The Doctors Who's Who (24 page)

Although filled with trepidation, Tennant made the brave step away from the show and, so far, he has done well. Of course, he will always be the Doctor to a whole generation of
Doctor Who
fans, but then again, the same thing applies to all his predecessors – and probably successors too. The last scene he filmed saw him hanging from a wire in front of a blue screen, not the emotional regeneration into Matt Smith’s Doctor. He recalled in
Doctor Who
Magazine
that, after his regeneration scene, he left the studio alone while Matt Smith continued filming. He went home and revised his lines for the following day. Such is an actor’s lot.

When the final episode was completed, Tennant was given a box of
Doctor Who
goodies, including his sonic screwdriver, something he considered so precious that he refused to keep it at home as he feared burglary.

Being the Doctor was something Tennant adored and, like most of his predecessors, he quit while he was ahead, but he did face some bitter moments. While shooting the Christmas 2007 Special ‘Voyage of the Damned’, his mother, Helen, passed away. In an interview with
Doctor Who Magazine
, he admitted that, although the working day wasn’t difficult, going home and learning lines on his own was ‘trickier’ – surely an understatement from one of the celebrity patrons of the Association for International Cancer Research?

Tennant managed to fit in other TV work during short breaks in
Doctor Who
, probably the most important of which was
Recovery
(2007). He played Alan Hamilton, a hard-working man with a loving family who is knocked over in the street by a van travelling at high speed. He suffers brain damage and the 90-minute TV drama documents his slow and painful recovery.

Sarah Parish plays Tennant’s wife, Tricia Hamilton, in the drama, and she goes through every type of emotional rollercoaster as her husband fights to regain his mind, body, family and dignity. Tennant said of the story, ‘You can’t really imagine what it must be like to be married to somebody who becomes a different human being [through brain injury],’ but that’s indeed what happens in the drama. One minute Tennant’s character is fine, the next he is playing with a woman’s breasts at a party and not aware that what he is doing is wrong, to his wife’s total shock and embarrassment.

Recovery
showed Tennant as a serious character actor, not just a Doctor Who with lots of CGI behind him. Was that the way Tennant looked at it? No, probably not, but he knew that he needed to play a variety of other roles in order to progress his career and continue to enhance his reputation as a quality actor. He was still quite young as an actor, with many years
stretching ahead of him in a variety of different roles, or so he would hope.

As we have seen throughout this book, especially with the first four Doctors,
Doctor Who
never goes away. In one shape or form the actor returns. Tennant has already come back in a two-part story in
The Sarah Jane Adventures
(2009), and of course the 50th Anniversary special (with Billie Piper). There has been talk once again about another
Doctor Who
movie, and no one is better placed to take on the role than Tennant. Once upon a time Jon Pertwee talked about a
Doctor Who
movie, but the backers wanted an American actor to play the lead, so time will tell.

So what about life after
Doctor Who
?

Even before his last episode was aired, Tennant had become the CBeebies
Bedroom Stories
reader over Christmas 2009 with five stories. More importantly, he was signed to star as Rex Alexander, a Chicago litigator who, following a panic attack, coaches clients to represent themselves in the NBC drama pilot,
Rex is Not Your Lawyer
.

Christmas 2009 was a bumper one for Tennant on the BBC. Not only was Part One of his final
Doctor Who
story aired, but he also took an amusing role in
Nan’s Christmas Carol
(Catherine Tate) and then there was the BBC version of the RSC’s
Hamlet
.

Including most of the original cast, the TV
Hamlet
was a lavish affair, with its spy cameras, two-way mirrors and exotic camera angles.

‘How is it that the clouds still hang on you?’ Patrick Stewart’s opening words to Tennant’s Hamlet sum up the stark loneliness of the self-wounding prince we first meet. But then Hamlet denies his sorrow with vigour, only to spill his bitter-torn heart on the floor when alone.

Tennant’s Hamlet is full of emotion. Passionate, with an at
times vicious delivery, he brings out the child in the young prince. The way he embraces his good friend Horatio directly after his first soliloquy is childishly over-happy, in comparison to the devastated prince-alone two heartbeats earlier.

The reason Tennant received rave reviews for his stage
Hamlet
in Stratford-upon-Avon was because
Doctor Who
fans suddenly saw what the actor was capable of – and, like the critics, they were blown away.

It was right that the BBC showed
Hamlet
the same Christmas as Tennant’s last
Doctor Who
story. The production clearly showed that the show couldn’t keep an actor of his calibre in the same suit forever when he was capable of so much more. And he needed stretching.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
was good, but a small role;
Hamlet
was an exceptional lead.

For me, the modern glitzy sets, suits and ties in
Hamlet
stifle the performance. There is always a dark, depraved starkness about the period
Hamlet
, and Tennant showed this with a classical interpretation. In short, the modern look took something away from the period piece, but not the performances.

While other actors seem happy to gently walk through their lines with polite perfection, Tennant painstakingly lived – and indeed thought through – every word.

Hamlet
was his giant leap away from
Doctor Who
. It should not have come as too much of a surprise, though. For 15 years, Tennant trod the boards, appeared in a variety of TV character roles and indifferent film parts; but it was
Doctor Who
that made him a household name, and
Hamlet
– and possibly
Recovery
(2007) – took him forwards as a potentially great actor who was once Doctor Who, an actor the adult female audience would follow without question (a love-interest Pied Piper, no less).

For Tennant, work continued to flow in 2010. He provided a voice in the film
How to Train Your Dragon
and was reunited with the
Casanova/Doctor
Who Red Production Company for a four-part TV serial
Single Father
, which was also well received.

Single Father
was an ‘emotionally powerful yet funny’ BBC drama, made by the Red Production Company through BBC Scotland. Written by Mick Ford (
Ashes to Ashes
), it followed the life of a photographer called Dave (Tennant) with the seemingly impossible task of bringing up four children alone. Tennant said of the role, ‘I feel very lucky to have been sent the script. When I read what Mick Ford had written, I was desperate to be part of the project. And to be working with Red Production Company again makes me very happy indeed.’

In 2011 Tennant starred in quite a different BBC2 film:
United
, which told the story of the ‘Busby Babes’, the Manchester United football team who lost their lives in the Munich air disaster. He played coach/assistant manager Jimmy Murphy in a very good interpretation of the tragic story. The role was quite divorced from anything else he had done before, but was still heart-felt in what was a notable production.

2013 saw Tennant appear in two very different dramas:
The Politician’s Husband
(BBC2) and
Broadchurch
(BBC1). Both series would be acclaimed, but the former drama played second fiddle to the latter. In
The Politician’s Husband
Tennant played the less than likeable Aiden Hoynes. Although he liked playing villainous roles, to do his bit of ‘moustache twisting’, audiences preferred him either in the romantic lead or that of an antihero, and that’s where
Broadchurch
came in.

Broadchurch
was an eight-part drama written by
Doctor Who
and
Torchwood
writer Chris Chibnall. Tennant played Detective Inspector Alec Hardy as part of an impressive cast
that included Olivia Colman, Will Mellor and Arthur Darvill as the town priest. Chibnall said that the drama had ‘scale and intimacy’ and that the characters’ lives were ‘laid bare’.

This was quite true. Every single character – including Tennant’s – had complexities and any one of them might have been the murderer in this riveting whodunit. The show really caught the viewing audience’s imagination, with the final episode clocking up an impressive 10 million viewers (similar to audiences for
Doctor Who
). The BBC quickly decided to commission another season of the drama.

Later in the year, despite his
Doctor Who
comeback to celebrate the show’s 50th Anniversary, Tennant was back with the RSC, most notably taking the main role in
Richard II
for the winter season in Stratford-upon-Avon.

But life had not been all work for Tennant. He married Peter Davison’s daughter, Georgia Moffett (‘The Doctor’s Daughter’) on 30 December 2011. Their daughter Olive was born 30 March 2011, and Tennant adopted Georgia’s son Tyler from a previous relationship in September before they tied the knot at the end of the year. On the birth of their child, he said: ‘It feels an important thing to do and I’d hate to miss out on it. I’m only 38, but my parents had had three kids by this age and I have had none yet.’

‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d.’

Romeo and Juliet 
William Shakespeare

Tennant took some time out with his new family and the media backed away. Yes, there was the obligatory photo of the couple with baby carriage, but by-and-large they were left alone.

He started turning up the momentum of his career again
(2012/13) with
Broadchurch
, the RSC and, of course,
Doctor Who
. And
Doctor Who
will always run alongside Tennant’s career, a happy indulgence rather than an Albatross around his neck. The sheer volume of diverse work that he does will allow
Doctor Who
to find its place within his career. In that way he is not unlike Jon Pertwee, who had many important and popular roles scattered across his lengthy career.

So what happened to Doctor Who after David Tennant left?

Enter Matt Smith, the youngest actor to take on the iconic role.

Smith certainly had a mountain to climb following Tennant. He wasn’t the sexy hero, so deadly serious and heroic, nor so comic and reassuring. He was a 26-year-old actor with much less experience, but still had plenty of plaudits. Some of the female audience who liked the ‘eye candy’ of David Tennant (and even Christopher Eccleston) saw Smith spit during his first scene in the TARDIS and instantly dismissed him.

The Doctor was enigmatic. He didn’t eat, drink, swear – or spit. Also, this chap looked a little geeky, or was he a tad too preppy?

Audiences were passing judgement before they even saw him perform properly. It was as though the odd couple of minutes they saw of him in the TARDIS as it plummeted to Earth were enough for them to know exactly what this Doctor was going to be like, and they didn’t approve.

As
Doctor Who
has shown us over the years, you can write off an actor but you cannot write off the character. No matter how good the last actor was, the Doctor – those essential ingredients – still existed, and each actor had those ingredients firmly sown in him… so Smith took a deep breath and gave it his all.

The show moved on, the Tenth Doctor became history, and
on 3 April 2010, with an awesome new opening sequence and music, a new executive producer and travelling companion,
Doctor Who
, the programme – not just the Doctor himself – regenerated into another entity entirely.

‘’Tis as easy as lying; govern these ventages… give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.’

Hamlet
, Scene II

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MATT SMITH

‘…I wished him [Matt Smith] great success, and he left. As soon as he disappeared down the hall, I turned to the others in the office and said, “I feel as if I just cheated on David [Tennant].”’

I Am What I Am 
John Barrowman

PERHAPS ONE THING
Matt Smith had going for him was the fact that, to all intents and purposes, he was an unknown actor and the youngest person ever, at 26, to play the Doctor. That said, he had to follow the most popular Doctor to date (according to
Dr Who Magazine
readers), so no pressure then.

As we cannot hop forward in time to see how the show affected Smith’s career as an actor, what we can do is analyse his immediate contribution against his previous work and understand how seriously he – and the rest of the production team – took the new Doctor.

As far as the show was concerned, favourite aliens were brought back for Smith’s first season as a kind of safety net. Fans young and old would at least tune in to see the Daleks,
Silurians and Cybermen. And then there were the Weeping Angels from one of the most popular episodes in the show’s history, ‘Blink’ (voted the second-best story of all time by
Doctor Who Magazine
readers). Steven Moffat, creator of the Weeping Angels, was now executive producer, and the one thing he promised audiences was greater chills not unlike the gothic days of former producer Philip Hinchcliffe (during Tom Baker’s era), but it didn’t quite work out that way.