#Doctor who last christmas ending full
#Doctor who last christmas ending series

He's a classic Father Christmas, but I didn't want him to just be all full of ho ho hos. 'Well kind of pops up when they need him most.

#Doctor who last christmas ending series

It's perhaps that long familiarity with the series that made Frost decide to play his version of Father Christmas slightly differently from what we've seen before, and with a suggestion that this isn't the first time he has crossed paths with the man in the blue box. David Tennant, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan really kind of `rehooked' my interest.' 'Then I kind of left it behind as I got older and didn't watch too much Saturday-night TV, and then it had this big resurgence and I really got back into it at that point. I remember really liking Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison. Playing Santa, a very different Santa it should be pointed out, opposite Capaldi's Doctor was a dream come true. Early in Capaldi's debut season, scripts and unfinished episodes ended up online and, as Christmas approaches, small details of the Christmas special's plot are surfacing online as fans, desperate to assemble the jigsaw before it appears on television, distil and discuss every morsel. Moffat has also had to content contend with what may be an unprecedented volume of leaks. What's good about that? There was a tremendous sort of hushed reverence for whatever Peter did.'

Being middle-aged isn't a super power, but people seem to think it is when you talk about Doctor. 'He's sort of accepted as one of the best actors in the world, and he's a very senior man. 'Peter Capaldi is already somebody in Britain, a national treasure,' Moffat says.

Now that he's famous, it's hard to remember people really didn't have a clue. was a completely different scenario from introducing Matt Smith. 'And you just sort of march to that drum, really. Now there's the Peter Capaldi show,' he says. 'It used to be the David Tennant show, then it was the Matt Smith show. Quirky role: Nick Frost plays Santa Claus in Doctor Who: Last Christmas.Īlthough the show has jettisoned actors as quickly as old age, Metebelis radiation, spectrox poisoning and time vortex energy has claimed them, Doctor Who is actually a star vehicle, Moffat says. Since 1963, only a dozen actors have played the time-travelling Doctor: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith and, finally, Peter Capaldi, with an honourable mention to a handful of others in cameo roles, including Peter Cushing, who played the role in two feature films produced in the 1960s. I just, generally speaking, know that he ought to.' I love the film Casino Royale, and I don't think, having seen it several times, I yet have the faintest idea why it's important that he wins that card game. I just assume that James Bond knows what's going on and that's enough. 'I never spend any effort at all trying to work out what's going on. 'It's a bit like when I see a James Bond film,' he says. They just think it's fun and there's the Doctor, he's funny, and there are the monsters, they're frightening, they did a thing, he did a thing and it all ended with a good joke. In truth, he considers, most people who watch Doctor Who 'haven't a clue what's going on, nor do they think they should. 'In the time I've been doing the Christmas specials, I have done some which are totally locked into the continuity of the series and ones that are pretty much stand-alone Christmas fluff, and I don't think the audience noticed difference. Hushed reverence: Peter Capaldi as the Doctor in the Christmas episode. I don't know if a word of what I said is actually true. 'I just don't know if that's true or not. 'What I've been in the habit of saying and Russell used to say as well is you've got to keep in mind there are more people who don't normally watch Doctor Who watching the Christmas episode,' Moffat says. Once a year, however, Moffat gets to toss it all out the window, when the show's much-loved Christmas special episode is produced. It isn't easy making a television program when your audience can match you detail for detail, step for step. The diehard fans, who know the show's minutiae inside out, can be as relentless and unforgiving as they are loving and loyal. Among them are 'wibbly wobbly, timey wimey', 'bigger on the inside than the outside' and a now-revered classic: 'reversing the polarity of the neutron flow'.įor the show's producer and puppetmaster, Steven Moffat, steering around those tropes can be a delicate dance. There are certain touchstones which come with the Doctor Who universe and few, if any of them, make sense.