Tennant does a self-deprecating boggle.
Talking to him is an experience of mild surreality. On the one hand—it’s the Doctor! You’re talking to the Doctor! On the other hand, he’s as obsessive and passionate about the show as any fan. This is a man who can talk about the Gravitic Anomalyser without any protective layer of irony.
Dismissing the possibility that, paradoxically, becoming the Doctor could ultimately ruin the show for a him—“I know what you mean, because all the surprises are gone, but I’d have gone mad if I’d turned it down and watched someone else do it”—Tennant, instead, spends the next hour discussing the show with all the enthusiasm and mild geekery of a fan, albeit a very privileged one. Discussing certain titillating morsels that Russell T. Davies has thrown into previous episodes and then not returned to—such as the intriguing news that the Doctor has, at some point, been a father—Tennant yelps, and then says, “I know! I’ll be reading these things, going ‘When are you coming back to that?’ Often he does. But sometimes,” he says, leaning forward, “he just drops them in for wickedness. There’s something he’s done in the next season, and I said, ‘What’s that all about?’ and he replied, ‘Oh, I’ve just put it in because it’s funny.’ The internet forums will go into meltdown.”
He beams. “But you know—he knows what he wants as a fan. You want to be discussing it all the next week. You want to float your different theories on what will happen next. That’s part of the pleasure.”
Together with Russell T. Davies, he comes across like a steam enthusiast who’s taken over an old rail line. Every detail of the show thrills him—even the clothes. Indeed, perhaps the most surprising moment comes when he explains how the image of his Doctor was, fairly unguessably, based on the savior of our fat school children, Jamie Oliver.
“I’d always wanted a long coat, because you’ve kind of got to. You’ve got to swish. Then when Billie was on Parkie, she was on the same week as Jamie Oliver, who was looking rather cool in a funky suit with sneakers were the one thing I did go to the wall on.” Tennant bashes his hand down on the table, and then laughs.
“Although,” he adds, “I have to say, I do regret it when I’m doing a night shoot in a quarry of stinking mud, and they’re putting plastic bags on my feet.”
The big news for the forthcoming season, of course, is that Billie Piper, who played the Doctor’s assistant, Rose, has left. As well as being phenomenally popular in the role—she was credited with bringing a young, female audience to a show that had previously lacked one—she and Tennant formed a famously matey duo. They always emanated the vibe of having spent their down time in Cardiff Nandos, eating huge amounts of fried chicken with their hands and laughing with their mouths open. When discussing her departure, Tennant becomes quite tender.
“The last scene we shot was for [the episode called] ‘The Satan Pit.’ Our very last line was someone saying, ‘Who are you two?’, and we reply ‘The stuff of legend,’ and then zap off in the TARDIS. We just could not get a take where we weren’t crying. If you look very carefully, you can still see us starting to go ‘Wah!’ ”
Tennant, however, is stalwart in his enthusiasm for the new assistant, Freema Agyeman.
“It’s a totally different energy—she comes from a totally different starting place. She’s very upfront about fancying [the Doctor], and so he has to be very upfront about not being into it. It’s a completely new dynamic. She’s a completely new girl.”
It’s Who—2.1, perhaps, I suggest.
“Yes!” Tennant beams. “Who 2.1!”
Breaking for lunch, the whole crew travels down the hill to the “base station”—a line of location buses and Portakabins. When David Tennant turns up, dandy and wire-thin in his new, electric-blue suit and precipitous quiff, the effect is roughly equivalent to the advent of the Fonz in Al’s Diner. He is clearly lord of this domain—he manages to simultaneously hail, chat to and tease three crewmembers at once.
By contrast, John Simm’s entrance onto the set is intense and lowkey. As the pivotally evil Mr. Saxon, Simm is in a black suit, wearing an ominous-looking ring, and eschewing the buffet in favor of a quiet lunch in his trailer.
“I can’t tell you anything,” he says, sighing. “I don’t think I’m even officially here, am I?” he shrugs.
Later on, in a waterfront bar back in Cardiff, Simm starts an admirably brisk line of whisky ordering, and explains exactly why he left a three-week-old baby to spend a month in Wales, on the side of a windy hill.
“It’s Doctor Who, innit?” he says, with admirable succinctness. “You’ve got to do it. And Christ, the energy they all put into it. Julie Gardner [producer] and Russell T. Davies were getting on midnight trains up to Manchester, to the set of Life on Mars, to ask me to do it.”
The deciding vote, though, was cast by Simm’s five-year-old son, Ryan. “He’s Doctor Who mad. He’s got the lunchbox, the dolls, the screwdriver. As a dad of a small boy, you kind of have a moral duty to be a baddie on Doctor Who if you can, don’t you?”
Simm is keen to illustrate just what he and Tennant have gone through to thrill this new generation of Who fans—just how far their dedication extends.
“We were shooting one scene, just me and David, on top of this deserted mountain top. We’re giving it our all when, from fuck knows where, you can hear the faint sounds of an ice cream van. David carries on, so I thought well, I’m not going to stop if you’re not going to stop. So we carried on right to the end—despite the fact that this must be the only ice cream van in existence that does the theme tune to The Benny Hill Show. The least inter-galactic sound imaginable!”
He shakes his head.
“We were, looking back, very professional that day.”
For Season Three, the BBC have taken the publicity for Doctor Who out of their own, often ramshackle, house, and placed it in the hands of Taylor Herring—PR to Robbie Williams, Big Brother and Al Gore.
The new PR team, seemingly more aware of just how much interest there is in the show, have accordingly ramped up the screenings of the first two episodes. While screenings normally consist of a small room, forty scruffy journalists and a table of coffee and buns, the Who screenings are treated like a movie premiere. Outside the Mayfair Hotel, fans scream as a phalanx of paparazzi snap at the guests. While the celebrities do, by and large, look like someone took a van down to the BBC canteen and shouted, “Anyone want to come and watch Doctor ’oo?”—Ian Beale, Michelle Collins, Reggie Yates—there is also Jonathan Ross, Catherine Tate and Dawn French.
Freema Agyeman is wearing a pair of £4,000 earrings, and both David Tennant and Russell T. Davies are resplendent in sharp suits, and working the line of TV crews like pros.
At the beginning of the screening there is, momentarily, no sound. The TARDIS, iconic as ever, spins through electric-blue spacetime to complete silence. Then the audience, as one, begins to sing the theme-tune themselves: “Oooo WEEE oooooo/OOOO ooo.” There is even an impressive counter-accompaniment of “De duddle le dum/De duddle le dum.” It’s a moment of happy, communal rejoicing.
Russell T. Davies floats around, looking as joyous and serene as someone recently voted “The Third Most Powerful Man in British Show Business” should, upon pulling off another considerable success.
“The show is simply one of the best ideas ever, really, isn’t it?” he says, dragging on a ciggie and beaming. “So simple, yet so complex. How can you not love a sexy anarchist, roaming through time and space?”
When asked if—given that Doctor Who has now, to all intents and purposes, over-taken EastEnders as the BBC’s flagship show—a larger budget would be more useful, he says a series of vaguely blustery and on-message things before roaring, dramatically, “Yes! Yes! Yes, I want more money, goddamnit!”
And it’s hardly surprising that he does, considering that Who is still not being shot in HD—surely a foolish short-term economy,
given the show’s inevitably longevity in repeats and DVD sales.
But in all, “I am a happy man,” Davies sighs, exhaling, and staring across the room at the Doctor, his assistant, and a circle of a dozen grown adults, all squealing with excitement about being about to touch the TARDIS. “A very happy man.”
And he should, perhaps, feel a quiet satisfaction. After all, in a world where very little is a surprise, and everything is viewed with cynicism, Doctor Who is a genuine rarity. It represents one of the very few areas where adults become as unashamedly enthusiastic as children. It’s where children first experience the thrills and fears of adults, and where we never know the exact ending in advance. With its ballsy women, bisexual captains, working-class loquaciousness, scientific passion and unremittingly pacifist dictum, it offers a release from the dispiritingly limited vision of most storytelling.
It is, despite being about a 900-year-old man with two hearts and a spacetime taxi made of wood, still one of our very best projections of how to be human.
Last piece for this section—on the curious phraseology of the anti-choice movement in America. “A gift.”
THIS IS NOT A GIFT
There’s something disturbing about the idea of someone pressing something unwanted—wholly unwanted—in your hands, saying, “It’s a gift! It’s a gift!”
And you demure, politely at first—saying, “How lovely, but no. I do not want this gun/modern sculpture too large for my house/a sack of oysters—to which I am allergic—thank you. It is lovely that you thought of me: but no.”
But the insistence increases.
“It’s a GIFT,” they insist, forcing it into your palm. “A PRESENT. YOU MUST HAVE THIS GIFT.”
And now your hands are bleeding, and you’re truly alarmed, and you try to back away. But you find that the law is changed, overnight, and you are legally obliged to take this gift—even as you stand there with your hands torn, saying, “But surely a gift is something wanted? Something suitable? A stranger’s hand putting something into my pocket is the same as a stranger’s hand taking something out of my pocket. Really, there should be no hand there at all.”
And the gun goes off, and the sculpture is wedged in the doorway, immovably, and the oysters leak, slowly, onto the floor. Things that would have been wanted elsewhere cause chaos here. They do not fit, and they cause grief. And the stranger walks away from you. Having pressed his gift upon you, his work is done. And you do not understand why he ever came to your door.
Republican candidate Rick Santorum’s comment that, if his fourteen-year-old daughter were raped, and became pregnant, he would not want her to have an abortion—but think of the baby as a “gift” from God—has been one of the defining quotes of the year.
As contraception and abortion become, yet again, controversial—the UK facing the second proposal, in as many years, for pro-life organizations to counsel women wanting an abortion; in the US, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum speaking out against contraception, even for married couples—the idea of babies as a “gift” becomes a pivotal one.
“Gift” is a key concept. If all babies are a “gift,” then a pregnant woman seeking abortion becomes unforgivably “ungrateful.” Similarly, contraception is bad, because it is the rejection of yet more “gifts.”
Let us think of all the inferences of “gifts.” If I give you a gift, it is usually a surprise. It is probably something you would not have gotten for yourself. And after I have given it to you, I would not see it again. I leave you with the gift. Gift-giving leaves the person who receives the gift essentially powerless—not a problem if it’s an incongruously brightly colored wristwatch; a great deal more so if it’s a human being for whom you bear responsibility for the rest of your life.
Babies being “given” to women as gifts makes the women sound powerless. Just something that a present was put onto, like a bookcase, or a shelf—rather than a reasoning adult, who decided they were ready to be a mother, instead.
Calling a baby “a gift” also sounds—let us be honest—like the phrasing of someone who has not spent much time bringing up children. It seems unfair to use visceral language to describe the reality of parenthood—but as anti-choice, anti-contraception campaigners are quite happy to use visceral language themselves (“slut,” “prostitute,” “whore,” “murder”), I have to presume they would be all right with it.
From the shop floor of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, here’s what that gift can entail: tearing, bleeding, weeping, exhaustion, hallucination, despair, rage, anemia, stitches, incontinence, unemployment, depression, infection, loneliness. Death. Women still die in childbirth. Not as many as used to—but notably more die than while receiving any other “gifts,” such as scented candles, or long weekends. Additionally, “gift” sounds hopelessly inadequate to describe your children, whom you would die for in a heartbeat, inhale like oxygen, and swoon over like lovers. I have never done this over a foot spa or vase.
The worry of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception campaigners is that women rejecting these “gifts” are rejecting the gifts of Nature, or God. It is in obeisance to them that we should not turn to contraception, or abortion. But Nature, of course, turns to contraception and abortion all the time: the diseases that make you barren; the sperm-counts that fall to zero. Blocked tubes and blown wombs and the thousand sorrows of the infertile. The one-in-three first pregnancies that end in miscarriage—miscarriage that is just like abortion, we must remember—a potential life ended—except miscarriages are unwanted, and often dangerous; while abortions are safe, and wanted.
Nature also, clearly, believes in non-procreative sex: for twenty-seven days a month, sex is non-procreative. Sex after menopause is non-procreative. Statistically, most sex is non-procreative. Clearly, sex isn’t just for procreation: it’s also for the creation of happiness, or excitement, or contentment.
Those things that really are gifts; and are always wanted. Those things that do not scare me, when pressed upon me.
Part Three
PARENTING, POLITICS, AND THE POSH
In which we boggle over Downton Abbey, mount a defense of parental binge drinking, discuss the heaviness of poverty, and call for Lola from Charlie and Lola to be rubbed out forever. But before that, a domestic interlude.
While my job involves a lot of brief, yet incongruously intimate, encounters with all kinds of people, my ability to just “get on” with anyone—put them at their ease, make time with me a pleasant experience—is never more pertinently exposed than in the late night conversations I have with my husband. In many ways, I feel these chats encapsulate marriage in a nutshell: one person bursting with ideas they feel they can only share with one, special, most-beloved; the other just wanting to go the fuck to sleep.
ALL THE WAYS I’VE RUINED YOUR LIFE
It’s 12:04 am. I’m on the woozy half-slide of sleep; the cotton-wool duvet of more weightless thought. There’s something about my teeth growing bigger. I’m falling, leg first, into a dream.
“Cate.” It’s my husband, sitting up next to me.
“Wh?”
“Cate.” He, apparently, is not falling asleep.
“Wh?”
“I’ve just found your Mooncup under my pillow.”
For those who have never come across one, a Mooncup is a . . . lady thing, which you use at . . . lady-time, to do . . . lady-business. For some reason, I always seem to be losing them—then finding them in unexpected places. The second most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me is having my best friend’s one-year-old son walk into the kitchen, my Mooncup wedged in his mouth, like a pacifier. I still can’t talk about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. Needless to say, I was not expecting to see that twenty-one-year-old accountant on my landing at that particular moment.
“Why is your Mooncup under my pillow?” Pete asks. Oh dear.
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“I wondered where it was!” I say. Maybe my cheeriness at having found it again will infect Pete, and he will be happy for me.
“I’m not happy for you about this,” he says. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I am sorry,” I say. “It is just the way of my Mooncup. It is like all scissors and cheese graters—I never, ever know where they are. They seem to flit between parallel worlds. It’s mad!”
“I don’t think your Mooncup has made it to underneath my pillow via string theory,” Pete says, still looking quite awake. “Because it’s one of many, many of your things that have ended up in the wrong place, and I don’t think even an infinite universe has that many wormholes.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
Clearly I am not going to sleep any time soon. Pete is obviously a little het up about this. I have to say, I find this desire to chat during sleepy time somewhat thoughtless. I would never do this.
“Well, yesterday I found a slice of half-eaten bread and Marmite on top of my Pentangle boxed set,” Pete says, sounding genuinely quite annoyed. “I was going to have a go at the kids—until I recognized the gigantic, foot-wide mouth print of the person who’d been eating it.”
“Me?” I say.
“Well, it was either you or a wandering T-Rex,” he says. “You appear to have the mouth span of something that can dislocate its lower jaw and eat a piano, whole.”
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