#one text david!!!!

[nick-nellson]

[mizgnomer]

Behind the Scenes of The Giggle - Part Fourteen

Excerpt from Benjamin Cook’s article in DWM 599:

In the back garden of a lovely detached house in the Cardiff suburbs – “Not a mansion, but enough to make you go ‘Ooh’,” Russell’s script specifies – David Tennant is giving Bonnie Langford a bear hug. “Welcome back!” he’s saying. “How long’s it been? Thirty-four years?” What a touching moment. “Yeah! And then she sort of blew it,” David tells me later, laughing, “and said, ‘Oh, no, I was here last year!’”

In a timey-wimey twist, today – Friday, 17 June 2022, another scorcher – is Bonnie first time back on Doctor Who since 1987… bar a fleeting cameo in 2022’s The Power of the Doctor. She’s carrying an apple crumble through some patio doors.

And there are the Nobles – Donna, Rose, Sylvia and Shaun – gathered around the garden table, beneath the pergola, about to tuck into pots of curry and cauliflower cheese. (Anything but tuna madras, please.) Sat with them, joining the familial fray at Donna’s new gaff, is the Nobles’ lodger: the Doctor, like we’ve never seen him before. So relaxed. So happy. “He’s not really save-the-world Doctor right now,” Chanya tells David. “This is an off-duty Doctor.” He’s regaling his adopted family with The Eyebrows Story that he’s probably spun a hundred times before. He’s almost at the bit with the Warrior Queen of the Felooth when –

“Am I late?” Enter: Mel, wearing a Reiss dress covered in pink and white flowers. It’s a floral riff of her Time and the Rani ensemble (“They put me in white trousers in a quarry,” winces Bonnie, when I ask her about that ’87 gear. “What the hell was that about??”). “Sorry, the door was open, you don’t mind?”

“Mad Aunty Mel!! I was so happy when I thought of that,” says Russell. “At last she’s got a home, a story, a history. I suppose this house is Donna and Shaun’s, living with mum and grandad, and the Doctor as the strange lodger in the attic. They were promised compensation by UNIT at the end of The Star Beast [after their home was ravaged by Wrarth Warriors].

“Or maybe Bonnie Langford should move into Bannerman Road?” adds Russell, tantalisingly. “I wouldn’t object. MAD AUNTY MEL.”

For Catherine, working with Bonnie must be the equivalent of David partnering with Ncuti? Is there a sense that they’re kindred souls? “Oh I mean,” she says, “I’m just not as deep as that.” She explodes with laughter. “We didn’t even discuss it. I didn’t know she was a companion! I was literally going to David, ‘Bonnie Langford was in Doctor Who?!’”

“Bonnie’s quite unusual, certainly from the old show, in that she was probably better known for other things,” David reasons. “That’s quite rare. This show tends to cling to you.”

“That’s the thing about Doctor Who. You can run, but you can’t hide,” says Catherine. “It’ll get you. It’ll bring you back in the end – happily.”

Catherine has no regrets, then, about returning for these 60th Anniversary Specials? No, not one, she insists. Best of all, Donna finally gets the happy ending she deserves – the delightful fate of Donna Noble. “I think it’s just amazing that Russell has found a way to do that,” says Catherine. “I was convinced he was going to have the Doctor and Donna die in some terrible, spectacular way and everyone would be sobbing. But no. We sit in a garden and eat apple crumble with Bonnie Langford. Ha! Which is so perfect.”

When Catherine read the script for The Giggle, she was “a little bit taken aback, actually, at what happens,” she told us two issues back. Now she explains: “That was when it fell into place for me. I realised, the need to want the monumental was the actor in me. That’s not what Donna wants. Donna doesn’t want the drama. What she wants is to bring the Doctor home and to ground him the way she needed to ground herself. That’s how she saves him. For me that’s Russell’s brilliance, that he sees beyond the showiness.”

Catherine texted Russell after reading the script. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, we sit in a garden having a barbecue,’ and he goes, ‘Yeah, Donna gets the ending she always wanted.’ I thought, of course, that’s what she wants. She wants her best friend. And obviously,” says Catherine, smiling cheerily, “they get the best of both worlds, because there’s a TARDIS in the garden as well.”

“I really like that this is part of the garden,” says David, pointing across the lawn to where his TARDIS is stood. The Doctor’s TARDIS, by the patio windows. For now. (He took Mel to New York last week. And Rose Noble to Mars.)

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For other posts in this set, please see the #whoBtsGiggle tag. The full episode list is [ here ]

[emotinalsupportturtle]

David Tennant characters x text posts. Wet cat edition:

[florida3exclamationpoints]

ouat text posts: pt. 7/?

[iamthejam]

band of brothers as txt posts pt 3!!!

pt 1 and 2

[bnmxfld]

Whatever happens tomorrow, we’ve had today.

David Nicholls / One Day

[adams-fav-roach]

TLB as a "conversation" my friend and I had the other evening.

*Paul and Marko chilling out after dinner*

Paul: Toy story or Kermit the frog?

Marko: What?

Paul: Toy story or Kermit the frog?

Marko: In what context?

Paul: *turns so that his full body is facing Marko* Toy story? Or Kermit the frog? Answer the question.

Marko: Yeah, but like, in what context? Like what films or media do I like better? Do I want to be a toy or a muppet? Which one do I dislike? I need to know the context, dude.

Paul: *turns to David* Toy story or Kermit the frog?

David: *not even looking up from what he's doing next to Dwayne* Toy Story.

Paul: *looks at Dwayne*

Dwayne: Toy Story.

Paul: *looks back at Marko* Toy story or Kermit the frog?

Marko: *still confused, but starting to laugh at Paul's frustration* In what context my guy?

Paul: Toy Story?! Or! KERMIT THE FROG?!

[pacing-er]

[seventh-district]

Figured I'd try my hand at some Redacted character post/text edits!

[ 1 / ? ]

Credit to @/sainthowlzon for all the Listener icons, and to @/elisacaleisa for their google drive with all the canon icons!

(slightly alternative version of the Solaires' GC edit below the cut bc i had a lil too much fun with what Vincent would name his contacts)

[lonely-dog-draws]

just felt like revisiting Allegra from Eskew

[starliers]

my favorite episode of the x files will always be the one where they got brad dourif (the voice of chucky) to play a hannibal lecter-esque character that makes scully (who was heavily influenced by clarice starling) be in a silence of the lambs type scenario

[blangg]

Thoschei + Textposts; pt. 3 (pt. 1, pt. 2)

[snaggletoothedbastard]

he <3

[borgialucrezia]

the tragic irony of juan saying this in the sweetest and most playful way possible makes the whole fratricide arc even more moving because throughout the show he never took his quarrel with cesare to the heart, never calculated that cesare's envy would be so extreme that he'd actually end up killing him and then their father would eventually forgive him for the act...

[florida3exclamationpoints]

ouat text posts: rumple

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

no fear. what if there is a song in Portuguese on the Fitzjames davechella playlist. one fear.