How Russell T Davies reunited David Tennant and Catherine Tate for Doctor Who
The story behind David Tennant and Catherine Tate getting back together for three Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials...
David Tennant and Catherine Tate are reuniting for Doctor Who in 2023. (Image credit: BBC Studios/Bad Wolf)
So with much fanfare and high anticipation, the three Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials that play out from November 25 2023 will see David Tennant’s newly regenerated Doctor reunite with his former companion Donna Noble played again by Catherine Tate.
In his last adventure as the Time Lord in 2010 called The End of Time, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor was forced to part with Donna as she took on the memory of a Time Lord to save the Universe. To survive the huge side effects of her transformation into the “DoctorDonna”, her memory of her time with the Doctor were forcibly erased and she was returned to Earth where she marries Shaun Temple and has a daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney). If she ever remembers her time in the TARDIS she’ll die we are told…
Yet the pair will have three adventures The Star Beast, (November 25 2023), Wild Blue Yonder (December 2) and Giggle (December 9). At a recent event in London, Doctor Who‘s executive producer Russell T Davies explained how Catherine Tate and David Tennant decided it was time to get back together in the TARDIS during lockdown…
Russell says: “It’s quite a well-known story. It was Emily Cook who arranged during the pandemic some ‘Tweetalongs’ so we’d all say watch Catherine’s first episode, The Runaway Bride. Fans would watch it worldwide, you tweet along with it and they became very successful.
“At first Emily had to drag us along kicking and screaming and Catherine hadn’t watched an episode since she left. She loved her time on Doctor Who but it isn’t something she does, watch old Doctor Who episodes. I do, this morning I had the telly on and watched an old episode from 1973.
“Then it was Catherine who said she loved it, that she loved watching it and she said I’ve always loved Donna Noble and wouldn’t it be marvelous to make some more. And I went ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ like that and then she asked David. She said, ‘Would you make some more?’ and he went ‘Oh yeah in a heartbeat!’. So then she told me that and I genuinely felt honor bound to go to the BBC and say look these two stars have just said this and I know it’s the 60th anniversary coming up and I know they would love to come back,’ so I sent off that email, simple as that.
“It was Christmas Eve or the 23rd and I just sent them the best Christmas present they ever had. And all I got was a reply saying, ‘thank you, we’ll think about it’. But what I didn’t know was at the same time top BBC drama boss Piers Wenger and BBC Controller of Content Charlotte Moore and the BBC were planning the future of Doctor Who — the next step of Doctor Who which was to make it bigger and take it to an international streamer such as Disney Plus, and to syndicate it across all countries worldwide. That conversation was happening at the same time. So my email went boom and exploded and sat there. But it all ended up coming together and here we are at the start of this new era of Doctor Who.”
