Queen Billie

“Those last two episodes are so beautifully paced,” thinks star David Tennant. “Again, it’s that whole Rose journey, which has been seeded throughout the series; the Mickey journey, the Jackie journey, the Pete Tyler journey, all of these chickens coming home to roost.  When I first read the scripts, I just cried my eyes out. Billie and I were two of only five people to have the Bad Wolf Bay pages, which were kept secret from everyone else. Even the crew didn’t know what they were filming that day. They just had to turn up. To this day, I don’t even know how many of them knew what they had filmed, because we were on a very windy beach. The sound man will have heard it, and they’d all have seen what was going on, but beyond that I don’t know how much people were aware of. I use the sonic screwdriver at one point and, because nobody had been given scripts or briefed, Phil Shellard, our standby props man, didn’t even know it was needed. But Phil is known as the Grand Master, so of course he had brought everything just in case. And then there was the Catherine Tate scene, which even fewer people knew about. That was filmed with five people. We wrapped the final day’s shoot for Series Two, which was for The Satan Pit, and everyone said, ‘Cheerio’. We came back a couple of hours later, once the studio had cleared. Graeme Harper came down and we filmed the Donna scene for the very, very end of Doomsday in top, top secret. Then we all went off to the wrap party as if nothing had happened.