David Tennant Treat 4 Today for Tuesday 18th December 2012

The David Tennant Treat 4 Today is an extract from David Tennant's recent interview in The Big Issue magazine.

This section is where David speaks about Doctor Who:

David's combination of intelligence, wit, energy and genuine compassion – his emotional, indignant film about Ugandan children suffering with malaria almost melted down the Comic Relief phone lines last year – made him seem like a real-life example of the ‘brain over brawn, kindness over cruelty’ superhero. The Doctor was a role he says he had coveted since he was a small boy. But now that the dust has settled, does he still miss it?

“I don’t think there was a single moment that was too shaky,” he says. “I left feeling like it had just been a rare and heady time. I never got bored, it was never a chore. I left feeling incredibly good about it and I haven’t really paused to take stock. It’s still something I’m recognised for pretty much all the time and something I’ll forever be proud of.”

In one of his very last lines on the show he stopped what he was doing, a look of fear and sadness fell over his face and he shouted “I don’t want to go”. That was about more than the Doctor facing regeneration, wasn’t it?

“Aahh,” he pauses. “I think that was a very clever line. It absolutely made sense in terms of character – that’s exactly what that version of the Doctor would say. So it didn’t break the fiction. But at the same time it was a bigger line than that. It was partly Russell [T Davies] expressing how he felt about leaving the show because we were all leaving together.

“We all felt it was the right time to go – we’d given it all we could – but at the same time we all knew there would be nothing else we’d ever do that would be quite like this. You might have real success doing something else, you’ll work on other things, but whatever happens this is unique. There’s nothing else like Doctor Who. In the world. So yes, it was a bittersweet goodbye.”