Favorite Doctor Who Confidential Moments (12/?)

“This show will never run out of new ideas,” declares Russel T Davies, Doctor Who’s showrunner. “We tend to hit an experimental patch just before the finale every year, so Midnight was another chance to venture into new territory, and to give David Tennant a script of the like he’s never seen before!  I even dreaded sending it to him, because of certain technical challenges that the entire cast faces, but of course he embraced it and made it brilliant.”

“Midnight was so unusual and so difficult to film,” continues Russell, “that we had a rare rehearsal day for all concerned, which helped the whole cast bond. We had the set all marked out in the rehearsal room, with line-runs and discussions of character and motive.  Everyone became good mates on that day. They had to, to survive the endurance test of filming this script.”

“Filming was very intense,” agrees David Tennant. “It was a cramped set, and one scene lasted 45 pages, which we played in 15-minute takes! That’s unheard of in television drama - let alone Doctor Who, which tends to rattle from one scene to the next quite quickly. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to doing theatre on television. It allowed us to sort of indulge in the acting. You just lost yourself in the playing of it. We were all worried that it might drive all of us properly mad, or that it might be very dull to shoot, but actually it was one of the most exciting times I’ve had on this show.”

“It’s a brilliant piece of writing,” enthuses David. “Watching it back, it’s already one of my absolute favorites of all the ones we’ve done.  I think it’s great. The concept, the idea, is so clever, but also the interpersonal relationships within the episode are so finely drawn and so brilliantly played. The cast ate up these parts.”