Doctor Who Cuttings Archive

We're coming to get you!

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Radio Times logo 2000s.jpg
coverage of series 3, 2007
  1. Labour of love (7 April)
  2. Cat and Doc (14 April)
  3. The Thinking Man's Dalek (21 April)
  4. Enemy of the States (28 April)
  5. Who's scariest monster yet? (5 May)
  6. Burn, baby, burn (19 May)
  7. We're coming to get you! (26 May)
  8. Loving the Alien (2 June)
  9. Hell's Angels (9 June)
  10. And then there were three (16 June)
  11. Master mind (23 June)
  12. On set with... Freema Agyeman (30 June)
  13. Who's on board? (22 December)
coverage of other series
S1 | S2 | S3 | S4 | Specials | S5 | S6 | S7 | S8 | S9 | S10

[edit]

Get ready to run! It's 1913, and spooky Scarecrows are stalking the countryside, but the Doctor can't help-- he's no longer a Time Lord!

THE FINAL STRAW

"I'd say this is the scariest creature so far," says Ken Hosking (Scarecrow, far left) — and as a veteran monster-performer, he's well placed to know. "But it only takes about 20 minutes to put on, so it's not one of the more complicated costumes."

"It's comfortable to wear because it's soft, not rigid, so you can do lots of action in it," adds Ruari Mears (Scarecrow, centre). "But when you start exerting yourself, ventilation becomes an issue. We've been given breathing exercises by the choreographer."

"We breathe in for eight seconds, breathe out for eight, breathe in for five, breathe out for eight — that sort of thing," adds Hosking, "just generally varying your breathing to slow it down consciously, so you don't panic and hyperventilate. But it's not as physically arduous as some of the other monsters have been."

Maybe Scarecrow Hosking got off lightly — "You didn't have to run up that blooming country lane!" Mears retorts.

For exclusive video clips from our Scarecrow photo shoot, visit www.radiotimes.com/ doctor-who-scarecrows

Who regenerator Russell T Davies has flagged this two-parter as "a very different sort of a story", and he isn't wrong.

Human Nature/The Family of Blood is set in 1913, just before the First World War, in a rural English public school, and features seriously scary monsters — so far, so normal — it's just that there's no Doctor, only this John Smith fellow, who bears an uncanny resemblance to him ...

The story is based on Paul Cornell's 1995 Who novel Human Nature, now rewritten by him for television. He explains: "The Doctor is forced to hide by becoming human, and it's the story of what happens when aliens arrive to destroy everything and the Doctor isn't there. That's why it's scary. Can Martha make John Smith turn back into the Doctor to save everybody?"

So aliens who can sniff out a Time Lord anywhere in the universe are after the Doctor, but they can't survive long and if he can hide as a human for just three months, he believes he'll be safe. "But he isn't safe at all," says Cornell. "He falls in love with a nurse called Joan Redfern [Jessica Hynes, née Stevenson, from Spaced and The Royle Family], who's a nurse at the school. Martha is trying to take care of him, but among the many things he warned her about, he didn't mention that he might fall in love."

This is a big episode for Freema Agyeman and her character. Suddenly, Martha's in charge, with the class odds of 1913 stacked against her. "We see her desperately trying to look after John Smith, even though she's a servant, she's black .. . She's excluded from this society, basically," explains Cornell. "She has to look after somebody of a much higher social class than her, who's falling in love and doesn't listen to her warnings and doesn't believe her. It's Martha's journey, really."

And it's a tear-jerker. Besides the love angle, there's the knowledge that some of these schoolboys will be called up to fight in the imminent war. "It's a kind of spectre over the whole thing, that doom is coming for all these people, not just John Smith," says Cornell.

It's no coincidence that his previous Who episode was Father's Day, from series one, in which Rose Tyler went back in time to see her father Pete before he died. "The cast put in great performances in jerking those tears," says the writer of his latest story. "Jessica breaks your heart."

Small boys already gagging at this prospect: fear not. This is still Doctor Who and you will get what's coming: the Scarecrows. These hessian sacks of malevolence and straw, reckons Cornell,

"will scare little eight-year-olds absolutely witless! There's a scene where a whole army of them shows up, and [director] Charles Palmer fills the screen with them! And there's another where a Scarecrow grabs a child holding a balloon. And if that doesn't get them hiding behind the sofa..."

What of the Doctor in all of this? Russell T Davies, says Cornell, calls him "the lonely god". The poor man has sampled a human existence, an alternative to galaxy-hopping. "He's been there a few months and [he and Joan] have had a lot of time to get to know each other and we see them falling in love," says the writer.

Will he at least get the chance to savour a woman's embrace, before the burden of the Time Lord forces him to choose between love and planet? "Oh," says Cornell, "we've got some serious snoggage."

NEXT WEEK: JESSICA HYNES ON FALLING FOR THE DOCTOR

HUMANITY STUDIES

John Smith, aka the Doctor (David Tennant), takes a post at a 1913 boys' school (above) and has a heart-to-heart (right) with Nurse Redfern (Jessica Hynes)

MAID MARTHA

Duties extend well beyond dusting and scrubbing for Martha (Freema Agyeman)

Disclaimer: These citations are created on-the-fly using primitive parsing techniques. You should double-check all citations. Send feedback to whovian@cuttingsarchive.org

  • APA 6th ed.: Griffiths, Nick (2007-05-26). We're coming to get you!. Radio Times p. 16.
  • MLA 7th ed.: Griffiths, Nick. "We're coming to get you!." Radio Times [add city] 2007-05-26, 16. Print.
  • Chicago 15th ed.: Griffiths, Nick. "We're coming to get you!." Radio Times, edition, sec., 2007-05-26
  • Turabian: Griffiths, Nick. "We're coming to get you!." Radio Times, 2007-05-26, section, 16 edition.
  • Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=We're coming to get you! | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/We%27re_coming_to_get_you! | work=Radio Times | pages=16 | date=2007-05-26 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=23 November 2024 }}</ref>
  • Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=We're coming to get you! | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/We%27re_coming_to_get_you! | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=23 November 2024}}</ref>


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