A Life in Time and Space - The Biography of David Tennant. Nigel Goodall
rel="nofollow" href="#u7e07dd11-002e-5c7e-9407-023b4da94e58">THE BOY FROM THE HIGHLANDS
‘I was blessed with a very good upbringing, because my parents are very moral, Christian people, but without all the brimstone and thunder nonsense.’
(David talking about his childhood – 2000)
Three-year-old David MacDonald was watching Doctor Who on television and he was just crazy about it. In the years to come, he would own a Tom Baker doll, have his gran knit him a multi-coloured scarf so he could run around the garden pretending to be the Time Lord and pen a school essay declaring that he would one day play the leading role.
Although many would regard a career decision slightly premature at the age of three or four, David knew, even then, that all what he ever wanted to do was to become an actor: ‘I just loved watching people on the telly. I think I had a conversation with my parents about who these people were in the TV, and as soon as I had an understanding that this was a job, that people got paid for telling stories, that was what I wanted to do.’
Looking back, it was obvious that it was Doctor Who and in particular, Tom Baker (David’s all-time favourite) that triggered his desire to become an actor in the first place, and as far as he can remember, he was never dissuaded from pursuing his goal: ‘My parents expected I would grow out of it. And when I didn’t grow out of it and continued to pursue it, they tried to gently suggest some other things I might want to do. They always said, “You’re going to do what you want to do.” But in pragmatic terms, it’s a fairly stupid career. I think it’s one of those things you end up doing because, for whatever reason, you feel you have to. And you feel you can’t do anything else.’
As a sign of things to come, Jon Pertwee was in his second season of playing the Doctor and was only three years off regenerating into Tom Baker in the ‘Planet of the Spiders’ episode when David John MacDonald was born on April 18, 1971 in Bathgate, a post-industrial Scottish town in West Lothian, located between Glasgow and Edinburgh. That regeneration scene was the first time the process had been seen on screen. Suffering from fatal radiation poisoning, the Doctor is left for dead before regenerating into his fourth incarnation before viewer’s eyes, rather than just taking on a different appearance as had happened with the first three Doctors.
Before all of that, of course, and before David got hooked on the programme and, like the rest of the country, ranked Baker as the most quintessential Doctor ever, he spent the first three years of his life with his older brother and sister, Blair and Karen, living in Bathgate before the family moved to Paisley in Renfrewshire. His mother Helen was a full-time housewife, and his father Alexander (‘Sandy’ for short) was a minister in the Church of Scotland.
But to David, religion remains at best an abstract concept: ‘I don’t think, just because I’m the minister’s son, that I must believe. My parents allowed me to come to my own conclusions. Let’s face it, organised religion, especially in Scotland, leaves a lot to be desired and the Church of Scotland in particular has a lot to answer for. But I think I have a humanist outlook because of them – Christian in the right way.’
Sandy and Helen met at St George’s Tron Church, Glasgow in 1961 when Helen was twenty-one. Shortly after that fateful meeting, she had to go into hospital and Sandy visited her there, taking along a bouquet of white tulips as a get-well gift. But according to the Very Reverend Dr James Simpson, who is today a chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen, and who conducted Helen’s funeral service at Renfrew North Parish Church in the summer of 2007, ‘Helen’s mum was already in the infirmary, speaking to Helen, when Sandy came in with his flowers. Like most men, Sandy was a bit embarrassed about carrying the flowers, so he dropped them by the bedside and rushed out of the hospital. Helen’s mum told her: “That young man is serious about you.” And, soon afterwards, she and Sandy were married.’ Interestingly enough, those happy days of Helen and Sandy’s romance were poignantly remembered at her funeral by a beautiful bouquet of white tulips – just like the ones Sandy had courted her with – which lay on the communion table throughout the service.
Although the MacDonalds had ‘gypsied’ around other places in Scotland while Sandy worked for the ministry, they ended up making Paisley their home just three years after David arrived into the world, and to all intents and purposes, that is where he spent his childhood and where he was educated, first at Ralston Primary, followed by Paisley Grammar School, where he is said to have enjoyed a fruitful relationship with his English teacher, Moira Robertson, who was among the first to realise his true potential. Overall though, David remembers enduring academic studies rather than enjoying them.
What he perhaps enjoyed most was talking to his mates about wanting to become an actor and how he really wanted to play his hero, Doctor Who, which in his estimation was Tom Baker. Not even the emergency surgery that he had when he was nine years old, which left him battling for life with appendicitis, would deter him. ‘It was certainly touch-and-go for a while,’ recalls his friend Innes Smith: ‘It was feared he might not make it.’ On leaving the hospital, a few weeks later, he needed two months off school to allow time to recover.
It was in the period soon after the appendix scare that some pupils at his school wondered if he may be gay. He always clowned around, in and out of class, and was even a bit camp, remembers Carol Robertson: ‘Loads of girls fancied him, but he didn’t have many girlfriends. And so, some boys started to accuse him of being gay. But he didn’t care.’ And why should he? He’d already experienced his first kiss in primary school, the year after he had been signed off sick from school, with a girl called Melanie Hughes.
But that, according to David, was about four years before he started ‘really’ getting into music for the first time. He got into lots of Scottish groups such as The Proclaimers (still his all-time favourite band), Deacon Blue, Hipsway, The Water Boys, Hue and Cry: ‘I loved all that white-boy soul thing that was going on. And also the good stadium stuff, Simple Minds and U2. I guess I was also going to the theatre for the first time, going to the Citz in Glasgow. It was an extraordinary artistic policy which they operated under; I saw some of the worst things I’ve ever seen and some of the best. The first thing I saw, I think, was School for Scandal, but an unusual, high-camp production. Brilliant! Macbeth set in a spaceship was probably the low point.’
The Citizen’s Theatre, or the Citz, as David called it, was then, as it is today, Glasgow’s very own theatre. It is what it says it is – a citizen’s theatre in the fullest sense of the term. Established to make Glasgow independent from London for its drama, it produces plays which the Glasgow theatre-goers would otherwise not have the opportunity of seeing. Internationally renowned for its repertoire, it is one of few theatres in Scotland to produce its own work. By inviting a diverse range of touring work into the theatre, offers a powerful mix of productions that seal the Citizen’s reputation as the place to see theatre in Glasgow.
David balanced his theatrical and musical diet with books and movies. One book that was a favourite was J. D Salinger’s immortal The Catcher in the Rye, a novel that assumed an almost religious significance to the counterculture generation, some of whom were known to speak only in quotations from the novel. The book still resonates with readers today. Mark Chapman, the murderer of Beatle John Lennon, is one of the most notorious readers of the book. He was carrying a copy when he was arrested soon after he had shot five hollow bullets from a .38 revolver into the back of Lennon at around 10.49 p.m. on 8 December 1980, outside the Dakota Building in New York, where Lennon shared an apartment with Yoko Ono. Chapman was still reading passages from the book when the police arrived. He had apparently bought a copy of the novel from a book store in the city early that morning, a paperback edition, inside which, he scrawled ‘This is my statement’ and signed it ‘Catcher in the Rye’.
Equally influential on David, albeit for different reasons, was actress Audrey Hepburn. ‘Although I’ve seen lots of her films and am a great admirer of what she does, the little shrine in my head is to Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. I must have been in my late teens when I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ From an early age, he was in love: ‘She has such an iconic look: the little black dress, the cigarette holder and the coquettish grin. It’s a proper piece of good