way of a greeting. Tennant explained he'd come from hosting a rival station's breakfast show. "According to the papers I seem to be leaving every week," said Moyles. "So you might as well have mine."
Fearne Cotton appeared. "We'll get you in just after the news; some questions from listeners – nothing bizarre." Tennant explained he'd been doing the promotional rounds. "Do you ever get tempted to make stuff up?" Cotton asked.
"So tempting," he said. "'Have you given Matt Smith any advice?' That's all I get asked. What am I supposed to say?"
"That's ridiculous," said Cotton. She consulted her notes. "Cross that one off."
Tennant wondered about the listener questions. "Are there rude ones? Do you get sent rude pictures?"
"All the time," said producer Stuey. "A lot of penises."
"Especially if you ask for something specific," said Cotton. "We did this thing asking people to send in pictures of their teddy bears – 50% were cocks. You get willies and boobs all the time."
On air Cotton asked Tennant about a poll that had voted him Britain's Sexiest Man, above Daniel Craig and Ewan McGregor, but also Jeremy Paxman ("Well, that's taken the sheen off"), discussed manual vs electric toothbrushes (Tennant's an electric man) and asked how his "complete army of fans" would cope when he's no longer on Doctor Who. "You know what will happen? Everyone will go: 'Oh, it'll never be the same.' And then two weeks in [to the new series] they'll go: 'Matt Smith: he's brilliant.'
"That's what happened when I was a kid, when Tom Baker left," he said. "That's just how it works."
It's possible, of course. But even Matt Smith must figure Matt Smith's got his work cut out. Though it was Christopher Eccleston who jump-started Doctor Who's regeneration from 1970s wobbly setted laughing stock to one of the BBC's biggest properties, a brand now reckoned to be worth £100m, it was surely David Tennant who sealed the deal. Not only has the role seen him surpass even the immortal Tom Baker as "The Best Doctor Ever", as voted by readers of Doctor Who Magazine, and there's no sterner jury, it's seen him become one of our most respected, most loved actors.
"David is arguably the most popular actor in England," says Patrick Stewart, who appeared with him earlier this year in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet, the film of which is on BBC2 this Christmas. "There was more anticipation for that production and David's performance than anything I've ever been in."
Famously, it was Doctor Who that made the three-year-old Tennant want to act. At school he'd carry around a Tom Baker doll (though he was too shy to ask his parents for Baker's assistant, Romana). As a teenager he wrote Who-themed essays called things like "Intergalactic Overdose", as his English teacher, Mrs Robertson, helpfully showed the News of the World recently. Even when he got the role, he lobbied the producers to change the credits to correct a longstanding inconsistency that had always bugged him – everyone knows the lead character is called "The Doctor", never "Doctor Who". (One afternoon I recalled how Jon Pertwee's Doctor used to dispatch foes with a neat line in kung fu. "Actually I think you'll find it was Venusian aikido," he corrected, not entirely humorously.) While all of this might have made him ideally suited to the job, leaving it has traditionally proved rather harder. None of the other actors who've played the Timelord have ever really lived it down. Baker has confessed that everything since has been "a muddle and a disappointment, an outrageous failure", and fear of typecasting led Eccleston to crash back to earth after just one series. It was a problem not lost on Tennant – or his agent, who suggested that even a bit part on the show would mean "I'll never work again."
"It did take me a few weeks to think it through," says Tennant, 38. "But the only other option is you don't do the job. I remember waking up one morning thinking: 'I can't turn this down. Even if it's the wrong thing to do.'"
Yet his acting credentials already put him in a different league to his predecessors. Olivier Award-nominated at 31 and a veteran of the RSC, he has managed to fill the three remaining months of the year when he's not been in Cardiff filming Doctor Who with an impressively wide range of boldface gigs: the lead in Hamlet and Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost running on stage concurrently, a Harry Potter film and several weighty TV dramas, including playing Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in Einstein and Eddington. As well as Doctor Who and Hamlet this Christmas, there's the Stephen Poliakoff film Glorious 39 and the role of dastardly Lord Pomfrey in St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold. Which certainly shows range. "It's all the same thing," Tennant smiles. "It's all acting. I think Shakespeare was a man of the people."
"When I started out, if you got known for one role, forget it," says David Morrissey, who co-starred with Tennant in Doctor Who and the 2004 TV musical-drama Blackpool. "But David's Doctor won't be the millstone around his neck that it's been for actors in the past. It might weigh him down in a personal way – walking down the street and stuff – but he's so gifted it won't ever restrict him professionally."
What's more, Tennant's popularity is now such that he occupies a fairly unique position among his peers. He is as likely to give an interview to the University of Cambridge's Shakespeare journal on Mark Rylance's 1989 production of Hamlet for the RSC as he is to appear on Top Gear's "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car", or turn on the Blackpool Christmas lights. In February he presented Comic Relief with Davina McCall – a remarkable thing for an actor to be asked to do. "Yes, but that's to do with Doctor Who," Tennant says. "I don't imagine I'll be in the frame for things like that any more. I'm sure in two years' time they'll want Matt Smith to do Comic Relief. I suspect I'm just passing through, really."
Perhaps. When he joined Doctor Who in 2005 it made the BBC News At Six. It may be no exaggeration to say his departure is a national event. "David is very sad to leave," says his friend, the actress Arabella Weir. "But when do you leave the party? When everybody has stopped asking you to dance and is going: 'Look at that sad old cow, he's still here'? You don't know, is the short answer. You just have to make that judgement." Tennant's final episodes will be broadcast on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Because filming happens non-sequentially, the last scene he recorded as The Doctor has actually already aired – an episode of spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures, which went out last month. His final words were an unprepossessing: "You two, with me, spit spot." "It couldn't have been less memorable or less significant," he says. "It was robbed of any epic quality, but that was probably best. There are a lot of scenes in the final story that are very sad, and were very sad to play. If one of them had coincided with the actual final day, I'd have been a puddle."
Come 1 January, writer and executive producer Russell T Davies is counting on us feeling the same way – greeting the New Year in cheery fashion, watching Tennant expire at the hands of The Master. "I can't watch it without crying, literally," says Davies. "I was checking it for the music cues the other night, which must have been the 17th time I've watched it, and I ended up crying. It's heartbreaking."
BBC Wales makes Doctor Who in several large hangars in Upper Boat studios near Pontypridd – Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures are also filmed here. One stage houses a vast permanent set of the Tardis interior, and round the back there's an endless props area, an I-spy of half-exploded Daleks, killer Christmas trees, Ood heads. A fortnight before filming each episode begins, the cast and crew meet in a nondescript Cardiff hotel for a script read-through. There is some secrecy surrounding these meetings, for reasons best illustrated by the time they had to eject a journalist from the Sun who'd been discovered sitting among them, mid-read-through.
In early February I watched the cast read "The Waters of Mars", an episode transmitted in November, arranged around a long table with Tennant, boyish in a Dennis the Menace-style jumper. Two weeks later the script was being realised in three dimensions. Set aboard a Nasa-style base, it required Tony Award-winning actress Lindsay Duncan – last seen playing Margaret Thatcher in TV drama Margaret, today playing space-suited ball breaker Captain Adelaide Brooke – to be thrown around amid various explosions. "I can't roll on the floor because of the gun," she worried to director Graeme Harper.
"Dare I say it?" wondered Harper. "But are your knickers going to be OK?"
"I'm wearing an all-in-one," she advised.
Tennant was in the canteen ("The Blue Box"), not required for filming until after lunch. "You do get slightly institutionalised here," he said. "For four years I've always been going back to Cardiff at some point in the near future, so when I leave it will be like leaving campus. I don't mean to get things out of proportion, but I was keenly watching George Bush leaving the White House, and the thought of how his life is going to change… I'm not saying his life is like mine. I'm not the leader of the Free World, I'm really not…"
Which would make Matt Smith Obama, of course.
"Oh, that's not really worked out very well for me, has it? It's just the thought that you hand over… and it stops. Maybe I'll be whisked up into something equally all-consuming."
One thing he may adjust to more quickly is a reduction in his own visibility. "We always thought when the honeymoon period was over it would settle down, but with every series it seems to get more attention. The viewing figures went up last year considerably. It's sort of bewildering." While Tennant fully appreciated the level of attention Doctor Who would bring him personally, it's not necessarily something he regards as a perk. He was in the role for a matter of weeks before a tabloid reporter had him out of bed at 7am, threatening to run a story involving a brothel, prostitutes and drugs. "Funnily enough, they didn't have photographs." It's not what he joined Equity for.
"You know you're going to have to cope with it on some level, but until it happens to you I defy anyone to really know what it feels like," he says. "When I saw people who were famous, and people whispered and pointed, it felt as though a very powerful individual had walked by. And actually, once you are that person, it just feels scary. All the time."
He says he was helped enormously by having Billie Piper with him for his first year, playing the Doctor's companion Rose Tyler. "She'd been through it for years. And she had it much worse – women tend to. She had become such a great friend and a real help through the madness that was beginning to explode. And then losing her, and thinking: 'I'm on my own!'"
If Doctor Who saw Tennant join the select group of males favoured by the gossip pages, unlike, say, James Corden or Russell Brand, he's done a remarkable job of keeping his personal life just that. He's adept at giving nothing of himself away while remaining a charismatic personality.
He apparently dated Sophia Myles, who played Madame de Pompadour in the show, and has been linked to his assistant director and another BBC Wales staffer. It's likely he's currently seeing Georgia Moffett, who played the Doctor's daughter in one episode and is ex-Doctor Peter Davison's daughter in real life (at which point you may think he's taken his enthusiasm for Doctor Who as far as it can go – "It can be odd when David comes round for Sunday lunch and we all sit at the table; me, an ex-Doctor, with my wife, and David, another Doctor, and my daughter," Peter Davison revealed). And years ago he went out with Anne-Marie Duff, now married to James McAvoy. But you won't hear that from him. "Relationships are hard enough with the people you're having them with," he says, "let alone talking about them in public."
"I resisted jumping his bones," says Billie Piper, "but women really fancy him. He's got a gorgeous face, and an energy that's contagious – the spirit of a child. My girlfriends were all in love with him." One female critic described his Doctor as "the first Timephwoard". His favoured trick for dealing with the inquisitor who inches towards the aforementioned "Who-are-you-shagging?" type question is a kind of reproachful look. "He's avoided any scandal because he keeps shtoom," says Piper. "He very rarely talks about anything that isn't related to his career or acting. You never see him falling out of clubs. He's never off his face. He's got far more patience than I have," Piper adds. "I don't mind signing autographs, but it becomes the topic of conversation at every social event you go to. It starts off: 'So how are you?' Then it's: 'Anyway, about Doctor Who…' It's at that point I start reaching for the wine."
In April, Tennant was at BBC Television Centre to promote the first of 2009's Doctor Who specials, "Planet of the Dead", to air that evening. It was 8am on Easter Saturday morning, yet BBC reception was uncharacteristically busy. Specifically, it was uncharacteristically busy with children. Tennant was due on BBC Breakfast and arrived cheerful as ever, wearing a jacket and thin tie. "You're on after the Association of British Drivers," said Kate, Breakfast's producer. "The people who blow up speed cameras."
"I didn't know there was such a thing," Tennant said.
Julia, the editor of programmes, appeared with five children. "It's my day off," she explained. "But I came in especially."
Tennant signed autographs for everybody and posed for photos. He was ushered into the green room. "This is Frederick," said Kate. "He's reviewing the papers just before you."
"Can I be the first to ask," Frederick said. "Would you mind signing this for my sister? She's desperate to have your autograph."
Then Maxine appeared. "I'm one of the holiday newsreaders," she said. "Would you – I mean, you're probably fed up of doing this – would you sign this for my nephew?"
Tennant went on air and was interviewed by presenters Sonia Deol and Charlie Stayt. I watched from the control room. Stayt suggested that while the previous Doctors had been "interesting, quirky characters", Tennant was the first to be a sex symbol. "Lots of snogging you've done," he said.
"Not lots," countered Tennant. "More than Jon Pertwee did."
He was asked what he found scary in real life ("I'm not a fan of a rodent"), about changing his birth name from McDonald to Tennant for Equity by picking Neil Tennant's name from Smash Hits ("I could have been David Kajagoogoo") and whether he is ever able to go out in public and "be normal".
"Has he talked about the next Doctor?" asked someone in the control room.
"No. Can we ask him about the next Doctor?"
They went on Wikipedia. "It's Matt Smith."
"Matt Smith," it was relayed to Deol's ear. "The new Doctor. Very young."
"What about the new guy?" she said on air. "What advice have you got for him?"
"I don't think you can give anyone advice about stuff like that, can you?" said Tennant.
Afterwards he was collected by producer Kate. She was holding a pile of paper. "I shouldn't have walked through the newsroom," she said. "More requests."
"More requests? We're not going to be allowed to leave, are we?" said Tennant, not unkindly.
Kate seemed to be chewing something over. "I don't care. I've lost all dignity," she said to me. "I'm going to ask for a photo."
The smell that reminds David Tennant of childhood is his father's homemade chicken and leek soup. He grew up in Paisley, near Glasgow, the youngest of three. His dad, Sandy, was a minister and later moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. His mum, Helen, devoted her life to charity work and helped found Paisley's Accord hospice. She died of cancer in 2007, aged 67. There's a gap of six and eight years between him and his siblings, Blair, who works in the music business, and Karen, a nurse and teacher. His upbringing was grounding. "Not all men of the church are necessarily good human beings, but my dad happens to be. My mum was, too," he says. "I feel very thankful for that."
He gained a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama at 17 – their youngest pupil. It was a combination of this and moving to Glasgow with his sister that brought him out of his shell. "Leaving home was one of the best things that happened to me. I was a bit green. I wasn't a particularly worldly 17-year-old." At drama school he was "surrounded by all these exotic older people who seemed to know about life. So it was a really brilliant time." He acted Ken Stott off the screen in Takin' Over the Asylum, the 1994 TV mini-series set in a Glasgow psychiatric-hospital radio station, playing bipolar DJ Campbell ("This is for all you having ECT tomorrow: hope you get some 'Good Vibrations'!"). On set he met Arabella Weir, moving to London the following year to spend five years as her lodger. He complained she never put the heating on; she teased him about alphabetising his CDs. Tennant was soon being talked up as a rising star of theatre, notably for comic roles – Touchstone in As You Like It, Captain Jack Absolute in Sheridan's The Rivals. "Even aged 22 he had an unusually strong sense of self," says Weir. "Most actors are in the business of wanting people to like them. He was: 'This is what I can do; I'm not interested in doing other jobs.'"
He was mesmeric as love-struck policeman DI Peter Carlisle in 2004's Blackpool and head- turning as Russell T Davies's Casanova a year later. "No one could get it right," says Davies. "Everyone was playing the swarthy romantic lead – and here was this man who simply danced all over the script."
"I think I've just been lucky, really," Tennant says, "because I'm not conventional leading-man stuff. I'm slightly left of centre. I remember going up for Casanova thinking: 'I haven't got a chance – the other people are much more traditional square-jawed types.'"
Plus, everyone agrees he's a generous team player. "When you're playing the leading role in a play, you have responsibilities that go beyond saying the lines," says Patrick Stewart. "You lead the company; you set an example. The stress of Hamlet must have got to him, but it never seemed to. You'd see him in the wings beforehand and you would have thought he was preparing to go out for dinner, he was so relaxed."
"Everyone said I would adore working with David, and they were right," says Kylie Minogue, one-time Doctor Who companion Astrid Peth. "He made me feel at ease. I also felt he trusted me, which was important – it was a step back into acting for me. My time on Doctor Who was hard work, but I felt somehow I was 'home'."
Tennant was back at Upper Boat in May, filming his final two Doctor Who episodes, "The End of Time". "Three weeks to go now," he said. "Three weeks and counting." On set John Simm was doing something terrible as The Master that it would be wrong to reveal. "What have you done, you monster?" shouted Bernard Cribbins, who's returning as Wilfred Mott, father of Catherine Tate's Donna Noble. Tennant was feeling good about his final scenes. "It's all very heroic," he explained. "My final 100-yard dash." They were being even more wary than usual about leaks. Some on-location photographs had appeared that week, to everyone's disappointment. "And someone was discovered here the other day with a scanner," Tennant tutted. "They had tuned themselves into the radio mics inside the building and were writing down the dialogue."
In June, the month after filming their finale, Tennant, Davies and John Barrowman travelled out to Comic-Con, the annual "popular arts" convention in San Diego. (Doctor Who has a US fanbase, while Torchwood has become the top-rated show on BBC America. Davies now works for BBC America in LA.) While he was there, Tennant found himself an American agent and did some auditioning. "Just sniffing around, vaguely seeing what was out there." This resulted in him being cast as the lead in comedy-drama Rex is Not Your Lawyer, a role NBC had been trying to fill for months. Tennant will play Rex Alexander, a panic attack-prone Chicago litigator who starts coaching his clients to represent themselves. The pilot's being directed by David Semel, who did House and Lost. "I went to bed one night having had conversations that we could come to terms for this pilot, woke up, and it was on the front of the Hollywood Reporter," he says. "It's a different world in America."
"I'm sure Hugh Laurie's success with House is an appropriate comparison," says Catherine Tate. "David's a brilliant comic actor. America would be mad not to love him."
He's also likely to play opposite Simon Pegg in John Landis's black-comedy remake of Burke & Hare, about the 19th-century body snatchers, and the internet is convinced he'll be the Riddler in the next Batman. "I probably should be," he says. "But you'd think my agent would have mentioned something if it was true."
Tennant finished his chat with Fearne Cotton, remembering to plug the upcoming episode. That evening he was off to Stratford to see his friend Richard Wilson in Twelfth Night. In 10 days' time, visa permitting, he'd be filming his pilot in LA. But first it was off to Television Centre and Simon Mayo's Radio 5 show. Down one corridor he ran into a class of schoolchildren being given a guided tour. They couldn't have been more stunned if Tennant had stepped out of their own TVs. "And they've just seen the Tardis outside," their teacher beamed – a replica prop lit up outside reception.
"That's how I got here," mugged Tennant. "I've just arrived."
A lady from BBC promotions appeared. "If you don't mind, I've got a 16-year-old niece in Australia. She loves three men: you, some Australian footballer and Roger Federer."
"What an interesting combination," said Tennant.
"So if you could just sign…"
On Mayo's show they discussed the upcoming Glorious 39 and St Trinian's 2 with film reviewer Mark Kermode. "Did you like St Trinian's 1?" Tennant teased. "It was one of the worst things that's ever happened to me," said Kermode.
But what everyone really wanted to talk about was Doctor Who. Tennant explained he'd just watched his final episode, with some key crew (more tears). Beforehand he'd been nervous. Afterwards he realised they'd done what they'd come to do. They were handing it over in rude health.
"I feel like I've done all right by my eight-year-old self," he said.★
Doctor Who will be shown on Christmas Day and New Year's Day on BBC 1 at 6pm
Credit: Johnny Davis, The Observer
He's been voted the best Doctor Who ever, but David Tennant's rule as the Timelord is coming to an end. So how will he cope with life outside the Tardis? Johnny Davis, who has spent the past year trailing him, talks to Britain's most popular actor
Tennant was hosting Absolute's Breakfast Show alongside regular presenter Christian O'Connell. By 10am he'd played ping pong in the back of a Ford Galaxy, answered a series of questions from 12-year-olds and encouraged the actor Anthony Head to call in and sing "Lean on Me". Then there was his bed, being auctioned off for Children in Need. Fiona from Tadworth had pushed the bidding to £2,001, but off air O'Connell had a confession to make. The previous night he'd hosted a corporate do for the show's sponsors, British Gas. Things had got a bit carried away and everyone had climbed on the bed for a photo. "And it just sort of went 'poot'," O'Connell explained. "It was 10 of them. They were all trashed."
"There's never been more than two people on that bed," said Tennant.
Now its slats were snapped, the frame buckled beyond repair. "It's not the kind of thing you can just bend back into shape," noted Richie, the show's producer. "I felt bad; I told them it was for Children in Need," O'Connell said. "But you've seen the state of that bed – it's got 'Prone to collapse' all over it!"
"It wasn't prone to collapse," Tennant said.
On air O'Connell came clean, and someone from British Gas called in to do the honourable thing: take the now-useless bed off their hands for £5,000. "How's your head this morning?" Tennant asked.
Four hours of breakfast DJing behind him, he signed off with the Proclaimers' "King of the Road" and went outside to sign autographs and accept gifts from fans. Some had been waiting in the rain since 3.30am.
"That's quite good," he said, unwrapping one in the car that sped him towards his next appointment, at Radio 1. It was a Housemartins T-shirt, one of his favourite bands. "I bet it's extra large – they always think I'm big. And I'm only little."
Tennant was spending the day promoting his final three episodes of Doctor Who, the culmination of which will see him "regenerate" into a new Doctor, played by Matt Smith. After a chat with Radio 1's Fearne Cotton, there was a round of interviews with the TV listings magazines. Tennant asked his publicist which journalist would be attending from one particular title. "Hmm," he said. "She'll always go for the 'Who-are-you-shagging?' type question."
At Radio 1, he bumped into Chris Moyles. "So handsome," Moyles said to him by way of a greeting. Tennant explained he'd come from hosting a rival station's breakfast show. "According to the papers I seem to be leaving every week," said Moyles. "So you might as well have mine."
Fearne Cotton appeared. "We'll get you in just after the news; some questions from listeners – nothing bizarre." Tennant explained he'd been doing the promotional rounds. "Do you ever get tempted to make stuff up?" Cotton asked.
"So tempting," he said. "'Have you given Matt Smith any advice?' That's all I get asked. What am I supposed to say?"
"That's ridiculous," said Cotton. She consulted her notes. "Cross that one off."
Tennant wondered about the listener questions. "Are there rude ones? Do you get sent rude pictures?"
"All the time," said producer Stuey. "A lot of penises."
"Especially if you ask for something specific," said Cotton. "We did this thing asking people to send in pictures of their teddy bears – 50% were cocks. You get willies and boobs all the time."
On air Cotton asked Tennant about a poll that had voted him Britain's Sexiest Man, above Daniel Craig and Ewan McGregor, but also Jeremy Paxman ("Well, that's taken the sheen off"), discussed manual vs electric toothbrushes (Tennant's an electric man) and asked how his "complete army of fans" would cope when he's no longer on Doctor Who. "You know what will happen? Everyone will go: 'Oh, it'll never be the same.' And then two weeks in [to the new series] they'll go: 'Matt Smith: he's brilliant.'
"That's what happened when I was a kid, when Tom Baker left," he said. "That's just how it works."
It's possible, of course. But even Matt Smith must figure Matt Smith's got his work cut out. Though it was Christopher Eccleston who jump-started Doctor Who's regeneration from 1970s wobbly setted laughing stock to one of the BBC's biggest properties, a brand now reckoned to be worth £100m, it was surely David Tennant who sealed the deal. Not only has the role seen him surpass even the immortal Tom Baker as "The Best Doctor Ever", as voted by readers of Doctor Who Magazine, and there's no sterner jury, it's seen him become one of our most respected, most loved actors.
"David is arguably the most popular actor in England," says Patrick Stewart, who appeared with him earlier this year in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet, the film of which is on BBC2 this Christmas. "There was more anticipation for that production and David's performance than anything I've ever been in."
Famously, it was Doctor Who that made the three-year-old Tennant want to act. At school he'd carry around a Tom Baker doll (though he was too shy to ask his parents for Baker's assistant, Romana). As a teenager he wrote Who-themed essays called things like "Intergalactic Overdose", as his English teacher, Mrs Robertson, helpfully showed the News of the World recently. Even when he got the role, he lobbied the producers to change the credits to correct a longstanding inconsistency that had always bugged him – everyone knows the lead character is called "The Doctor", never "Doctor Who". (One afternoon I recalled how Jon Pertwee's Doctor used to dispatch foes with a neat line in kung fu. "Actually I think you'll find it was Venusian aikido," he corrected, not entirely humorously.) While all of this might have made him ideally suited to the job, leaving it has traditionally proved rather harder. None of the other actors who've played the Timelord have ever really lived it down. Baker has confessed that everything since has been "a muddle and a disappointment, an outrageous failure", and fear of typecasting led Eccleston to crash back to earth after just one series. It was a problem not lost on Tennant – or his agent, who suggested that even a bit part on the show would mean "I'll never work again."
"It did take me a few weeks to think it through," says Tennant, 38. "But the only other option is you don't do the job. I remember waking up one morning thinking: 'I can't turn this down. Even if it's the wrong thing to do.'"
Yet his acting credentials already put him in a different league to his predecessors. Olivier Award-nominated at 31 and a veteran of the RSC, he has managed to fill the three remaining months of the year when he's not been in Cardiff filming Doctor Who with an impressively wide range of boldface gigs: the lead in Hamlet and Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost running on stage concurrently, a Harry Potter film and several weighty TV dramas, including playing Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in Einstein and Eddington. As well as Doctor Who and Hamlet this Christmas, there's the Stephen Poliakoff film Glorious 39 and the role of dastardly Lord Pomfrey in St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold. Which certainly shows range. "It's all the same thing," Tennant smiles. "It's all acting. I think Shakespeare was a man of the people."
"When I started out, if you got known for one role, forget it," says David Morrissey, who co-starred with Tennant in Doctor Who and the 2004 TV musical-drama Blackpool. "But David's Doctor won't be the millstone around his neck that it's been for actors in the past. It might weigh him down in a personal way – walking down the street and stuff – but he's so gifted it won't ever restrict him professionally."
What's more, Tennant's popularity is now such that he occupies a fairly unique position among his peers. He is as likely to give an interview to the University of Cambridge's Shakespeare journal on Mark Rylance's 1989 production of Hamlet for the RSC as he is to appear on Top Gear's "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car", or turn on the Blackpool Christmas lights. In February he presented Comic Relief with Davina McCall – a remarkable thing for an actor to be asked to do. "Yes, but that's to do with Doctor Who," Tennant says. "I don't imagine I'll be in the frame for things like that any more. I'm sure in two years' time they'll want Matt Smith to do Comic Relief. I suspect I'm just passing through, really."
Come 1 January, writer and executive producer Russell T Davies is counting on us feeling the same way – greeting the New Year in cheery fashion, watching Tennant expire at the hands of The Master. "I can't watch it without crying, literally," says Davies. "I was checking it for the music cues the other night, which must have been the 17th time I've watched it, and I ended up crying. It's heartbreaking."
BBC Wales makes Doctor Who in several large hangars in Upper Boat studios near Pontypridd – Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures are also filmed here. One stage houses a vast permanent set of the Tardis interior, and round the back there's an endless props area, an I-spy of half-exploded Daleks, killer Christmas trees, Ood heads. A fortnight before filming each episode begins, the cast and crew meet in a nondescript Cardiff hotel for a script read-through. There is some secrecy surrounding these meetings, for reasons best illustrated by the time they had to eject a journalist from the Sun who'd been discovered sitting among them, mid-read-through.
In early February I watched the cast read "The Waters of Mars", an episode transmitted in November, arranged around a long table with Tennant, boyish in a Dennis the Menace-style jumper. Two weeks later the script was being realised in three dimensions. Set aboard a Nasa-style base, it required Tony Award-winning actress Lindsay Duncan – last seen playing Margaret Thatcher in TV drama Margaret, today playing space-suited ball breaker Captain Adelaide Brooke – to be thrown around amid various explosions. "I can't roll on the floor because of the gun," she worried to director Graeme Harper.
"Dare I say it?" wondered Harper. "But are your knickers going to be OK?"
"I'm wearing an all-in-one," she advised.
Tennant was in the canteen ("The Blue Box"), not required for filming until after lunch. "You do get slightly institutionalised here," he said. "For four years I've always been going back to Cardiff at some point in the near future, so when I leave it will be like leaving campus. I don't mean to get things out of proportion, but I was keenly watching George Bush leaving the White House, and the thought of how his life is going to change… I'm not saying his life is like mine. I'm not the leader of the Free World, I'm really not…"
Which would make Matt Smith Obama, of course.
"Oh, that's not really worked out very well for me, has it? It's just the thought that you hand over… and it stops. Maybe I'll be whisked up into something equally all-consuming."
One thing he may adjust to more quickly is a reduction in his own visibility. "We always thought when the honeymoon period was over it would settle down, but with every series it seems to get more attention. The viewing figures went up last year considerably. It's sort of bewildering." While Tennant fully appreciated the level of attention Doctor Who would bring him personally, it's not necessarily something he regards as a perk. He was in the role for a matter of weeks before a tabloid reporter had him out of bed at 7am, threatening to run a story involving a brothel, prostitutes and drugs. "Funnily enough, they didn't have photographs." It's not what he joined Equity for.
"You know you're going to have to cope with it on some level, but until it happens to you I defy anyone to really know what it feels like," he says. "When I saw people who were famous, and people whispered and pointed, it felt as though a very powerful individual had walked by. And actually, once you are that person, it just feels scary. All the time."
He says he was helped enormously by having Billie Piper with him for his first year, playing the Doctor's companion Rose Tyler. "She'd been through it for years. And she had it much worse – women tend to. She had become such a great friend and a real help through the madness that was beginning to explode. And then losing her, and thinking: 'I'm on my own!'"
If Doctor Who saw Tennant join the select group of males favoured by the gossip pages, unlike, say, James Corden or Russell Brand, he's done a remarkable job of keeping his personal life just that. He's adept at giving nothing of himself away while remaining a charismatic personality.
He apparently dated Sophia Myles, who played Madame de Pompadour in the show, and has been linked to his assistant director and another BBC Wales staffer. It's likely he's currently seeing Georgia Moffett, who played the Doctor's daughter in one episode and is ex-Doctor Peter Davison's daughter in real life (at which point you may think he's taken his enthusiasm for Doctor Who as far as it can go – "It can be odd when David comes round for Sunday lunch and we all sit at the table; me, an ex-Doctor, with my wife, and David, another Doctor, and my daughter," Peter Davison revealed). And years ago he went out with Anne-Marie Duff, now married to James McAvoy. But you won't hear that from him. "Relationships are hard enough with the people you're having them with," he says, "let alone talking about them in public."
"I resisted jumping his bones," says Billie Piper, "but women really fancy him. He's got a gorgeous face, and an energy that's contagious – the spirit of a child. My girlfriends were all in love with him." One female critic described his Doctor as "the first Timephwoard". His favoured trick for dealing with the inquisitor who inches towards the aforementioned "Who-are-you-shagging?" type question is a kind of reproachful look. "He's avoided any scandal because he keeps shtoom," says Piper. "He very rarely talks about anything that isn't related to his career or acting. You never see him falling out of clubs. He's never off his face. He's got far more patience than I have," Piper adds. "I don't mind signing autographs, but it becomes the topic of conversation at every social event you go to. It starts off: 'So how are you?' Then it's: 'Anyway, about Doctor Who…' It's at that point I start reaching for the wine."
In April, Tennant was at BBC Television Centre to promote the first of 2009's Doctor Who specials, "Planet of the Dead", to air that evening. It was 8am on Easter Saturday morning, yet BBC reception was uncharacteristically busy. Specifically, it was uncharacteristically busy with children. Tennant was due on BBC Breakfast and arrived cheerful as ever, wearing a jacket and thin tie. "You're on after the Association of British Drivers," said Kate, Breakfast's producer. "The people who blow up speed cameras."
"I didn't know there was such a thing," Tennant said.
Julia, the editor of programmes, appeared with five children. "It's my day off," she explained. "But I came in especially."
Tennant signed autographs for everybody and posed for photos. He was ushered into the green room. "This is Frederick," said Kate. "He's reviewing the papers just before you."
"Can I be the first to ask," Frederick said. "Would you mind signing this for my sister? She's desperate to have your autograph."
Then Maxine appeared. "I'm one of the holiday newsreaders," she said. "Would you – I mean, you're probably fed up of doing this – would you sign this for my nephew?"
Tennant went on air and was interviewed by presenters Sonia Deol and Charlie Stayt. I watched from the control room. Stayt suggested that while the previous Doctors had been "interesting, quirky characters", Tennant was the first to be a sex symbol. "Lots of snogging you've done," he said.
"Not lots," countered Tennant. "More than Jon Pertwee did."
He was asked what he found scary in real life ("I'm not a fan of a rodent"), about changing his birth name from McDonald to Tennant for Equity by picking Neil Tennant's name from Smash Hits ("I could have been David Kajagoogoo") and whether he is ever able to go out in public and "be normal".
"Has he talked about the next Doctor?" asked someone in the control room.
"No. Can we ask him about the next Doctor?"
They went on Wikipedia. "It's Matt Smith."
"Matt Smith," it was relayed to Deol's ear. "The new Doctor. Very young."
"What about the new guy?" she said on air. "What advice have you got for him?"
"I don't think you can give anyone advice about stuff like that, can you?" said Tennant.
Afterwards he was collected by producer Kate. She was holding a pile of paper. "I shouldn't have walked through the newsroom," she said. "More requests."
"More requests? We're not going to be allowed to leave, are we?" said Tennant, not unkindly.
Kate seemed to be chewing something over. "I don't care. I've lost all dignity," she said to me. "I'm going to ask for a photo."
The smell that reminds David Tennant of childhood is his father's homemade chicken and leek soup. He grew up in Paisley, near Glasgow, the youngest of three. His dad, Sandy, was a minister and later moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. His mum, Helen, devoted her life to charity work and helped found Paisley's Accord hospice. She died of cancer in 2007, aged 67. There's a gap of six and eight years between him and his siblings, Blair, who works in the music business, and Karen, a nurse and teacher. His upbringing was grounding. "Not all men of the church are necessarily good human beings, but my dad happens to be. My mum was, too," he says. "I feel very thankful for that."
He gained a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama at 17 – their youngest pupil. It was a combination of this and moving to Glasgow with his sister that brought him out of his shell. "Leaving home was one of the best things that happened to me. I was a bit green. I wasn't a particularly worldly 17-year-old." At drama school he was "surrounded by all these exotic older people who seemed to know about life. So it was a really brilliant time." He acted Ken Stott off the screen in Takin' Over the Asylum, the 1994 TV mini-series set in a Glasgow psychiatric-hospital radio station, playing bipolar DJ Campbell ("This is for all you having ECT tomorrow: hope you get some 'Good Vibrations'!"). On set he met Arabella Weir, moving to London the following year to spend five years as her lodger. He complained she never put the heating on; she teased him about alphabetising his CDs. Tennant was soon being talked up as a rising star of theatre, notably for comic roles – Touchstone in As You Like It, Captain Jack Absolute in Sheridan's The Rivals. "Even aged 22 he had an unusually strong sense of self," says Weir. "Most actors are in the business of wanting people to like them. He was: 'This is what I can do; I'm not interested in doing other jobs.'"
He was mesmeric as love-struck policeman DI Peter Carlisle in 2004's Blackpool and head- turning as Russell T Davies's Casanova a year later. "No one could get it right," says Davies. "Everyone was playing the swarthy romantic lead – and here was this man who simply danced all over the script."
"I think I've just been lucky, really," Tennant says, "because I'm not conventional leading-man stuff. I'm slightly left of centre. I remember going up for Casanova thinking: 'I haven't got a chance – the other people are much more traditional square-jawed types.'"
Plus, everyone agrees he's a generous team player. "When you're playing the leading role in a play, you have responsibilities that go beyond saying the lines," says Patrick Stewart. "You lead the company; you set an example. The stress of Hamlet must have got to him, but it never seemed to. You'd see him in the wings beforehand and you would have thought he was preparing to go out for dinner, he was so relaxed."
"Everyone said I would adore working with David, and they were right," says Kylie Minogue, one-time Doctor Who companion Astrid Peth. "He made me feel at ease. I also felt he trusted me, which was important – it was a step back into acting for me. My time on Doctor Who was hard work, but I felt somehow I was 'home'."
Tennant was back at Upper Boat in May, filming his final two Doctor Who episodes, "The End of Time". "Three weeks to go now," he said. "Three weeks and counting." On set John Simm was doing something terrible as The Master that it would be wrong to reveal. "What have you done, you monster?" shouted Bernard Cribbins, who's returning as Wilfred Mott, father of Catherine Tate's Donna Noble. Tennant was feeling good about his final scenes. "It's all very heroic," he explained. "My final 100-yard dash." They were being even more wary than usual about leaks. Some on-location photographs had appeared that week, to everyone's disappointment. "And someone was discovered here the other day with a scanner," Tennant tutted. "They had tuned themselves into the radio mics inside the building and were writing down the dialogue."
In June, the month after filming their finale, Tennant, Davies and John Barrowman travelled out to Comic-Con, the annual "popular arts" convention in San Diego. (Doctor Who has a US fanbase, while Torchwood has become the top-rated show on BBC America. Davies now works for BBC America in LA.) While he was there, Tennant found himself an American agent and did some auditioning. "Just sniffing around, vaguely seeing what was out there." This resulted in him being cast as the lead in comedy-drama Rex is Not Your Lawyer, a role NBC had been trying to fill for months. Tennant will play Rex Alexander, a panic attack-prone Chicago litigator who starts coaching his clients to represent themselves. The pilot's being directed by David Semel, who did House and Lost. "I went to bed one night having had conversations that we could come to terms for this pilot, woke up, and it was on the front of the Hollywood Reporter," he says. "It's a different world in America."
"I'm sure Hugh Laurie's success with House is an appropriate comparison," says Catherine Tate. "David's a brilliant comic actor. America would be mad not to love him."
He's also likely to play opposite Simon Pegg in John Landis's black-comedy remake of Burke & Hare, about the 19th-century body snatchers, and the internet is convinced he'll be the Riddler in the next Batman. "I probably should be," he says. "But you'd think my agent would have mentioned something if it was true."
Tennant finished his chat with Fearne Cotton, remembering to plug the upcoming episode. That evening he was off to Stratford to see his friend Richard Wilson in Twelfth Night. In 10 days' time, visa permitting, he'd be filming his pilot in LA. But first it was off to Television Centre and Simon Mayo's Radio 5 show. Down one corridor he ran into a class of schoolchildren being given a guided tour. They couldn't have been more stunned if Tennant had stepped out of their own TVs. "And they've just seen the Tardis outside," their teacher beamed – a replica prop lit up outside reception.
"That's how I got here," mugged Tennant. "I've just arrived."
A lady from BBC promotions appeared. "If you don't mind, I've got a 16-year-old niece in Australia. She loves three men: you, some Australian footballer and Roger Federer."
"What an interesting combination," said Tennant.
"So if you could just sign…"
On Mayo's show they discussed the upcoming Glorious 39 and St Trinian's 2 with film reviewer Mark Kermode. "Did you like St Trinian's 1?" Tennant teased. "It was one of the worst things that's ever happened to me," said Kermode.
But what everyone really wanted to talk about was Doctor Who. Tennant explained he'd just watched his final episode, with some key crew (more tears). Beforehand he'd been nervous. Afterwards he realised they'd done what they'd come to do. They were handing it over in rude health.
"I feel like I've done all right by my eight-year-old self," he said.★
Doctor Who will be shown on Christmas Day and New Year's Day on BBC 1 at 6pm
Credit: Johnny Davis, The Observer
Sunday, 20 December 2009
The End Of Time On Newsround
Newsround interview stars of The End Of Time at the recent Press Launch.
How David Tennant's Time Lord Saved Auntie
David Tennant's reign as the Doctor saved the BBC – and it comes to a dramatic end on New Year's Day. But fear not! The next Time Lord, Matt Smith, will have plenty on his plate: the Second World War, Van Gogh...
Do you hate David Tennant? Then this will be the worst Christmas of your life. You might as well gaffer-tape your face until January, because between today and New Year's Day, that lanky Scotsman with the Converse tennis shoes and the pinstripes and the great hair-wax explosion will fill more airwaves than Fiona Bruce and the jewellery demonstrators of QVC combined.
Doctor Who will drive the Tardis-like Santa's sleigh all over the BBC One channel idents. Off he'll go, with the full complement of reindeer, to score a big "O" into the winter sky – and he'll make around 40 more house calls during the festive season. Principal among these, of course, is his 10th incarnation's final two-part adventure. (Its title, "The End of Time", is sufficiently apocalyptic to suggest that Tennant's Doctor will not, like Colin Baker's, perish simply by falling over and banging his head on a hard bit of the Tardis.) Each episode will be followed by Doctor Who Confidential, a supporting documentary on BBC Three, which will comprise behind-the-scenes footage and the now-customary interviews with production staff overusing the word "iconic". A CGI Tennant will battle monsters in the New Mexico desert in the animated story "Dreamland", and the flesh-and-blood original will be standing in for Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, lolling on the sofas of GMTV, Blue Peter and Alan Carr; hosting a Who-themed Never Mind the Buzzcocks, warming a seat on QI and Desert Island Discs, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Hamlet on BBC2, and reading ' a week of bedtime stories on CBeebies. (That may be it, but the details of the Queen's Speech have yet to be announced.)
Fortunately for Tennant, the British nation has fallen hopelessly, madly and devotedly in love with him – and the 900-year-old Time Lord whose hair products he's been using for the past five years. He is everywhere. Doctor Who is everywhere. Its language, its concepts and its characters have become part of our national conversation. Its season finales harvest ratings of the sort once thought lost to television drama. Posters outside churches read "Christ – the original Time Lord", suggesting that the Church of England believes that Doctor Who is bigger than Jesus. Those of us who, 20 years ago this month, were among the small band of die-hards who watched Sylvester McCoy stroll off into the sunset with a swing of his question-mark umbrella are still pinching ourselves. Two decades ago, the BBC regarded Doctor Who as an embarrassment: something to schedule against Coronation Street in the hope that the ITV gargantuan would roll over and squash it. Now the Corporation uses the programme to justify its existence to the public and the Government. How did this happen, exactly?
The question still occurs to some of those who brought about the show's revival. When the writer-producer Russell T Davies persuaded the BBC to let him make 13 new episodes of Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston in the lead, he constructed them as a stand-alone series, and was fully prepared for it to be his sole chance to see his name and the Doctor's on the same credit-roll.
Doctor Who did not return easily to the world: during the first few months of filming, its personnel were forced to learn from scratch the forgotten art of making a drama series that demands a weekly parade of monsters, an inferno of pyrotechnics, and the realisation of images that are much easier for writers to type than technicians to materialise: a swarm of Daleks swooping over the burning carcass of the planet Earth; the heat-death of the solar system; a Second World War gas mask erupting from the mouth of an old man; Number 10 Downing Street obliterated in a missile strike. It was not a guaranteed success. Five years later, however, Christmas seems unimaginable without an hour spent watching Tennant tackling something evil against a flurry of artificial snow.
There's a myth that's grown up around the new Who: that it has achieved its success in spite of the old series from which it sprang. And at some level, the brand managers at the BBC concur with this uncharitable analysis: old Doctor Who is never repeated; images from the programme's deeper past rarely feature on Doctor Who Confidential; the range of novels featuring the adventures of the old Doctors was quietly killed. Which is a shame, because that view occludes the fact that much of what seems most innovative in new Doctor Who is deeply rooted in its history – and not always the best-regarded periods of that history. Those elements of the revived series that seemed most fresh in 2005 – a working-class companion with a well- developed family background, a council-estate setting, the sense that the Doctor's personality contained a thick streak of darkness – are all to be found in Sylvester McCoy's last season of Doctor Who. McCoy's final story, a parable about Thatcherism set in a frowsty tract of west London, written by Ken Loach's screenwriter Rona Munro, wouldn't require much revision to serve as a script for Tennant.
And the endgame for the 10th Doctor – which began in last month's special "The Waters of Mars" and will conclude the incumbency of both Tennant and Davies – follows an even older set of moves, ones laid down in the prehistory of the programme. "The Waters of Mars" began with Lindsay Duncan's space commander battling an alien influence that infected her colony's drinking water and caused her colleagues to transmogrify into goggle-eyed zombies whose cracked faces issued alarming torrents of clear liquid. By the end of the story, however, her enemy had become the Doctor himself. It was Tennant's finest hour: before our eyes, his trademark cheekiness gained an unattractive note of contempt; his bravado soured into a form of self-love. And all because he had taken the decision to defy the Laws of Time and save some hapless humans from the fate history had reserved for them. Because he had dared to play God.
Similarly, in a story from 1978, Tom Baker's Doctor found himself in possession of an artefact called the Key to Time, which would allow him to manage the moral life of the universe. He rolled his eyes and declared his desire for divine power. But he was bluffing. Tennant's Doctor, full of hubristic pride in his ability to outwit the processes of history, meant it.
It felt like a big switcheroo, but really it was the moment at which Davies made explicit an idea that has haunted Doctor Who since William Hartnell stepped out of a London fog 46 years ago – that without the influence of his companions, the Doctor is not a nice person to be around; that he needs a human sidekick to curb his excesses.
In the very first story, back in 1963, there's a moment at which one of the Doctor's companions – Ian Chesterton, a heroic school teacher played by William Russell – catches the Doctor contemplating a shocking act of violence. It's 100,000 BC and the Tardis crew has just watched a caveman being mauled by a sabre-toothed tiger. The Doctor wants to head back to the safety of his police box and leave this Neolithic casualty to die. But his three fellow travellers agree to tend the wounded man and risk the possibility of being recaptured by the less conciliatory members of his tribe. Moments later, Ian discovers the Doctor kneeling over the caveman with a pointy rock in his hand – and is clearly not convinced by his blustering explanation that he intended to persuade the tribesman to draw a map in the sand to guide them home.
In the following story, the Doctor sabotages the Tardis because his companions don't share his enthusiasm for exploring a city in the middle of a petrified alien jungle. Soon, all four are expiring from radiation sickness and languishing in a metal cell provided by the hidden inhabitants of that city: shouty types with sink-plungers where their left arms should be. The lesson of the first series of Doctor Who is clear: the Doctor needs humans to keep his conscience in good order.
Unlike any previous actor to play the role, Tennant is a Doctor Who obsessive, with a spooky command of the arcana of the television series in which he currently stars. I'm sure that when he acted the shocking finale of the 2006 Christmas special "The Runaway Bride", in which the Doctor, a crazed and vengeful glint in his eye, commits infanticide upon the brood of a spidery alien queen, he was aware that the Doctor's moral history contains many such moments. The Doctor is a man who has preached the sanctity of all life, committed genocide and blown up inhabited planets. He has torn a strip off companions who have attempted to change history – and done his own share of meddling. And soon his Doctor will be paying with his life for that interference. He has over-reached himself, and the universe will punish him for it by killing him. This Doctor – much as we loved him – had it coming.
He will, of course, survive this death. By New Year's Day we will have glimpsed his replacement. Matt Smith is currently filming a new series of Doctor Who under the eye of its new head writer Steven Moffat, who knows the programme as well as his predecessors and has already written some of its best episodes. The new team, of course, don't want to go down in history as the people who screwed up the BBC's biggest success this decade.
But it's hard to imagine it going too badly wrong: the new season will feature the return of the Angels, those sinister stone creatures from the story "Blink". It will send the Doctor back to the Second World War to tussle with the biggest politico-moral dilemma the show has yet treated. It will bring the Doctor face-to-face with Vincent Van Gogh in a story that its author, Richard Curtis, claims will terrify us all. Most of all, though, Smith seems a perfect piece of casting: he looks like a boy who might grow up into William Hartnell.
I have a prediction: it will be the best season of Doctor Who ever broadcast. But even if the public don't agree; even if the new production team discover that when your predecessors achieve audiences of 12 million the only place to go is down, they will not destroy Doctor Who. That's the nature of the achievement wrought by Davies and Tennant.
Today, Doctor Who is more than a TV series. It's something we do. It's a story that will go on being told even when television falls out of love with it, and the chat-show hosts and the quiz-show bookers no longer call the production office. No one can kill Doctor Who. Not now. Not the BBC. And not the gods.
'Doctor Who: The End of Time', 6pm on Christmas Day and 6.40pm New Year's Day
Credit: Matthew Sweet The Independent
Do you hate David Tennant? Then this will be the worst Christmas of your life. You might as well gaffer-tape your face until January, because between today and New Year's Day, that lanky Scotsman with the Converse tennis shoes and the pinstripes and the great hair-wax explosion will fill more airwaves than Fiona Bruce and the jewellery demonstrators of QVC combined.
Doctor Who will drive the Tardis-like Santa's sleigh all over the BBC One channel idents. Off he'll go, with the full complement of reindeer, to score a big "O" into the winter sky – and he'll make around 40 more house calls during the festive season. Principal among these, of course, is his 10th incarnation's final two-part adventure. (Its title, "The End of Time", is sufficiently apocalyptic to suggest that Tennant's Doctor will not, like Colin Baker's, perish simply by falling over and banging his head on a hard bit of the Tardis.) Each episode will be followed by Doctor Who Confidential, a supporting documentary on BBC Three, which will comprise behind-the-scenes footage and the now-customary interviews with production staff overusing the word "iconic". A CGI Tennant will battle monsters in the New Mexico desert in the animated story "Dreamland", and the flesh-and-blood original will be standing in for Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, lolling on the sofas of GMTV, Blue Peter and Alan Carr; hosting a Who-themed Never Mind the Buzzcocks, warming a seat on QI and Desert Island Discs, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Hamlet on BBC2, and reading ' a week of bedtime stories on CBeebies. (That may be it, but the details of the Queen's Speech have yet to be announced.)
Fortunately for Tennant, the British nation has fallen hopelessly, madly and devotedly in love with him – and the 900-year-old Time Lord whose hair products he's been using for the past five years. He is everywhere. Doctor Who is everywhere. Its language, its concepts and its characters have become part of our national conversation. Its season finales harvest ratings of the sort once thought lost to television drama. Posters outside churches read "Christ – the original Time Lord", suggesting that the Church of England believes that Doctor Who is bigger than Jesus. Those of us who, 20 years ago this month, were among the small band of die-hards who watched Sylvester McCoy stroll off into the sunset with a swing of his question-mark umbrella are still pinching ourselves. Two decades ago, the BBC regarded Doctor Who as an embarrassment: something to schedule against Coronation Street in the hope that the ITV gargantuan would roll over and squash it. Now the Corporation uses the programme to justify its existence to the public and the Government. How did this happen, exactly?
The question still occurs to some of those who brought about the show's revival. When the writer-producer Russell T Davies persuaded the BBC to let him make 13 new episodes of Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston in the lead, he constructed them as a stand-alone series, and was fully prepared for it to be his sole chance to see his name and the Doctor's on the same credit-roll.
Doctor Who did not return easily to the world: during the first few months of filming, its personnel were forced to learn from scratch the forgotten art of making a drama series that demands a weekly parade of monsters, an inferno of pyrotechnics, and the realisation of images that are much easier for writers to type than technicians to materialise: a swarm of Daleks swooping over the burning carcass of the planet Earth; the heat-death of the solar system; a Second World War gas mask erupting from the mouth of an old man; Number 10 Downing Street obliterated in a missile strike. It was not a guaranteed success. Five years later, however, Christmas seems unimaginable without an hour spent watching Tennant tackling something evil against a flurry of artificial snow.
There's a myth that's grown up around the new Who: that it has achieved its success in spite of the old series from which it sprang. And at some level, the brand managers at the BBC concur with this uncharitable analysis: old Doctor Who is never repeated; images from the programme's deeper past rarely feature on Doctor Who Confidential; the range of novels featuring the adventures of the old Doctors was quietly killed. Which is a shame, because that view occludes the fact that much of what seems most innovative in new Doctor Who is deeply rooted in its history – and not always the best-regarded periods of that history. Those elements of the revived series that seemed most fresh in 2005 – a working-class companion with a well- developed family background, a council-estate setting, the sense that the Doctor's personality contained a thick streak of darkness – are all to be found in Sylvester McCoy's last season of Doctor Who. McCoy's final story, a parable about Thatcherism set in a frowsty tract of west London, written by Ken Loach's screenwriter Rona Munro, wouldn't require much revision to serve as a script for Tennant.
And the endgame for the 10th Doctor – which began in last month's special "The Waters of Mars" and will conclude the incumbency of both Tennant and Davies – follows an even older set of moves, ones laid down in the prehistory of the programme. "The Waters of Mars" began with Lindsay Duncan's space commander battling an alien influence that infected her colony's drinking water and caused her colleagues to transmogrify into goggle-eyed zombies whose cracked faces issued alarming torrents of clear liquid. By the end of the story, however, her enemy had become the Doctor himself. It was Tennant's finest hour: before our eyes, his trademark cheekiness gained an unattractive note of contempt; his bravado soured into a form of self-love. And all because he had taken the decision to defy the Laws of Time and save some hapless humans from the fate history had reserved for them. Because he had dared to play God.
Similarly, in a story from 1978, Tom Baker's Doctor found himself in possession of an artefact called the Key to Time, which would allow him to manage the moral life of the universe. He rolled his eyes and declared his desire for divine power. But he was bluffing. Tennant's Doctor, full of hubristic pride in his ability to outwit the processes of history, meant it.
It felt like a big switcheroo, but really it was the moment at which Davies made explicit an idea that has haunted Doctor Who since William Hartnell stepped out of a London fog 46 years ago – that without the influence of his companions, the Doctor is not a nice person to be around; that he needs a human sidekick to curb his excesses.
In the very first story, back in 1963, there's a moment at which one of the Doctor's companions – Ian Chesterton, a heroic school teacher played by William Russell – catches the Doctor contemplating a shocking act of violence. It's 100,000 BC and the Tardis crew has just watched a caveman being mauled by a sabre-toothed tiger. The Doctor wants to head back to the safety of his police box and leave this Neolithic casualty to die. But his three fellow travellers agree to tend the wounded man and risk the possibility of being recaptured by the less conciliatory members of his tribe. Moments later, Ian discovers the Doctor kneeling over the caveman with a pointy rock in his hand – and is clearly not convinced by his blustering explanation that he intended to persuade the tribesman to draw a map in the sand to guide them home.
In the following story, the Doctor sabotages the Tardis because his companions don't share his enthusiasm for exploring a city in the middle of a petrified alien jungle. Soon, all four are expiring from radiation sickness and languishing in a metal cell provided by the hidden inhabitants of that city: shouty types with sink-plungers where their left arms should be. The lesson of the first series of Doctor Who is clear: the Doctor needs humans to keep his conscience in good order.
Unlike any previous actor to play the role, Tennant is a Doctor Who obsessive, with a spooky command of the arcana of the television series in which he currently stars. I'm sure that when he acted the shocking finale of the 2006 Christmas special "The Runaway Bride", in which the Doctor, a crazed and vengeful glint in his eye, commits infanticide upon the brood of a spidery alien queen, he was aware that the Doctor's moral history contains many such moments. The Doctor is a man who has preached the sanctity of all life, committed genocide and blown up inhabited planets. He has torn a strip off companions who have attempted to change history – and done his own share of meddling. And soon his Doctor will be paying with his life for that interference. He has over-reached himself, and the universe will punish him for it by killing him. This Doctor – much as we loved him – had it coming.
He will, of course, survive this death. By New Year's Day we will have glimpsed his replacement. Matt Smith is currently filming a new series of Doctor Who under the eye of its new head writer Steven Moffat, who knows the programme as well as his predecessors and has already written some of its best episodes. The new team, of course, don't want to go down in history as the people who screwed up the BBC's biggest success this decade.
But it's hard to imagine it going too badly wrong: the new season will feature the return of the Angels, those sinister stone creatures from the story "Blink". It will send the Doctor back to the Second World War to tussle with the biggest politico-moral dilemma the show has yet treated. It will bring the Doctor face-to-face with Vincent Van Gogh in a story that its author, Richard Curtis, claims will terrify us all. Most of all, though, Smith seems a perfect piece of casting: he looks like a boy who might grow up into William Hartnell.
I have a prediction: it will be the best season of Doctor Who ever broadcast. But even if the public don't agree; even if the new production team discover that when your predecessors achieve audiences of 12 million the only place to go is down, they will not destroy Doctor Who. That's the nature of the achievement wrought by Davies and Tennant.
Today, Doctor Who is more than a TV series. It's something we do. It's a story that will go on being told even when television falls out of love with it, and the chat-show hosts and the quiz-show bookers no longer call the production office. No one can kill Doctor Who. Not now. Not the BBC. And not the gods.
'Doctor Who: The End of Time', 6pm on Christmas Day and 6.40pm New Year's Day
Credit: Matthew Sweet The Independent
David Tennant Brings Hamlet To TV
Whatever Shakespeare had in mind when he pictured Elsinore, it probably wasn’t Mill Hill. Yet, back in June, it was in this north London suburb that David Tennant, Patrick Stewart and the cast of the RSC’s blockbuster 2008 Hamlet reassembled to make a film of their production for BBC2. St Joseph’s College, a 19th-century missionary school that was put up for sale three years ago and has been mothballed ever since, was their Danish royal palace. It sits on an incongruous knoll just beside the A1; had you happened to be driving past in June, the only clue that this was where the theatrical event of 2008 was being retooled for Christmas TV in 2009 was the presence of security guards, stationed at the gate to keep the Whovians out.
Nobody can quite agree what exactly this retooling has created, but they know they like it. Put it to Patrick Stewart that this is a straight record of the play, a nice way to preserve his Claudius in aspic, and you’ll get a suitably dismissive eyebrow-raise: “We were in no way filming a stage production, because none of us wanted to do that. Putting on film a stage production, I think, is hopeless and artificial.”
Even so, the imprint of the stage production is everywhere, as you might expect: Tennant’s Hamlet was a monster hit for the RSC. Greg Doran directs, as he did before. The cast is here in its entirety and the shooting script, based largely on the second quarto, runs a full three hours, with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Fortinbras and the oft-cut Reynaldo all present and correct, just as on stage. Music, costumes and props will also be familiar to anyone who saw the RSC production. Even poor Yorick’s skull is the same as the one used a year ago in the theatre — that of the concert pianist Andre Tchaikowsky, who bequeathed it to the RSC for theatrical use. (A “skull-wrangler” accompanied Tchaikowsky down from Stratford, and back again, in his box.)
So, definitely not a straight record of the stage production, but manifestly a scion of the same stock. Stewart calls it “in every sense a film”, but it’s not, not in every sense. No sound stages, computer graphics, tricksy camerawork or special effects were involved. It was shot in three weeks, which in Hollywood terms is barely time to put flowers in the trailers. And in normal films, the cast don’t spend the best part of six months performing in front of live audiences before their parts are committed to film.
What a piece of work is this, then? Most obviously, it is the stage play sent on location. About half of the action, including the first big court scene and Hamlet’s climactic duel with Laertes, was filmed in St Joseph’s chapel, now deconsecrated, complete with the shiny black floor that was a feature of the stage production. The rest was filmed around the college, with the cloisters doubling as the battlements where Hamlet sees his father’s ghost and the corridors and anterooms used as dimly lit chambers in which Hamlet’s introspection ferments. The only exterior shots took place in the quad.
“Look, that’s where we buried Ophelia,” says the producer, John Wyver, pointing at a huge pile of earth next to an open grave as he gives me the tour. “I think we’ve got a location that gives this a fantastic sense of space and place,” he adds. “You feel like you’re in rooms, corridors, large spaces — you get a kind of concrete quality, rather than going off to black, which is what you get when you film on a sound stage.”
This Hamlet is filmed with a single camera, as in a movie, as opposed to the multiple cameras you associate with older Shakepearian crossovers and with Play for Today. The camera itself is a Red digital (“It’s like HD, but better,” Wyver says), used to bring out detail that could not be seen in the theatre.
That is important. “Even though they finished playing this in mid-January, the cast still knows it incredibly well,” Wyver says. “Over those 100-plus performances, David and Patrick developed an incredible level of detail and nuance and particularity of reactions and responses. They can bring that to the location, the kind of stuff you just don’t get when you put a rehearsal together the day before [as a feature film would do].
I think it’s much denser in those terms.”
“It’s funny doing it,” Tennant says, “because you know it well, but at the same time you’re slightly rediscovering it for a camera. It's all a bit closer, which I like.”
Wyver adds: “This is neither a straightforward record of the theatre piece nor a movie. It’s a very particular kind of approach. What we’re not trying to do is make a movie of Hamlet. We’re trying to make a film of the stage production, and there are very, very few direct comparisons.” That might sound like DVD commentary blurb, but, watching them at work, you sense that Wyver might be on to something. This is not like normal filming. There is much less of the stop-start, piecemeal pedantry that can make being on set feel about as dramatically intense as five hours in an airport lounge. They are filming about 10 minutes of screen time a day, which in film terms — where two minutes a day is a good clip — counts as warp speed.
In performance terms, that brings a palpable intensity. I watch the scene from Act III in which Hamlet, with dagger, catches sight of Claudius praying and ponders whether or not to kill him (“Now might I do it pat...”). There is hardly anyone in St Joseph’s chapel. Stewart and Tennant don’t have scripts or prompts — their lines and movements are so well drilled as to be instinctive. Between takes, Stewart mutters and Tennant paces, but nobody talks and the lights stay low. Wouldn’t you know it?
It’s a bit like being at the theatre.
If there are, as Wyver suggests, few direct comparisons for what they are trying to do, then the reason they’re trying to do it is less of a mystery. As the RSC discovered when the stage door at Stratford was blockaded nightly, casting Doctor Who brings in a whole new crowd. “I think this production is a particularly immediate, direct and accessible Hamlet,” Wyver says. “David Tennant’s a bloody good actor as well, but of course the RSC casting him is in part wanting to bring in a younger audience.”
The television film could not have happened without Tennant’s help. His initial RSC performances met with great acclaim, but a back problem in December last year led him to miss much of the play’s West End run. “David was really gutted that he missed those performances,” Wyver says, “and he really wanted a film version made.”
“It was done with a lot of love and enthusiasm, from those of us who were keen to have a record of it,” says Tennant. “It’s what’s great about the theatre — but it’s also what’s frustrating. When the run ends, it’s gone.
So the fact that we could all get back... I mean, if anybody hadn’t been available, I don’t think we would have done it.”
By anybody, of course, he means himself and Patrick Stewart. The production company managed to persuade the BBC and the RSC that this might be a good idea, but the likelihood of getting two of our biggest names on the same set at the same time within a matter of months was minuscule. Tennant, however, took a month out of his schedule to coincide with Stewart being in London for Waiting for Godot. Each day, they would finish filming at five, whereupon Stewart would shapeshift from Claudius in St Joseph’s to Vladimir at the Haymarket in the space of two hours.
Stewart, in particular, finds himself increasingly involved in this kind of augmented stage production. The company that made Hamlet, Illuminations, is now filming Stewart’s acclaimed Macbeth on location in the Midlands. As with Hamlet, the cast is returning wholesale, as is the director, Rupert Goold. The intention, once again, is to retain the integrity of the stage show, but open the house doors to millions, not thousands. “If the Hamlet is successful,” says Stewart, “and if we bring off the Macbeth as well, I hope it will encourage companies like the BBC and ITV to take a bit of a gamble — it doesn’t cost that much, and there’s so little of this kind of drama on television now, compared to how it used to be. I’m hopeful that this television transmission might just be the highest-rated Shakespeare play ever on television.”
Hamlet is on BBC2 on Boxing Day at 5.05pm
Credit: Benji Wilson The Sunday Times
Even so, the imprint of the stage production is everywhere, as you might expect: Tennant’s Hamlet was a monster hit for the RSC. Greg Doran directs, as he did before. The cast is here in its entirety and the shooting script, based largely on the second quarto, runs a full three hours, with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Fortinbras and the oft-cut Reynaldo all present and correct, just as on stage. Music, costumes and props will also be familiar to anyone who saw the RSC production. Even poor Yorick’s skull is the same as the one used a year ago in the theatre — that of the concert pianist Andre Tchaikowsky, who bequeathed it to the RSC for theatrical use. (A “skull-wrangler” accompanied Tchaikowsky down from Stratford, and back again, in his box.)
So, definitely not a straight record of the stage production, but manifestly a scion of the same stock. Stewart calls it “in every sense a film”, but it’s not, not in every sense. No sound stages, computer graphics, tricksy camerawork or special effects were involved. It was shot in three weeks, which in Hollywood terms is barely time to put flowers in the trailers. And in normal films, the cast don’t spend the best part of six months performing in front of live audiences before their parts are committed to film.
What a piece of work is this, then? Most obviously, it is the stage play sent on location. About half of the action, including the first big court scene and Hamlet’s climactic duel with Laertes, was filmed in St Joseph’s chapel, now deconsecrated, complete with the shiny black floor that was a feature of the stage production. The rest was filmed around the college, with the cloisters doubling as the battlements where Hamlet sees his father’s ghost and the corridors and anterooms used as dimly lit chambers in which Hamlet’s introspection ferments. The only exterior shots took place in the quad.
“Look, that’s where we buried Ophelia,” says the producer, John Wyver, pointing at a huge pile of earth next to an open grave as he gives me the tour. “I think we’ve got a location that gives this a fantastic sense of space and place,” he adds. “You feel like you’re in rooms, corridors, large spaces — you get a kind of concrete quality, rather than going off to black, which is what you get when you film on a sound stage.”
This Hamlet is filmed with a single camera, as in a movie, as opposed to the multiple cameras you associate with older Shakepearian crossovers and with Play for Today. The camera itself is a Red digital (“It’s like HD, but better,” Wyver says), used to bring out detail that could not be seen in the theatre.
That is important. “Even though they finished playing this in mid-January, the cast still knows it incredibly well,” Wyver says. “Over those 100-plus performances, David and Patrick developed an incredible level of detail and nuance and particularity of reactions and responses. They can bring that to the location, the kind of stuff you just don’t get when you put a rehearsal together the day before [as a feature film would do].
I think it’s much denser in those terms.”
“It’s funny doing it,” Tennant says, “because you know it well, but at the same time you’re slightly rediscovering it for a camera. It's all a bit closer, which I like.”
Wyver adds: “This is neither a straightforward record of the theatre piece nor a movie. It’s a very particular kind of approach. What we’re not trying to do is make a movie of Hamlet. We’re trying to make a film of the stage production, and there are very, very few direct comparisons.” That might sound like DVD commentary blurb, but, watching them at work, you sense that Wyver might be on to something. This is not like normal filming. There is much less of the stop-start, piecemeal pedantry that can make being on set feel about as dramatically intense as five hours in an airport lounge. They are filming about 10 minutes of screen time a day, which in film terms — where two minutes a day is a good clip — counts as warp speed.
In performance terms, that brings a palpable intensity. I watch the scene from Act III in which Hamlet, with dagger, catches sight of Claudius praying and ponders whether or not to kill him (“Now might I do it pat...”). There is hardly anyone in St Joseph’s chapel. Stewart and Tennant don’t have scripts or prompts — their lines and movements are so well drilled as to be instinctive. Between takes, Stewart mutters and Tennant paces, but nobody talks and the lights stay low. Wouldn’t you know it?
It’s a bit like being at the theatre.
If there are, as Wyver suggests, few direct comparisons for what they are trying to do, then the reason they’re trying to do it is less of a mystery. As the RSC discovered when the stage door at Stratford was blockaded nightly, casting Doctor Who brings in a whole new crowd. “I think this production is a particularly immediate, direct and accessible Hamlet,” Wyver says. “David Tennant’s a bloody good actor as well, but of course the RSC casting him is in part wanting to bring in a younger audience.”
The television film could not have happened without Tennant’s help. His initial RSC performances met with great acclaim, but a back problem in December last year led him to miss much of the play’s West End run. “David was really gutted that he missed those performances,” Wyver says, “and he really wanted a film version made.”
“It was done with a lot of love and enthusiasm, from those of us who were keen to have a record of it,” says Tennant. “It’s what’s great about the theatre — but it’s also what’s frustrating. When the run ends, it’s gone.
So the fact that we could all get back... I mean, if anybody hadn’t been available, I don’t think we would have done it.”
By anybody, of course, he means himself and Patrick Stewart. The production company managed to persuade the BBC and the RSC that this might be a good idea, but the likelihood of getting two of our biggest names on the same set at the same time within a matter of months was minuscule. Tennant, however, took a month out of his schedule to coincide with Stewart being in London for Waiting for Godot. Each day, they would finish filming at five, whereupon Stewart would shapeshift from Claudius in St Joseph’s to Vladimir at the Haymarket in the space of two hours.
Stewart, in particular, finds himself increasingly involved in this kind of augmented stage production. The company that made Hamlet, Illuminations, is now filming Stewart’s acclaimed Macbeth on location in the Midlands. As with Hamlet, the cast is returning wholesale, as is the director, Rupert Goold. The intention, once again, is to retain the integrity of the stage show, but open the house doors to millions, not thousands. “If the Hamlet is successful,” says Stewart, “and if we bring off the Macbeth as well, I hope it will encourage companies like the BBC and ITV to take a bit of a gamble — it doesn’t cost that much, and there’s so little of this kind of drama on television now, compared to how it used to be. I’m hopeful that this television transmission might just be the highest-rated Shakespeare play ever on television.”
Hamlet is on BBC2 on Boxing Day at 5.05pm
Credit: Benji Wilson The Sunday Times
Daily Record Interview
Exclusive: Scots star David Tennant on taking a gamble with switch to Hollywood
DR WHO star David Tennant has admitted that he could be left out in the cold if his big break in Hollywood doesn't come off.
Tennant has the chance to make his name in the States after filming the hour-long pilot for the new US legal comedy Rex Is Not Your Lawyer in which he plays an oddball Chicago attorney at law.
But he admitted his fame in Britain could mean nothing when it comes to NBC network bosses deciding whether the pilot shows enough promise to become a full series.
Following in the footsteps of stars such as fellow-Scot Ashley Jensen as he tries to make it big across the Pond, the 38-year old from Bathgate explained: "It's impossible to know what will happen with a pilot, especially in the American market, which is so different to ours and difficult to predict. But it will be an adventure if nothing else.
"These American shows could be very allconsuming and go on for years, or I might film my pilot and never hear a thing. So you have to roll with the punches. I never really think about possibilities. I just kind of ramble along and see what happens next and hope for the best - and that's worked out so far."
The eagerly awaited pair of Dr Who Christmas specials will see Tennant step aside to make way for Matt Smith, who will take over as the "regenerated" 11th incarnation of the Time Lord with two hearts.
Smith will make a brief appearance in the Christmas special, in which the Time Lord will battle arch-enemy The Master, played by John Simm.
Over the festive period, David will also guest star in Catherine Tate's sketch show special, playing the Ghost of Christmas Present in Nan's Christmas Carol, a spoof of the Dickens classic in which the foul-mouthed pensioner plays Scrooge.
He is set to reprise his RSC role of Hamlet, which he performed on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, for a three-hour BBC2 film.
And he stars in the Stephen Poliakoff film Glorious 39, with plans to work with comedy genius Simon Pegg, best known for classic British comedies Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz.
David said: "We're just hoping that everything is going to work out but it's all looking very positive. Simon's terrific. I wouldn't say we're friends but we've certainly met and I'm a huge fan of his."
If the acting work does ever dry up, David has a future as a game show host.
He put in some practice recently, presenting a special edition of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, where he was joined by Catherine Tate, who stars as Doctor Who sidekick Donna in the Christmas specials.
But it's unlikely, having shown in versatility on the stage and screen.
He is currently starring alongside a largely female cast in the St. Trinians 2 film, an experience he admits was not entirely unpleasant.
"I'm the villain in St Trinian's 2 which was just great fun," David said. "I just didn't know what to expect, and on the first day I'm there with Colin Firth, who is one of the funniest men, just such a lovely man. Very funny and just enjoying himself - so I took my lead from him, and we had a really good time."
David also found the camaraderie between co-stars Rupert Everett and Firth particularly amusing between takes.
"They've known each other forever, so they're like an old married couple which is sort of what they're playing in the film - so that makes sense," he explained.
"And the girls were such a really nice bunch, because I guess potentially if you put a bunch of late-teen, early-20s girls together in a room they are not necessarily all going to be the best of friends but this lot absolutely were - like blood sisters. They all really looked out for each other and looked after each other. It was a really lovely time. I had a ball making that film."
One thing he has been less comfortable with is the fact that he has topped various polls as Britain's sexiest male since taking on the role of the Doctor - the latest among women over 30.
"Oh I don't know about that. I'm not sure about that," he admitted. "That doesn't make sense - 70 per cent of women voted for me and 55 per cent for Daniel Craig, so that doesn't add up. So, flattered as I am to be at the top of any list, frankly I'm not sure that we should be trusting the maths of this one."
As he looks back on 2009, he surveys an acting career which is in fine health - having injured his back in 2008, causing a spell on the sidelines.
David said: "This time last year I was struggling to get back on stage in Hamlet. I had to take a couple of weeks off, but I got back and finished the show and I've been fine ever since - thanks to some very fine surgeons.
"There's nothing you can do when your body decides to take a break - it becomes enforced. You suddenly feel a bit mortal and maybe that's a good lesson.
"It's quite good when you're playing Hamlet and you come back and feel even more mortal than you did before it happened. So perhaps that fed into the final performances and you'll see that when it's on TV at Christmas - a flash of my mortality.
"I'll be everywhere over Christmas. You'll be gorging on me but, don't worry, I'll go away and you won't see me for a long time."
David admitted there would be a feeling of loss when the Dr Who specials get aired. He almost broke down during the filming of the final scenes, so emotional was the experience after four years in control of the Tardis.
"The bell is tolling. The Doctor's time is running out. But I've done it all so I know exactly what's going to happen," he admitted.
"To be honest, it's exciting. We finished them in May, and they're such good stories I've just been desperate for everyone to see them.
"And now I've seen the finished episodes and they're sort of the best ones we've done, I think. It really is a big, exciting, rollicking story so I'm impatient for everyone to see them.
"The four extraordinary, rollercoaster years have flown by.. but it does feel like it's been such a huge part of my life, and life-changing I guess. And when I think back to 2005, it feels like I'm thinking about somebody who was much more young and more naive.
"It's sad and it's moving, and that feels right and proper too. And it's a big old epic story. I was a bit nervous when I got the scripts for the final stories because you're desperate for it to feel significant and to feel like the end of something.
"Actually the scripts that Russell T Davies has written are so fantastic, so perfect. And everybody involved on the show has done such incredible work."
Credit: John Dingwall The Daily Record
DR WHO star David Tennant has admitted that he could be left out in the cold if his big break in Hollywood doesn't come off.
Tennant has the chance to make his name in the States after filming the hour-long pilot for the new US legal comedy Rex Is Not Your Lawyer in which he plays an oddball Chicago attorney at law.
But he admitted his fame in Britain could mean nothing when it comes to NBC network bosses deciding whether the pilot shows enough promise to become a full series.
Following in the footsteps of stars such as fellow-Scot Ashley Jensen as he tries to make it big across the Pond, the 38-year old from Bathgate explained: "It's impossible to know what will happen with a pilot, especially in the American market, which is so different to ours and difficult to predict. But it will be an adventure if nothing else.
"These American shows could be very allconsuming and go on for years, or I might film my pilot and never hear a thing. So you have to roll with the punches. I never really think about possibilities. I just kind of ramble along and see what happens next and hope for the best - and that's worked out so far."
The eagerly awaited pair of Dr Who Christmas specials will see Tennant step aside to make way for Matt Smith, who will take over as the "regenerated" 11th incarnation of the Time Lord with two hearts.
Smith will make a brief appearance in the Christmas special, in which the Time Lord will battle arch-enemy The Master, played by John Simm.
Over the festive period, David will also guest star in Catherine Tate's sketch show special, playing the Ghost of Christmas Present in Nan's Christmas Carol, a spoof of the Dickens classic in which the foul-mouthed pensioner plays Scrooge.
He is set to reprise his RSC role of Hamlet, which he performed on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, for a three-hour BBC2 film.
And he stars in the Stephen Poliakoff film Glorious 39, with plans to work with comedy genius Simon Pegg, best known for classic British comedies Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz.
David said: "We're just hoping that everything is going to work out but it's all looking very positive. Simon's terrific. I wouldn't say we're friends but we've certainly met and I'm a huge fan of his."
If the acting work does ever dry up, David has a future as a game show host.
He put in some practice recently, presenting a special edition of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, where he was joined by Catherine Tate, who stars as Doctor Who sidekick Donna in the Christmas specials.
But it's unlikely, having shown in versatility on the stage and screen.
He is currently starring alongside a largely female cast in the St. Trinians 2 film, an experience he admits was not entirely unpleasant.
"I'm the villain in St Trinian's 2 which was just great fun," David said. "I just didn't know what to expect, and on the first day I'm there with Colin Firth, who is one of the funniest men, just such a lovely man. Very funny and just enjoying himself - so I took my lead from him, and we had a really good time."
David also found the camaraderie between co-stars Rupert Everett and Firth particularly amusing between takes.
"They've known each other forever, so they're like an old married couple which is sort of what they're playing in the film - so that makes sense," he explained.
"And the girls were such a really nice bunch, because I guess potentially if you put a bunch of late-teen, early-20s girls together in a room they are not necessarily all going to be the best of friends but this lot absolutely were - like blood sisters. They all really looked out for each other and looked after each other. It was a really lovely time. I had a ball making that film."
One thing he has been less comfortable with is the fact that he has topped various polls as Britain's sexiest male since taking on the role of the Doctor - the latest among women over 30.
"Oh I don't know about that. I'm not sure about that," he admitted. "That doesn't make sense - 70 per cent of women voted for me and 55 per cent for Daniel Craig, so that doesn't add up. So, flattered as I am to be at the top of any list, frankly I'm not sure that we should be trusting the maths of this one."
As he looks back on 2009, he surveys an acting career which is in fine health - having injured his back in 2008, causing a spell on the sidelines.
David said: "This time last year I was struggling to get back on stage in Hamlet. I had to take a couple of weeks off, but I got back and finished the show and I've been fine ever since - thanks to some very fine surgeons.
"There's nothing you can do when your body decides to take a break - it becomes enforced. You suddenly feel a bit mortal and maybe that's a good lesson.
"It's quite good when you're playing Hamlet and you come back and feel even more mortal than you did before it happened. So perhaps that fed into the final performances and you'll see that when it's on TV at Christmas - a flash of my mortality.
"I'll be everywhere over Christmas. You'll be gorging on me but, don't worry, I'll go away and you won't see me for a long time."
David admitted there would be a feeling of loss when the Dr Who specials get aired. He almost broke down during the filming of the final scenes, so emotional was the experience after four years in control of the Tardis.
"The bell is tolling. The Doctor's time is running out. But I've done it all so I know exactly what's going to happen," he admitted.
"To be honest, it's exciting. We finished them in May, and they're such good stories I've just been desperate for everyone to see them.
"And now I've seen the finished episodes and they're sort of the best ones we've done, I think. It really is a big, exciting, rollicking story so I'm impatient for everyone to see them.
"The four extraordinary, rollercoaster years have flown by.. but it does feel like it's been such a huge part of my life, and life-changing I guess. And when I think back to 2005, it feels like I'm thinking about somebody who was much more young and more naive.
"It's sad and it's moving, and that feels right and proper too. And it's a big old epic story. I was a bit nervous when I got the scripts for the final stories because you're desperate for it to feel significant and to feel like the end of something.
"Actually the scripts that Russell T Davies has written are so fantastic, so perfect. And everybody involved on the show has done such incredible work."
Credit: John Dingwall The Daily Record
LA Times Interview
Timeout with 'Doctor Who's' David Tennant
As the BBC series bids farewell to the 10th doctor, Tennant talks of his NBC pilot 'Rex Is Not Your Lawyer' and his delight 'to be going out with such a bang.'
For another two weeks, David Tennant is still the space-time-traveling Doctor in " Doctor Who," the British sci-fi series that airs here on BBC America. After a year in which the show appeared only sporadically, as a series of "specials," the end of the Tennant tenancy arrives all in a rush: "The Waters of Mars," his penultimate adventure, premieres tonight, with the two-part finale, "The End of Time," beginning Dec. 26. By the end of Part 2, which airs Jan. 2 -- and this is not a spoiler -- he will have died and regenerated into the form of his replacement, Matt Smith.
And yet in some strange quantum mechanical way, he is also already not the Doctor, having filmed his last scenes some months back. And even as he is and is not the Doctor, he is (possibly) becoming someone else, the eponymous star of an NBC pilot called "Rex Is Not Your Lawyer," in which he plays an attorney who coaches clients to represent themselves after he begins suffering panic attacks.
We spoke by telephone on a recent rainy day in Los Angeles. ("I can understand it's a novelty here," he said, "but I watched the news last night and it sounded like the world was coming to an end.") Of "Rex," which also features Jane Curtin and Jeffrey Tambor, he would only say, because "I don't know how much I'm allowed to say," that "it's a great part. It's a very dramatic role, it's quite funny -- you get to do a bit of everything and that always appeals."
Doing a bit of everything is the very essence of "Doctor Who," which revolves between comedy, tragedy, horror, suspense, melodrama, farce and satire from episode to episode and even from moment to moment. Tall, thin and energetic, with a face that fits two definitions of foxy, Tennant has played the Doctor as a swashbuckling clown with issues, a man whose response to his survivor's guilt -- he's not only a Time Lord, but he's the last -- is to randomly roam space and time, running toward life, and away from it. The Doctor contains multitudes, and multitudes have contained him -- Tennant is the 10th actor to have played him since the series began in 1963, following Christopher Eccleston (the first to play the character after the show's 16-year hiatus) into the role at the end of 2005.
He was working with writer Russell T. Davies and executive producer Julie Gardner on the "Casanova" miniseries just as the two were bringing "Doctor Who" back to life. (All three are leaving the show together.)
"I was thrilled that it was back," he said, "delighted that it was being done with such love and attention and taken so seriously by all involved. But it's all slightly mixed up in the fact that [before the new series aired] I got shown some episodes by Russell and Julie in what I thought was just a social night, at the end of which they said, 'And we're also looking for someone to do it for year two.' "
Rather than jump at the offer, he went through "a couple of weeks of indecision. You're being asked, in a way, to take on the expectations of your 8-year-old self, and that's quite an undertaking. I was surprised at how difficult I found it to say yes -- you had to wonder if this was a clever idea. This kind of drama was not being made in Britain at the time. We hadn't made a science-fiction drama for I don't know how many years, or for that kind of family audience. I knew that with Russell at the helm, it was going to be a quality product, but that doesn't necessarily translate into something that will be taken into the nation's heart."
But it was, phenomenally so. "It's been such a big hit in Britain," said Tennant, "and every year we did it, it seemed to get bigger. And although it's wonderful and thrilling to be part of it, you also feel the pressure of not wanting to be there when it . . . turns a corner. It's the sort of show that takes a lot of energy and a lot of commitment and a lot of inspiration and a lot of . . . attack. You can clearly give it as much as it requires for only so long before you start repeating yourself, and I was keen to make sure we didn't get to that point."
When he read Davies' final scripts, "I was nervous they would somehow disappoint, but of course they didn't. I read them in my trailer and had a wee cry. They are so beautifully written. I was just delighted to be going out with such a bang."
Tennant will likely next be seen on American television when "Great Performances" airs the film of his "Hamlet," which he performed at Stratford in 2008 with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has performed with the company over the years, including as Romeo in 2000, but this was his first performance after becoming a pop-cultural action figure.
"On the opening night in Stratford, when outside my dressing room window the BBC News 24 truck pulled up, I realized that if I failed at this it was going to be on a fairly international level," he said. But the Times called his performance "riveting throughout," and the Guardian praised his Hamlet's "quicksilver intelligence, mimetic vigor and wild humor" -- qualities that describe his Doctor as well.
As to the how it all happened, "I've always sort of bumbled, to be honest; I've always just gone from one contract to another; I've been mostly fortunate that I've been able to join them up. And that's all I ever really hoped for."
Credit: The Los Angeles Times: Robert Lloyd
As the BBC series bids farewell to the 10th doctor, Tennant talks of his NBC pilot 'Rex Is Not Your Lawyer' and his delight 'to be going out with such a bang.'
For another two weeks, David Tennant is still the space-time-traveling Doctor in " Doctor Who," the British sci-fi series that airs here on BBC America. After a year in which the show appeared only sporadically, as a series of "specials," the end of the Tennant tenancy arrives all in a rush: "The Waters of Mars," his penultimate adventure, premieres tonight, with the two-part finale, "The End of Time," beginning Dec. 26. By the end of Part 2, which airs Jan. 2 -- and this is not a spoiler -- he will have died and regenerated into the form of his replacement, Matt Smith.
And yet in some strange quantum mechanical way, he is also already not the Doctor, having filmed his last scenes some months back. And even as he is and is not the Doctor, he is (possibly) becoming someone else, the eponymous star of an NBC pilot called "Rex Is Not Your Lawyer," in which he plays an attorney who coaches clients to represent themselves after he begins suffering panic attacks.
We spoke by telephone on a recent rainy day in Los Angeles. ("I can understand it's a novelty here," he said, "but I watched the news last night and it sounded like the world was coming to an end.") Of "Rex," which also features Jane Curtin and Jeffrey Tambor, he would only say, because "I don't know how much I'm allowed to say," that "it's a great part. It's a very dramatic role, it's quite funny -- you get to do a bit of everything and that always appeals."
Doing a bit of everything is the very essence of "Doctor Who," which revolves between comedy, tragedy, horror, suspense, melodrama, farce and satire from episode to episode and even from moment to moment. Tall, thin and energetic, with a face that fits two definitions of foxy, Tennant has played the Doctor as a swashbuckling clown with issues, a man whose response to his survivor's guilt -- he's not only a Time Lord, but he's the last -- is to randomly roam space and time, running toward life, and away from it. The Doctor contains multitudes, and multitudes have contained him -- Tennant is the 10th actor to have played him since the series began in 1963, following Christopher Eccleston (the first to play the character after the show's 16-year hiatus) into the role at the end of 2005.
He was working with writer Russell T. Davies and executive producer Julie Gardner on the "Casanova" miniseries just as the two were bringing "Doctor Who" back to life. (All three are leaving the show together.)
"I was thrilled that it was back," he said, "delighted that it was being done with such love and attention and taken so seriously by all involved. But it's all slightly mixed up in the fact that [before the new series aired] I got shown some episodes by Russell and Julie in what I thought was just a social night, at the end of which they said, 'And we're also looking for someone to do it for year two.' "
Rather than jump at the offer, he went through "a couple of weeks of indecision. You're being asked, in a way, to take on the expectations of your 8-year-old self, and that's quite an undertaking. I was surprised at how difficult I found it to say yes -- you had to wonder if this was a clever idea. This kind of drama was not being made in Britain at the time. We hadn't made a science-fiction drama for I don't know how many years, or for that kind of family audience. I knew that with Russell at the helm, it was going to be a quality product, but that doesn't necessarily translate into something that will be taken into the nation's heart."
But it was, phenomenally so. "It's been such a big hit in Britain," said Tennant, "and every year we did it, it seemed to get bigger. And although it's wonderful and thrilling to be part of it, you also feel the pressure of not wanting to be there when it . . . turns a corner. It's the sort of show that takes a lot of energy and a lot of commitment and a lot of inspiration and a lot of . . . attack. You can clearly give it as much as it requires for only so long before you start repeating yourself, and I was keen to make sure we didn't get to that point."
When he read Davies' final scripts, "I was nervous they would somehow disappoint, but of course they didn't. I read them in my trailer and had a wee cry. They are so beautifully written. I was just delighted to be going out with such a bang."
Tennant will likely next be seen on American television when "Great Performances" airs the film of his "Hamlet," which he performed at Stratford in 2008 with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has performed with the company over the years, including as Romeo in 2000, but this was his first performance after becoming a pop-cultural action figure.
"On the opening night in Stratford, when outside my dressing room window the BBC News 24 truck pulled up, I realized that if I failed at this it was going to be on a fairly international level," he said. But the Times called his performance "riveting throughout," and the Guardian praised his Hamlet's "quicksilver intelligence, mimetic vigor and wild humor" -- qualities that describe his Doctor as well.
As to the how it all happened, "I've always sort of bumbled, to be honest; I've always just gone from one contract to another; I've been mostly fortunate that I've been able to join them up. And that's all I ever really hoped for."
Credit: The Los Angeles Times: Robert Lloyd
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)