David Tennant A Life in Time and Space Reviewed
A Nigel Goodall Biography on the Doctor Who Actor's Stellar Life
May 15, 2009
A Life in Time and Space – The Biography of David Tennant by Nigel Goodall takes a time-travelling trip back to where life began for Doctor Who actor David Tennant, but surprisingly this biography reads like l an Internet Movie Database (IMDB) profile of the actor with little revelation and minimal stylistic thought.
A Life in Time and Space Like Doctor Who's David Tennant's Deserves More Than Monotony
Nigel Goodall isn't a bad writer. It's important to state that at the out-set. He is quite competent, but what A Life in Time and Space suffers from as an actor biography is that, with information being so readily available on the internet today, a biographer must do more than simply detail the chronology of a subject's life, and sadly this David Tennant biography falls dramatically short.
A Life in Time and Space starts well. It pivots on the sad event of the cancer related death of David Tennant's mother in 2007 when he was filming a Doctor Who Christmas special along with Kylie Minogue, but then lapses back to how little David from Ralston, Scotland, always loved the TV program Doctor Who and decided to become an actor when he found out it was actually a job. No more detail, really, other than a little bit of funeral talk and no substantial news of the further impact on David Tennant's life.
Factoid after factoid is given in A Life in Time and Space about David Tennant's television and stage career before he became the lead in Doctor Who, from his first TV appearance in a Rab C. Nesbit episode as a transvestite barmaid to how he landed a role in the re-vamped Doctor Who after appearing in another show written by Russell T. Davies called Casanova. Parallels that could have been drawn between David Tennant's magnetic charm and that of Casanova's own seem to escape Nigel Goodall, though.
A Doctor Who Memoir? Nicholas Goodall's Misplaced Detail Reveals Little About David Tennant
As mentioned above, David Tennant is a hit with the ladies. He is also very career driven. The closest we come to any kind of insight on this aspect of David Tennant in the unofficial biography A Life in Time and Space is when Nigel Goodall passively relates one person's account that Tennant can, at times, seem cold because of his steely focus. Otherwise, Nigel Goodall busies himself with telling us how "nice" Tennant is as the actor goes about being the iconic face of Doctor Who.
Dirt is not needed for a good actor biography, but explaining why a man like David Tennant works so hard, or why he has become a serial monogamist, is. Nigel Goodall, instead, gives the reader back-story on everything from the history of the Daleks to a fairly unremarkable meeting Tennant had with Johnny Depp. Eventually, this aspect of the Doctor Who actor's biography A Life in Time and Space begins to grate.
A Life in Time and Space – The David Tennant Biography Disappoints Doctor Who Fans
A capably written narrative, but spotted with quite a few factual errors; the main worth of the book must surely be discerned by asking if a sparkling, live-wire of an actor like David Tennant is suitably captured in Nigel Goodall's A Life in Time and Space – The David Tennant Biography, and the answer is no, not even close. The departing Doctor Who actor, well, he deserves more than this.
(Publisher: John Blake Publishing Ltd; Date: 8 September 2008; Pages: 288 pages, Hardcover; ISBN-10: 1844546365; ISBN-13: 978-1844546367)
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