A Tennantcy To Act

Well, here it is.

I have to say - for a verrrry long time, Quality Control was one of those David Tennant credits that sat on my research list surrounded by question marks. As I'd shared beore on A Tennantcy To Act, I knew the film had been broadcast, but beyond that, very little seemed certain.

All of that changed very quickly once I found Hannah Lewis, who wrote and directed the film, and Duncan McLean, whose short story inspired it. From them came surviving VHS copies, production records, recovered memories....and eventually, the original 16mm print itself.

None of this would have happened without Hannah's generosity. Not only did she preserve the film all these years, she very kindly gave permission for me to share it with y'all, so that David's fans could finally see it.

So, after years of research and more than a few unexpected twists along the way, I'm delighted to finally share Quality Control.

Enough from me. You've waited long enough.

ok so david tennant almost played the chief blue meanie in a scrapped disney yellow submarine remake and I need everyone to know this

Here's some context: in 2009 Disney and Robert Zemeckis were making a full 3D motion-capture Yellow Submarine remake. David was in talks fto play the Chief Blue Meanie — the theatrical, scenery-chewing leader of the villains.

The production got FAR. There was concept art, character rigging, and a whole pipeline built at a studio Disney ran specifically for this kind of work. But then Disney shut that studio down after some unrelated box office flops and the whole thing died by 2012.

David only ever talked about it once — on a talk show in 2010.

And while we never got that 3D Tennant-voiced Blue Meanie villain, some of the recovered mocap test footage + concept art has surfaced online over the years. It's wild to look at all of it, knowing how close we maybe got to seeing David - a bona fide Beatles fan - in a Beatles movie.

I've got another fun little David Tennant research project on the horizon...one we know next to nothing about. But if you've followed me for a while, you know these are the sorts of productions I enjoy digging into the most.

In the coming weeks, I'll be chatting with the director of a 1997 performance featuring part of Act II, Scene IV from Measure for Measure, in which David played Angelo. It's one of the more obscure corners of his career, and one that's especially interesting given that David has said more than once over the years that he'd love to play Angelo in a full production of the play. So far, though, he hasn't had the chance.

Some of you may already know the performance since a clip of the scene has circulated for years. It originates from Conjuring Shakespeare, a six-part BBC2/Open University documentary series about making Shakespeare relevant to modern audiences.

If you haven't seen the clip, here it is:

I'm hoping my conversation with its director will help me piece together a little more of the story behind the production and how it came to be.

...you cannot believe how ridiculously happy it made me to see that!

The Criterion Collection just shared David Tennant's Closet Picks video, and one of the films he chose was Twelve Angry Men!

If you've been following me for a while now, you'll know that choice didn't surprise me in the slightest. David has called it his favorite film more than once over the years, after all.

But did you know that during drama school, David played Juror #8—the role made famous by Henry Fonda—in three separate productions of the stage play in 1990-91?

Early last year I spent months digging into those productions, piecing together their history through newspaper archives, theatre programmes, and interviews I did with David's former castmates and teachers. The whole process was really fun for me, and I ended up publishing a three-part series for A Tennantcy To Act about David's involvement in the play.

So if David's pick got you wondering about Twelve Angry Men, and his history with it, go check out my series below. I'll link the first part here, and links to the other two parts are at the end of the first.

I’m dusting off another one from my archive today! This time I'm heading to late-1980s Paisley to talk about the St. Mark’s Players, an amateur drama group based at St. Mark’s Oldhall. David's father Sandy was the minister there, and teenage David couldn't help but get involved!

I'm not sure just how many productions David did with the group, but I do know he did at least three: a farcical murder mystery called Wanted–One Body!, an Easter courthouse drama called The Vigil, and a play by Neil Simon about a cursed village where everyone is hilariously stupid called Fools.

Check it out!

David Tennant has had a long and quite interesting relationship with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Since his days in drama school, David's played Oberon, Lysander, Flute, Thisbe, and Puck, appeared in a unique RSC gala performance set in a Victorian drawing room, nearly directed Russell T. Davies' BBC adaptation, and even helped serve as Davies' unofficial Shakespeare expert!

Recently I've gained quite a few new readers since I unveiled David Tennant’s long-lost 1996 short film Quality Control, so I thought I should show off my archives a bit and pull this one out for a revisit!

If you're interested in David's Shakespeare journey, I think you'll enjoy this one.

So I hope by now you've seen David Tennant's lost-but-now-found 1996 short film, Quality Control. I debuted it for the first time in almost thirty years last week at A Tennantcy To Act, my Substack about everything David, career-wise. If you haven't seen it, you should check out the link above and learn all about my hunt for the film and its subsequent re-discovery!

Speaking of the film, a week after its release, I’m going back to it for a bit. Its writer/director Hannah Lewis and Duncan McLean (the author of the short story Hannah based the film on) saw the film again after thirty years and chatted with me afterward. They both let me know there was a lot more going on beneath its surface than it first appears.

Today I'm sharing that with you!