Articles by Rob Buckley

Ah. More reasons to hate those twats in the Kaiser Chiefs (about whose pretentious, self-love I’ve already written). Now lead singer Ricky claims he was offered the role of Doctor Who. I suspect there’s a certain amount of tongue in cheek here.

“The BBC offered it to me but I was so busy they got a lookalike. It’s the kind of thing I’ve got down for my autumn years.”

But he goes on:

“I’m worried David [Tennant]’s too young for the part. Eddie Izzard would be perfect.”

If he’d stopped at the first quote, he’d just have been cheeky. A twat, but cheeky. But he didn’t know where to stop. He crossed the line from cheeky to rude. Can the next person who sees him give him a thumping? (It might be construed that I’ve written this article just to come up with a thin pretext for people to beat up the Kaiser Chiefs. I couldn’t possibly comment…)

Incidentally, following on from yesterday’s discussions about it being who you know, not necessarily what you can do, that gets you the job, it should, to a certain extent, be clear that Mr Tennant got his job through the exact same mechanisms that Charlie Skelton did in Space Cadets. Not to diminish his acting skills, etc, since he’s a fine actor and does one of the better mockney accents I’ve heard, but

1. He appeared in Casanova, which was exec produced by Russell T Davies, who is the exec producer of Doctor Who. He replaced Christopher Eccleston, who appeared in Davies’ Second Coming for ITV1.
2. Tennant says “I did a show that he’d written, called Casanova, at the end of last year, so I knew him through that. And, I guess, unbeknownst to me, that was my audition. So it just came up after that, I guess, when they knew that Chris Eccleston was moving on. They just came to me and asked me to do it.”
3. He’s been up to his neck in Doctor Who work for years, through the Big Finish audio plays. Russell T Davies is a big fan of these, using their writers in his own show and mentioning them in his own stories and articles from time to time.

Anyway, my point isn’t that this is necessarily a bad thing, only that this is how the industry works.

PS David Tennant’s been a Doctor Who fan from way back. Despite his playing it down somewhat in this interview (search for ‘Doctor Who’), I hear from sources that he’s able to list every single Doctor Who story in order. Not too difficult for a Doctor Who fan: I’ve met many who can do this quite easily, although I never hung around long enough to hear the full 27 seasons’ worth. However, the earliest stories only had episode titles on screen, not story names. Given that ‘The Dalek Masterplan’, for example, had 12 episodes, each with its own title, you’ll immediately spot that that’s a whole lot more learning and obsession to deal with. Tennant can apparently list even these episodes in order, which I’ve never seen anyone do. I think I’d be frightened.