Sitting Tennant

Today’s Sitting Tennant: Recovery

David Tennant in Recovery

Today’s Sitting Tennant is from Recovery. I never saw it. Was it any good? Bit harrowing, I hear.

Anyway, don’t forget to send in your entries to the Sitting Tennant gallery for a chance to have your name read out on British TV*. Just leave a link in the comments below.

* Clearly, this chance might be as low as 0. I can promise you a chance to have your name on this blog, at least, not that that’s very hard to achieve.

Monday’s villainous news

Doctor Who

Film

Theatre

British TV

US TV

Takin’ Over The Asylum

Since y’all loves him so much, I thought you might like to know that David Tennant’s Takin’ Over The Asylum is coming out on DVD very soon. Full details below:


Takin' Over The Asylum

Takin’ Over The Asylum was first broadcast on BBC1 as a six-part series in September 1994. Written by Donna Franceschild, directed by David Blair (Anna Karenina, The Lakes) and starring Ken Stott (Messiah, Rebus) and David Tennant (Doctor Who) in award-winning debut performances plus a cameo from Spike Milligan, the acclaimed black comedy Takin’ Over The Asylum is available for the first time ever on DVD from 9th June, priced £19.99.

Stott stars as Eddie McKenna, a double-glazing salesman who moonlights as a DJ for hospital radio in a Scottish mental asylum. He nurtures close friendships with the patients there including Francine (Katy Murphy, Our Mutual Friend, Honest) a self-harmer and Campbell (David Tennant, Doctor Who) a manic depressive, with whom he shares a dream to make it onto the commercial radio scene.

Campbell’s inspired antics promise to bring the pair closer to their aim, but the pressures of life outside of the hospital begin to tell on Eddie. A vindictive colleague leads his small-minded boss to ban his activities and his eccentric grandmother returns suddenly to Lithuania leaving him penniless and alone. 

Eddie finds himself drawn to the troubled Francine, but when the radio is threatened with closure he turns to Campbell for comfort. As Campbell regains control over his life and courts success, Eddie’s goes into decline and he is finally forced to face his own illness – alcoholism. 

EXTRAS: Commentary with David Tennant. Plus David Tennant’s original audition tape, never seen before.

Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Doctor Who – The Haunting of Thomas Brewster

The Haunting of Thomas Brewster

I’m sitting here wondering how this Big Finish downloads ‘taster’ service is going to work. In essence, it’s simple. Pay 99p and you can download the first episode of any play. Like it and you can download the rest for £12.

All well and good, you might think. But the trouble with most Big Finish plays is that the first episode usually isn’t that good. Either it’s terminally dull set-up for a story that only later turns out to be intriguing, or it’s all a complicated set-up for a story that only explains itself in the fourth act.

Case in point: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster. This comes across in the first episode as a cross between a piece of Oliver Twist fan fiction and a standard twisty turny time-travel story in which everyone starts popping up and laying down plans before events have caused them to happen – or they’ve even arrived.

Yet, if you miss out on it, you’ll be missing out on a new (and possibly interesting?) series of fifth Doctor adventures.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Haunting of Thomas Brewster”