Let’s do the Time Lord again…


Couture fans looking to copy the new Doctor’s Christmas fashion sense should seek out something fiercely un-natty made of cotton, with pale blue, brown and white stripes, and top it with a dark blue dressing gown. Pyjamas are in, this festive season, down Gallifrey way.

All right, so he’s recovering from his metamorphosis, and even a Time Lord needs comfy bedwear. “As is the tradition, there’s a sort of post-regenerative trauma,” says David Tennant.

“There were a few days when I just got to lie there while everybody else acted about me, which was a nice gentle introduction.” But at some stage he has to rise out of his lazy bed and rediscover previous form, rather than let his young companion Rose Tyler do all the dirty work.

The first alien that Tennant encounters is a killer Santa Claus. Actually, “there’s more than one,” he says, “and these are not out-of-work actors in Harrods for the Christmas break. They’re from another place. There’s always something disturbing about the very familiar when it goes off-centre. Like clowns – they can be very scary.” Quaking in your Christmas stockings yet? Tennant continues: “That’s what’s great about the show – it brings the universe to a very domestic level.”

But the Santas are just a sideshow, it turns out. “They’re a kind of trailer for the real big baddie.” That’ll be the Sycorax Leader. Six and a half feet of towering bone and muscle, dripping the spoils of victory: shrunken heads, victims’ kneecaps, that sort of thing. Oh, and clutching a broadsword. And Tennant has to fight him.

Gruelling stuff? “I suppose,” says Tennant. “Filming [for the new series] lasts 38 weeks. It’s relentless, certainly, but it’s not like a real job. Daily, it’s incredibly exciting because it’s so mind-expanding and bonkers!”

Rose in charge….

Under current guidelines, a woman’s work is never done. And Christmas is just the busiest time. Presents to wrap, tree to decorate, mince pies in the oven and, in Rose Tyler’s case, a world to save from alien invasion. With the Doctor lying in bed, nursing a post-regenerative hangover, he’s not a lot of use for early swathes of the Christmas special.

So Billie Piper has to carry the episode. “When I first read the script, I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell! I’m left to make all the decisions!’ That was scary,” she admits. “I never feel like I’m in charge, as Rose or as myself. But it actually worked very well.

“What I forget is that even in the earlier episodes of series one, Rose gets the Doctor out of trouble. She instigates a lot of it.”

Rose has her share of heroics in The Christmas Invasion, too, as she, mum Jackie and on/off boyfriend Mickey square up to the zombie Santa Clauses and the odd killer Christmas tree.

“When I read the script, I thought, ‘This is quite dark and kids will be petrified to go near their Christmas trees.’ But they love being scared,” says Piper with glee. “This show sends your imagination crazy, and that’s so brilliant.

“But I’m a Christmas freak so I was in my element. I’ve got fairy lights in my house all year round and I once kept a Christmas tree up until the end of February. Getting rid of a tree is like leaving a friend or loved one,” she says.


Even a killer Christmas tree?