10th Doctor - The Runaway Bride (ii)

Book(s)/Other Related -
Dr Who & The Clash of The Ritalin-Deprived Gingers!
Doctor Who: All Will Bow Before Bridezilla
Bride and Gloom – When Good Weddings Go BAD!!

Roots -
"A mass of comedic characters infecting life from another realm..."
"Like The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse."
"What?"
"The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse?"
"What are you on about, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse?"
"That film, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, where all the characters come from the land of fiction, this is just ripping that whole thing off. Trying to help!"
"...That’s not helping!"


Fluffs - David Tennant seemed to be the best man for most of this story.

"Lead me not into temptation - I can find it perfectly well on my own."

"Me voici! D’où vient ta surprise? Ne suis-je pas mis à ta guise? L’épée au côté, la plume au chapeau, L’escarcelle pleine, un riche manteau sur l’épaule – en somme, un vrai gentihomme!" shouts the Leaderene for some reason during her death scene.

"Die, helpless evil spider creature! MWHAHAHAHAHA!"

"She’s Adam’s mum - FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!"
"I bet her name is Carol."


Goofs -
Donna claims Paris Hilton was at the wedding. Can Paris Hilton even set foot on consecrated ground? Was it just a bitchy nickname for Nicole Ritchie? If so, how was she sober enough to remain conscious and flirt with the DJ? Did she finally take the pledge after seeing the huge Dustbin/Cyberman war or something?

It is blatantly obvious that some of the exterior scenes are filmed at
the height of summer, especially the cash machine scene and the car chase. Though if you’re being asked to accept a flying telephone box bigger on the inside, then a slight filming oddity is probably not worthy of note, now you come to mention it.

It’s somewhat convenient that the Robot Santas just happen to be in the area where Donna is hunting for a taxi. Apart from the fact we see the Robot Santas following them and detecting her special Catherine Tate energy. So it actually makes sense. Mmm. Guess it’s not a goof.

It’s a bit of a co-incidence that Touchwood drilled a hole to the centre of the Earth right next to the lab where they were building a Catherine Tate Character Particle Detector, isn’t it? Except, hang on, the Leaderene built it afterwards. So it’s not a coincidence. My bad.

Why are the Army, rather than the RAF, attacking the Aracanon ship? Surely the air force would be faster, and be better equipped for the task. Is Mister B’Stard not interested in the welfare of his constituents and instead just making a sadistic game of this national emergency? I guess he is. So. This isn’t a goof either. Shit.

In The Jimmy Carter Menace, Alexei Zarkoff’s plan is NOT to drain the oceans into the Earth’s core to heat the water enough to destroy the Earth. So exactly why I’m mentioning it here is completely baffling, or even why the Doctor and Donna take time out of the plot to compare such completely different stories. And it’s quite lucky that the hole missed
the pockets of Staleman’s gas and of lava we saw in Infernal, though we can probably assume that there are areas of the planet which contain neither. So, um. That makes sense as well. Dammit.

Donna claims that she became a widow during this story, but she never actually married Lance. Course, she THEN says that she’s a bit dazed and confused but goddamn, there’s got to be SOMETHING for this section!!


Fashion Victims –
Apart from Catherine Tate spending the entire story in her wet and amazingly transparent wedding dress? None. Although Rose’s bright orange socks were a poor choice...


Fashion Triumph –
At long last, it is confirmed: the Doctor’s underpants are bigger on the inside than the outside.


Technobbable -
The Doctor’s speculation on what Donna’s cleavage includes "Standard Forced Eigen-tagged Quantum Entanglement".


Dialogue Disasters -

Donna: Suppose you’re right, though. Nothing special about me.
Doctor: Bollocks.
Donna: I beg your pardon?
Doctor: That’s just bollocks!
Donna: Oh, and you’d know, would you?
Doctor: Yes!
Donna: Oo, you’re spiky.
Doctor: Me? I’M spiky!
Donna: Yes! What’s special about me then?
Doctor: Well... I haven’t seen tits as big as yours since I ditched Peri on Thoros Beta.

Leaderene: What would be the point of staying here? This world is dying! And if the Aracanons must perish, so shall mankind! MAXIMUM POWER!!!!

Priest: Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt at a time of... well, I’m not sure what the word is. But regardless of your circumstances, there is an equally pressing concern. I have another wedding booked for 3.30.
Sylvia: But Donna disappeared! You saw it!
Priest: Indeed. And we can discuss making a mockery of the Church at a more convenient time. Nevertheless, if she’s not here in twenty minutes, then I’m afraid the wedding is off.
Sylvia: Off?
Priest: As in ‘sod’.

Donna: Wish we had a time machine. Then we could go back and get the wedding right.
Rose: Hang about, we...
Doctor: Ah, but even if we DID have a time machine, we couldn’t go back on someone’s personal timeline. Apparently. So. Forget that.
Rose: Doctor...
Doctor: You think I’m gonna get ANY sympathy from the Dommervoy? Sorry about risking the causal nexus, but Catherine Tate had to finish off her Christmas Special? I’d be blacklisted! AGAIN!

Leaderene: So Time Lord. How do you think you will stop us? What mighty weapons do you have?
Doctor: My wits.
Leaderene: So we have already won?
Doctor: ...bitch!


Dialogue Triumphs -

Doctor: Only a madman talks to thin air. And trust me, you don’t want to make me mad. I tend to get ever-so-slightly genocidal when I get mad. I’m aware of this.

Rose: How the hell did you start dating a giant red spider?
Lance: We met on the web.
Rose: ...shut up.

Donna: How did I get here?
Rose: Well, it was probably just a hen night gone wrong.
Donna: Hen night? What do you mean, ‘hen night’? Do you see me chained to that control desk thing? Do you see L plates on my ass? A traffic cone on my head? No? Then it wasn’t a flipping hen night, then, was it, blondie?!

Doctor: It was all there in the job title - Head of Human Resources.
Lance: This time... it’s personnel.
Rose: Oh, for fuck’s sake...

Leaderene: The Doctorman amuses me. I might almost consort with him.
Doctor: Tough. I’m seeing someone these days.

Donna: But that night in Alicante! We were happy then! Wasn’t that nice?
Lance: [sighs] What’s the capital of Spain?
Donna: ...Barcelona?
Lance: HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES?! IT’S NOT BARCELONA!!

Doctor: The Aracanons are being hunted to extinction – so they hide! Brilliant! They came here 4.6 billion years ago, when there’s no solar system, not yet. Only dust and rocks and gas and the brand new sun just beginning to burn. They sit in the dust and gravity takes hold. They are the one big rock, heavier than the others, starts to pull other rocks towards it. All the dust and gas and elements get pulled in, everything, piling in until you get the Earth! Jings! How hardcore is that? They make the whole planet grow around them and while they hibernate, the universe moves on and they’re forgotten!
Donna: So... the Leaderene created the Earth?
Doctor: They created a natural gravitational effect. YOU made the planet what it is. You lot. So don’t expect any sympathy for what humanity’s done, you can’t pass the buck this time!
Rose: Aw, but I love doing that!

Doctor: But why the hell do you want Donna?
Lance: I think he wants us to talk. It’s not that we want Donna, it’s that all we need is Donna! We don’t need YOU! The rest of you can be downsized!
Rose: Shut the fuck up! You AREN’T funny!


UnQuotable Quote -
Leaderene: BITE ME, ALIEN BOYAH!!!!


Links and References -
The Surfboard of Rassilon makes a return appearance. "I still can’t believe Captain Jack was able to fit the entire thing up his arse!" the Doctor marvels. "Lost £5 to Rose on THAT bet!"


Untelevised Misadventures -
Donna mentions a massive battle between an army of metal men and flying golden litter bins at Canada Square that demolished all of Cardiff. The Doctor is confident this is unlikely to affect his social life.

The Doctor tries to cheer up Rose by reminding her of the time he, Arthur and Tintin fought a ferocious saber-tooth gorilla terrorizing a Welsh coastal village, a reference to the BBC Novel "Crossover Nightmare of Black Island".


Groovy DVD Extras -
An alternative take of the scene where the Doctor whistles for a taxi – in this, he lets out an ultrasonic squeal that liquefies the brains of all the pedestrians all around, causing untold death and destruction. With optional commentary by Julie Gardner, RTD and Phil Collinson.


Vortext -
While going undercover as an English teacher called Logan Srun at another school, the Doctor encounters the genuine Catherine Tate pretending to be an obnoxious school girl called Lauren Cooper, and immediately recognizes him as a Time Lord. After asking him if he fancies Billie Piper, Tate then outrageously upstages him by reciting a Shakespearean sonnet. So the Doctor kills her with a Tissue Compression Eliminator, turning her into a Rose Tyler action figure.

This is considered by a surprisingly large amount of people to be a completely canonical adventure.


The Spite of Sparacus -
"I didn’t watch the whole thing – three minutes of Catherine Tate is overacting in comedic drivel was enough. Oh for pity’s sake - WHERE is the plot? All this grating stuff about her boyfriend! Her BLACK boyfriend, hmm? It is increasingly annoying that the new Doctor Who is riddled with token black support characters even when it is frankly unbelievable. It does not ring true and does smack of desperate political correctness and someone’s ham-fisted attempts at inclusiveness! I hated Mickey too! The whole thing is just bourgeois political correctness, a bunch of highly middle class people sitting round an office drinking cappucinos and saying "Oh and we MUST have another black actor in this one darlings, this would be like SO progressive!" Of course, no one else has the inclination to discuss this issue as it is too sensitive and controversial and therefore just abuse me and twist the discussion into one about my upcoming court case for trying to kill a girl who thought Adam Rickitt was ugly. Its a sad state of affairs where anyone even daring to broach this subject is NOT automatically beaten to death. As I said to the police at the time, it is obvious that I’m in the right."


Viewer Quotes -

"Oh, if only Donna were a companion! Just imagine! No potential for romance. She can go toe to toe with the Doctor in an argument. The best comparison I could give is the first Romana with the brains of Leela and the tits of Peri. Oh well, maybe one day..."
- Curiously Accurate Predictions Magazine (2007)

"Please someone sack RTD and get decent producers again."
- Same fan who demanded they sack JST and get decent producers again

"On so many levels it is a big disappointment! Another made-up alien race! Why can’t they stick to the Greys from Zeta Reticuli, huh? Answer me that?" - 'Mad Max' Edison (2007)

"It’s impossible to picture The Drunken Ginger Bridge being made in previous eras. Can you imagine Jon Pertwee running down Ealing High Street with a wedding-dressed Barbara Windsor? I can. But then... I’m insane. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?"
- Andrew Beeblebrox (2006)

"Blah blah big scale blah blah plot barely hangs together blah blah interesting characterisation of the Doctor blah blah Tennant is good blah blah."
- Mike Morris (2006 – and that’s his words verbatim, by the way, it’s not me being sarky or owt)

"From the very beginning of the story Tate seems determined to prove her naysayers right. Tate is abominable from start to finish, although she seems, somewhat impossibly, to get worse throughout the first half of the story." - Generic Tate-Hate Comment (2006-present)

"It felt like a bit of a mess really. The episode revolves around Catherine Tate’s absolutely beastly character, and there’s absolutely nothing to like about her gags. Unlike some other story that was crap, this one isn’t. Don’t analyze it too closely. And I’m talking to YOU, Alan Stevens!" - Ewen Campion-Clarke (2006)

"It’s time to stop all this speculation and get some hard facts... where's Youth of Australia with his Discontinuity Guide ?????"
– Some guy called Ian Curtis I’ve never met before (2006)

"Pah! My writers can out-write a great many of the writers working on our favorite TV series and it beats me why many of them haven’t already pitched ideas at RTD – apart from that whole BBC writ against not giving pathetic fanficers the time of day. The Drunken Ginger Bride? PAH! Pah, I say! The Yawn of Time would make a far better and much more exciting episode than this mess, even if it IS no more than a fanwank sequel to The Invasion of Time. At least it didn’t have Donna Noble shouting the place down, plus lots of Snotaran on Vardan action! This is what Doctor Who should be!!! Never mind all this Time War and destruction of Gallifrey nonsense! This is what Doctor Who needs on TV now!"
- Bob Furnell of The 'Doctor Who is MINE!' Project (2007)


David Tennant Speaks!
"This story is a romp, a caper comedy about giant spiders and weddings. Which must be terrified if you’re scared of spiders and weddings. I don’t mind spiders, in fact I feel quite comfortable around them, unlike Colin Baker who still to this day can’t watch Arachnophobia. Mind you, neither can I, it’s bloody shithouse, isn’t it? But moths are the ones that freak me out, with that way they turn to dust like Gothic archetypes. Had this story features giant moths, I woulda been bricking it. As for weddings, I’ve always had a good time at them, but people don’t seem to have them as much nowadays. Or at least if they do, they don’t tell ME about them. I mean Michaelle Heaton and Andy Scott-Lee are tying the knot, the Pop Wedding of the Week they’re calling it! Why haven’t I been invited? I wasn’t invited to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes either! My invitation might have got lost in the post, but you start to wonder after a while if there’s some kinda conspiracy going on..."

Billie Piper Speaks!
"Catherine who?"

Catherine Tate Speaks!
"I love Doctor Who and I love working with David Tennant, so it was a no-brainer for me and speaking of which, Donna’s quite thick, isn’t she? Still, I dunno if I could be a regular. It’s a struggle to keep up with Billie and David, because none of them have breasts like I have. Breasts aren’t made for running. That’s probably why Billie Piper played such a big part in getting young girls to watch, she’s bound to start puberty any day, I’m sure. Nah, just joshing you. I’m a professional comedienne, you think I’m gonna turn up the chance to mock the norks of the hottest girl on British TV? But I wasn’t cast as Donna because I only do comedy. The producers aren’t idiots. Lunatics, maybe, but not idiots."


Russell T Davies Speaks!
"Cardiff Bay is a breeding ground for spiders in the summer, and many a time I have left the window open and woken up webbed. So this is my revenge on the eight-legged freaks. Nothing deep or subtextual. I just hate the bastards. And, despite what people might have told you under torture, we NEVER considered keeping Donna on as a companion. The office doesn’t think of her as a companion. She’d get on your nerves. You’d have to radically change the character. No, I doubt you’ll ever see her again in this lifetime. Hahahah. What? No, just a hiccup. Ahem. Would I lie to YOU?"


Trivia -
RTD is nine foot tall. David Tennant is Welsh, he just pretends to be Scottish to sound more sophisticated. One of the cars the TARDIS dents is Gwen Cooper’s, adding to her foul attitude in the Touchwood episode Out of Ideas. Well, that’s what BBC Radio Wales tells the nation and why should they lie to me?


Rumors & Facts -

If you’d have told someone as little as four years ago that there’d be such a thing as a decently-budgeted massively popular ongoing Doctor Who series at the heart of the BBC’s schedule in 2006, you would be a hopelessly optimistic dolt who couldn’t accept that Doctor Who was dead and gone and that someone would leg it at the greatest possible speed from your mad, slavering presence.

This is one of the many fun things time travelers with a knowledge of pop culture can do to freak out passers-by.

Anyway, Executive Producer Russell T Davies had been a lifelong fan of Doctor Who, so that means he’s 45 and don’t accept any bullshit he might say at conventions to score with fit blokes, OK? Of course, SOME of the ideas he brought to the series when he was given charge of the program in 2003, could be traced all the way back to his childhood. Others he was gleefully ripping off everyone and everything else he could get his grubby protuberances on. One such notion was of the TARDIS pursuing a car from Paul Saint’s Third Doctor novel "The Buns of Ker-Rash!"

Quickly lying that he could remember driving along highways with his family, fantasizing about catching sight of the TARDIS whizzing past the other vehicles, RTD hastily changed the subject from just exactly WHERE he got the idea for a police box chasing a speeding car from. RTD discussed the feasibility of such a sequence with visual effects supervisor Dave Houghton, who agreed that it could be achieved after two years of uninterrupted computer-generated effort.

Thus, the intended opening shot of the revamped series with Paul McGann’s Doctor riding the bucking time machine down the M23 was cancelled, since the earliest it could be used was for School’s Out, with the Doctor discovering at his cost Sarah Jane Smith’s truly homicidal road rage. However, this totally derailed the plot of Toby Shithouse’s script, which didn’t feature Sarah Jane Smith in the first place and requiring a top to bottom rewrite.

Meanwhile, Davies decided he much preferred to use the car chase idea for his OWN far superior work, an indeed considered having the whole episode involving this TARDIS-based Wacky Races funapalooza. It was then it was pointed out that he had already written a whole episode about car chases for the Ninth Doctor called The Long Haul and everyone was frankly sick to death of the whole thing.

RTD quickly flipped through his own back catalogue and realized that one of the few ideas he HADN’T already done to death and worked out he HADN’T set a climax at the ancient stone monoliths of Stonehenge. This was another idea that RTD had long desired... or was nicked wholesale from Beth Comes To Rhyme... but in any case, though he was unable to come up with a satisfactory rationale for Stonehenge’s involvement he decided to keep it involved anyway until the final edit where Julie Gardener noted there were fifteen scenes located at the stone circle featuring absolutely nothing happening. RTD insisted they be filmed, but these were ultimately edited out of the finished story because the bloody thing was overrunning anyway.

RTD quickly worked out the plot for the story would be The Runaway Bride, with the Doctor and Rose arriving during the filming of the infamous Julia Roberts/Richard Gere romantic film and discovering that the director was none other than the Moxx of Baloon. Unfortunately, BBC Wales weren’t prepared to put up with more Moxx bollocks and demanded that the script be changed or else they’d fire RTD’s ass and replace him with Chris Chin-Balls.

Luckily at this stage, David Tennant was able to step in and suggest they base the next episode around his latest girlfriend, as they had with The Nun In The Lift-Shaft. This time, he was bumping uglies with comedienne Catherine Tate, who had got her start in The Bill under similar circumstances. Since then she had ascended to fame thanks to shagging all the right people like Peter Kay and Dawn French which culminated in her massive ego trip, the highly inaccurately named The Catherine Tate Show.

RTD realized this was brilliant, as they could film a whole story around Tate’s buzzword catchphrase characters rather than stock footage of Julia Roberts. After considering the titles of "The Day After", "The Sarcophagus Strikes Back!", "A Ghost in the Machine", "Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With A Wedding Cake", "My Big Fat Alien Wedding", "War of the Roses", "The Life You Never Knew", he decided that he didn’t really care and, deep down, no one else did. Thus the eighth story of the season was named "Jethro Tate and His Amazing Laughing Mongoose: If This Story Doesn’t Make Your Skin Crawl, It’s On Too Tight!"

Work then began on the actual plot of JTAHALMITSDMYSCTIOTT!. RTD judged that Victoria Russell was the funniest of Tate’s characters: a drunken bride who gives embarrassing speeches about her new husband and family. He thus focussed the entire story on this character, who renamed Donna Noble for reasons that would become obvious over two years later when the big Welsh bastard finally explained why. With a DVD box set of Tate’s sketch show and a cappuccino machine, RTD wrote the finished plot in three days and simply sat around the place twitching.

Recording for The Drunken Ginger Bride began on July 4th, 2006, and hasty changed were made so the fireworks displays were actually part of the plot: originally, the titular bride would start to grow fifty-foot tall and go on a rampage before being killed by the military. However, RTD foamed at the mouth when he was told off this rewrite and it was quietly decided not to go ahead with it and do something else.

Tate, Euros Lyn and some nice guy who happened to be passing called Greg worked to try and make the incredibly surreal story work, as well as make sense of the baffling development that this story was actually set AFTER the massive Dustbin/Cyberman conflict in the season two finale, which WOULD rather give the game away to the viewers. RTD allowed these changes on the condition that the return of the poorly-made Robo-Santas from The Michaelmas Evasion.

Since the Robo-Santas had been a completely random and pointless addition to the earlier story, have them wandering around being menacing, violent and incredibly mute would not only be in keeping but also give an intriguing bridge into the following story The Santa Tip, which delved into the pure of evil of Saint Nicholas in depth.

Production began in London, which was stupid as everything else was in Cardiff with the first day consumed with the Thames Flood Barrier, and the next day by footage of the taxi on the Chiswick flyover. On the 6th, the rooftop conversation was recorded at the IPC Building helipad. Absolutely nothing of any interest at all occurred during these events, I’m just telling you because I’m a clever bastard with a back-load of this endless, stupid trivia.

The crucial TARDIS/car chase sequence was then completed on the Ely Link Road in Cardiff on July 15th and 16th, causing massive pile-ups, explosions and the death of some fifteen people. During the early hours of the morning, the Doctor Who production team was arrested by the police, who enacted a rolling roadblock. Why the production team went to trouble of dangling a police box from a rope attached to the helicopter and tried to chase a cab rather than say, oh, I dunno, using CGI, we may never know. But one this is for sure, if there ever IS a flying police box hurtling after a taxi in real life, then it will look just as stupid and unrealistic as this.

Money was required to bail the production team out of jail, so David Tennant, Billie Piper and Catherine Tate robed a bank when Tennant discovered that the sonic screwdriver prop really DID work on automatic teller machines! The crime scene footage was later seamlessly fitted into the finished programme before the police could sequester it. The cash NOT used for bail cost were hastily altered to feature the faces of Tennant and Phil Collinson and changed from British pounds to Gallifreyan satsumas. Due to the exchange rate, this made every note worth a fortune, and it was with this they all bribed the relevant authorities to leave them alone and not cancel the series entirely.

In one last moment of certified insanity, RTD demanded that the military should receive orders from a "Mr. B’Stard", in what was actually a completely pointless crossover with Rik Mayall’s The New Statesman and not, as the entire fanbase immediately believed, a new story arc featuring the return of the Bastard as a xenophobic politician.

However, it struck RTD this was a BRILLIANT idea for a story arc, and decided to use it anyway. Having seen the story arc for the show so far, Collinson and Gardner went along with the idea and sent RTD to rehab once again while work continued for the rest of the season, and also helped the charity production of Poorly Researched Theater’s "Adolph Hitler: A Portrait of Epilepsy", starring Piper as the title role.

Meanwhile, David Tennant continued his baffling desire to sing in every episode. This time it was written into the plot that the Doctor’s karioke would destroy the Santa Zombies, with an off-key rendition of Ian Levine’s "Doctor In Distress" – but unfortunately, such material was banned on British television as part of the Geneva Convention. Not even RTD’s army of BAFTAs could overturn such a ruling, and so Murray Gold was ordered to write a replacement which would have the maximum irony factor following the devastating season two finale! Annoyed at this interference with the creative process, Gold ripped off The Snake by Al Wilson and his annoyance grew when absolutely NO ONE noticed.

"Lust Don’t Rust" by DJ Tennant and Murray 'Bootylicious' Gold

Well, I’ve roamed about the valleys
With a police box at my command
And I’ve met some bug-eyed monsters
I’ve met the blessed, I’ve met the damned

But of all the strange, strange creatures
In comics, on audio, in TV Land
Oh Rose, oh Rose, my precious Rose
I love you, you understand?

So reel me in, my precious girl
Come on, give into lust
Cause my libido’s tired of waiting
And my hearts don’t wish to rust

Well I have stumbled, I am rambled
I have crossed this crowded sphere
And I’ve met most of your family
Who I long to disappear

But all I’d have is anguished hearts
If you did vanish too!
Oh Rose, oh Rose, my precious Rose
What the hell am I supposed to do?

Well you freaked me out, stole my hearts
I can’t fly a second-hand gas stove
This lust that stays within me
Won’t wash up in K9 Cove

Now, the Last of the Time Lords
Forgets his tarts
Each tart, each foozie, each whore!
But the Last of the Time Lords
CANNOT forget
Why his lust don’t rust no more!

So reel me in, my precious girl
Come on, give into lust
Cause my libido’s tired of waiting
AND MY HEARTS DON’T WISH TO RUST!!