The Doctors Who's Who (23 page)

In 2000, Tennant appeared in the first episode of the new
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
, alongside Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer and Tom Baker. The episode was called ‘Drop Dead’ and he played emotionally unwell character (Gordon Stylus), who even wears a wedding dress in the episode.

His next significant role was in
Foyle’s War
(2002). He
played Theo Howard in a story about an investigation into a young evacuee’s death from a booby trap in a summerhouse, after a Conscientious Objector dies in his cell after losing his appeal at court. Two unrelated subjects they may appear to be, but a judge appears to be the catalyst for much of what went on.

Foyle’s War
was significant on a personal basis as well as professional, as actress Sophia Myles also appeared in Tennant’s episode (Sophia would later play Madame de Pompadour in the
Doctor Who
story ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’). Although never in the same scene together, Tennant did catch up with the actress on set, and they started dating before playing alongside each other in
Doctor Who
.

Tennant’s short films for the BBC are quite watchable.
Sweetnightgoodheart
(2001) is a ten minute short film in which he tries to tell his girlfriend he wants to split up but ends up proposing. Another ten minute short film,
Traffic Warden
(2004), showed his capacity for comedy and farce, as well as an ability to play the romantic lead – anticipating
Casanova
(2005), his breakthrough TV role the following year.

Casanova
was the start of Tennant’s professional journey to
Doctor Who
. Released in 2005, it was written by the man who would bring back the enigmatic Time Lord, Russell T. Davies. Directed by Sheree Folkson and produced by Red Production Company for BBC Wales in association with Granada Television, the show was three episodes long and told the story of the flamboyant 18th-century Giacomo Casanova, based upon his 12-volume memoirs. The comedy drama also featured Peter O’Toole as the old Casanova, looking back over his life, and Matt Lucas, as a Venecian duke.

The show’s veracity and offbeat humour made it an unusual hit, highlighting Russell T. Davies’s talents and teaming him
with executive producer Julie Gardner, with whom he would work on
Doctor Who
later that year.

Tennant’s next role of note was in
Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire
(2005). It was in this film that we saw his darker side, perhaps anticipating traits (in anger, at least) of his tragic
Hamlet
, still four years away. He played Barty Crouch Jnr, who is disguised as Professor Moody to begin with. In a scene that appears much more painful than a Time Lord’s regeneration, he transforms from the professor to his normal self. Crouch is a highly charged, sweating delinquent, with no redeeming features. Tennant said of his role, ‘It’s fun to be a baddy. To do a bit of moustache twisting.’ And he certainly played it with passion.

Although his part was minor, there was a fair bit of Harry Potter name dropping in one
Doctor Who
episode, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, where the Doctor admits to being a fan himself: ‘Wait till you read book seven. I cried!’ he says, almost coyly. He then brought the episode finale to a climax by shouting out a Potter spell and saying ‘Good old JK’, name-checking
Potter
author JK Rowling.

Tennant adored his role in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
. He stated that he would never be in anything as big again. He wasn’t being modest: Tennant was in awe of the size of the crowd at Leicester Square for the premiere, just as he would be for the premiere of the next movie,
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
, where he stated that he now felt part of the Harry Potter family. By then, though, there was another family he was already a major part of.

In
Doctor Who
he did much running and jumping around, and if we look back at his humble beginnings as a TV actor, he was running around even then (see
Sweetnightgoodheart
). It’s the madly adventurous/subtly romantic roles that seem to
attract him and, in that way, he is perhaps a little typecast. Even his
Hamlet
was a bit of an aerobics exercise, but a damn good one nevertheless.

Doctor Who
was the right thing at the right time for David Tennant. It enhanced his career by putting his talents firmly in the public eye, and he managed to do other work at the same time, in order to keep his career travelling in the right direction and battle the threat of typecasting.

Tennant exploded onto the scene as the Doctor. Although undergoing a difficult regeneration, he manages to save the world yet again in his first story, ‘The Christmas Invasion’, albeit losing a hand in the process.

Tennant took a short film of watching his screen debut at his parents home in Scotland. Lasting no more than five minutes the short film shows his aunt and parents watching the show on Christmas Day and passing comment on Boxing Day. It’s a wonderful insight into the beginning of a
Doctor Who
legend.

There was no lean period when Tennant took over the role.
Doctor Who
had only been on air for a year and people were still reeling from Christopher Eccleston’s shock departure. Tennant was accepted and, from the moment that he told Rose Tyler’s mother to be quiet, his popularity grew and grew.

Like Pertwee and Manning before them, Tennant and Piper truly got on, both on camera and off. Their friendship was obvious and something Piper mentions herself in her autobiography,
Growing Pains
. When John Barrowman joined the regular cast, the camaraderie became more intense and a special team started to form, including Piper’s on-screen mother, father and estranged boyfriend. Put all that together with the return of Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and K9, and there was certainly a big and quite brilliant regular cast working on the show.

Doctor Who
– like pop music – was suddenly a community movement. Boy bands, girl bands, street people, groups of people coming together to express themselves, it was all very millennium and something rock genius David Bowie anticipated in interview (from as early as 1993, so it shouldn’t have been a shock). Solo artists were not the norm and the Doctor needed a fuller TARDIS, or at least people he could call upon – sometimes by intergalactic cell phone – in times of trouble.

During a break from
Doctor Who
, Tennant appeared on Ainsley Harriott’s
Ready Steady Cook
with his father Sandy (who took a non-speaking part as a footman in the Agatha Christie-inspired
Doctor Who
episode ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’). Their appearance on the long-running and popular cookery show resulted in a great Scottish episode: haggis, neeps and tatties became the order of the day for Sandy – with, of course, some quality Scotch broth alongside. David’s less adventurous chicken and rice won the day, however… perhaps because the audience was crammed with
Doctor Who
fans.

Naturally, Sandy got his own back throughout the show, talking about his son’s formative years. It became clear that Tennant had always wanted to be an actor, even taking the leading role in his very first school production, and then the defining moment when he played an important part in a TV anti-smoking advertisement.

Sandy had clearly thought about his selection of food for
Ready Steady Cook
. What he had selected were foods the ‘poorer Scottish families’ had to live on in the past, and his love of his own country’s culture was refreshing and interesting. The very fact that the money David won on the show went to a hospice in Paisley (close to where he went to school) was the perfect end to a highly endearing episode of the cookery series.

Tennant knew by this time that
Doctor Who
had changed his life. Of course he was living the dream, his childhood dream. He even mentioned that the Cybermen would be back in his second season, along with K9. His natural enthusiasm for
Doctor Who
overshadowed his more fragile moments in the kitchen opposite his father. At one stage, the audience laughed at his best efforts, upon which he declared, ‘The audience are laughing at me!’ But it was all done in good taste, and his dad was on hand to show who was the more competent cook, rather than best actor.

As Tennant’s era as the Doctor continued, so too did the plaudits. The transition from Eccleston to Tennant was seamless in as much as the quality continued; no one was on a learning curve. Stories such as ‘Army of Ghosts’ and ‘Doomsday’, which detailed the end of the Doctor and Rose’s relationship, made way for more classics, such as ‘The Shakespeare Code’, ‘The Family of Blood’ (featuring Charles Dickens’ great-great-grandson Harry Lloyd as Jeremy) and the poignant ‘Planet of the Ood’.

Tennant embraced each story with relish. There’s no denying that he loved his four years as the Doctor; it’s there in every performance. He lived the part, and that really came across to his fellow actors and the watching audience. Billie Piper described him as ‘David Ten-inch’ with a laugh and a cuddle, while John Barrowman (Captain Jack) spoke highly of him and his humour and companionship, both on screen and off. It appeared that the good ship TARDIS under the command of David Tennant was always in happy mode. John Simm (the Master) actually stated that part of the reason why he wanted to play the Master was to act alongside him. High praise indeed from the accomplished actor of
The Lakes
and
Life on Mars
, but he meant every word of it; and ‘The Sound
of Drums’/‘Last of the Time Lords’ was one of the great stories of the new millennium
Doctor Who
.

‘Whatever you do, don’t blink.’

The Doctor

Then came the story ‘Blink’, a masterpiece of gothic suspense that clearly proved you didn’t need the Doctor in the show all the time to rivet and scare the audience – just a sensational idea, great actors and more scares than an army of Daleks.

Bernard Cribbins enjoyed his time reacquainted with the Doctor and the TARDIS, going over the top in the space-gun scene in Tennant’s very last story, ‘The End of Time’, but that summed up the Tennant years perfectly: scary fun.

In 2005 Tennant performed at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
. He took the part of Jimmy Porter. The latter performance was recorded by the National Video Archive of Performance for the Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Collection. It was the yearning for more serious roles that made him consider how long he would live the dream of being the Doctor.

Along with
Ready Steady Cook
, Tennant appeared in another BBC2 show,
Who Do You Think You Are
? (27 September 2006). The programme explored both his Scottish and Northern Irish ancestry. His maternal great-great-grandfather, James Blair, was a prominent Ulster Unionist member of Derry City Council after the partition of Ireland. He was also a member of the Orange Order, which appeared not to sit well with Tennant, but he was fascinated by what he found out about his ancestors on the show.

In 2007 Tennant starred in
Learners
, a BBC comedy drama
written by and starring Jessica Hynes (who had appeared in the two-episode
Doctor Who
story ‘Human Nature’/‘The Family of Blood’). Tennant played a Christian driving instructor who becomes the focus of a young student’s obsession.

When Tennant picked up the award for Outstanding Drama Performance at the National Television Awards in October 2008, he also announced to an unsuspecting TV audience that he would be leaving
Doctor Who
. There was an instant wail of disappointment from his many fans. But perhaps his way of dealing with his decision to depart was the right one. He didn’t let rumours slip out and he spoke directly to camera – to the fans – by satellite link during the interval of the RSC’s
Hamlet
and announced his departure and the reason that he couldn’t do it forever. He then gave them over a year to get used to the idea. It was the best and most noble thing to do.

Tennant adored playing the Doctor. On
The Graham Norton Show
(9 November 2009), he said that he enjoyed every minute of it, that he loved getting up and going to work every day. He also explained that if he didn’t leave then, he would never leave the series and they would one day have to bring him out in a bath chair (which is almost the same thing as he said when making the original announcement of his departure at the National Television Awards).

However, quitting the most successful show on television was a tough decision to make for Tennant.
Doctor Who
had been such an incredibly popular show during his reign; he didn’t want the bubble to burst. Personally, he wanted to quit while he was in front and not have to face the day when he would say, ‘Oh no, not Daleks again!’

It would appear that he did peak with his penultimate story, ‘The Waters of Mars’, which broke viewing-figure history for a
Doctor Who
story in the United States. Also,
Tennant’s last story hit the 10 million mark in the UK over Christmas 2009 and New Year’s Day 2010.

Although bitterly disappointed, his fans accepted the decision to go. Tennant had taken a few serious roles while playing the Doctor, including that of a man who recovers from a serious head injury in a road accident (
Recovery
, which I will discuss presently) and, of course, his stint in Stratford-upon-Avon playing, most notably,
Hamlet
, but he wanted to do much more. And so he left in the New Year’s Day special.

Tennant returned to the real world with a bit of a crash. He found that – certainly in America – he had to audition again, which was something he didn’t have to do in the UK while playing the Doctor. Indeed, the Doctor had his privileges and the BBC had been rightly criticised for picking the same actors for their programmes time and again. This didn’t happen outside its protective bubble and Tennant knew and embraced this challenge.