It's new both in the sense that I only just discovered it, and that he's only been doing it for a couple of months. I think the first I heard about it was on Twitter, when he congratulated his former costar Olivia Colman for her Academy Award, and she linked back to the tweet about the episode she did of his show. So I followed the various tweets and links back to the source, and then discovered on the Apple Podcasts app that he's been interviewing a number of interesting folks since he started it.
In addition to Olivia Colman, he talked to his other Broadchurch costar (and Doctor Who successor) Jodie Whittaker, plus Whoopi Goldberg, Ian McKellen and (the one that, perversely, convinced me to just go ahead and download them all) former UK prime minister Gordon Brown, of all people.
Broadchurch, of course, was the initial hook for me listening to DT's show. That was my favorite new discovery of the last few months, even despite its sometimes overwrought acting and the sort of weird West Country accents Colman and Whittaker were putting on for their characters. And for those two episodes, I wasn't disappointed - not that they talked a lot about the show, but I liked hearing how Whittaker got the call-up to audition for the part of the Doctor (Broadchurch showrunner Chris Chibnall is now showrunning Doctor Who).
It also ties into something I wrote about a couple of years ago, when David Bowie and Alan Rickman (and so many others) passed away more or less suddenly. Reading Rickman's obituaries I was struck by the sense of the whole community of British actors, and his place in it - and this is a feeling that gets reinforced whenever I watch a British show or movie and find myself playing "spot the familiar face".
More than anything, though, what I responded to in the Olivia Colman and Jodie Whittaker episodes was the obvious joy they all took in each other's company. They may have worked together on one or two things, but the sense of a bunch of peers who know one another's careers and enjoy each other's work is fun to listen to.
He obviously doesn't have the same connection with Whoopi Goldberg or Ian McKellen, but David Tennant's a good enough host that the sense of pros talking shop really comes through, in the best way. Goldberg and McKellen have all this experience, but Tennant's an accomplished actor in his own right, so he knows what they're talking about in a way that some of the other podcast hosts I listen to, who aren't long-time actors, may not be able to do as well.
In a lot of ways, DTDAPW reminds me of the best stretches of the Nerdist Podcast (which I no longer listen to, for non-podcast reasons). Like that show, the guests are a good mix of Tennant's friends and peers, and Tennant shows a lot of enthusiasm for joking, chatting and turns out to be a good interviewer.
I've said before that I'm not much of a fan of Doctor Who, to the point that I have to remember to write "Doctor" out in full, but I'll be happy if he gets more of his former costars or even the other Doctors (Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, or even Christopher Ecclestone) on the show. And I'll be happy to hear from folks who appeared with him in Jessica Jones, the only other show I've seen him in.
And yeah, circling back to that thing about Gordon Brown: that was the thing, as I said, that brought me on board. Brown has always fascinated me, because he was so clearly always going to be the nearly man, following a decade or so of Tony Blair's premiership. There were some less savory things I heard about him, like his refusal to concede the 2010 election until it was settled, and the fact that he was a bit of a martinet to his staff. But at the same time, he was being lauded for his response to the financial crisis (though a few of my friends blamed him for creating it
Given everything that's happened since, it's hard not to think that if he could have just won a tiny bit more of the electorate, Britain would be such a different place now. So I really do want to hear what he has to say for himself.
The life of an actor is pretty hectic, so I'm expecting that there'll come a time when DT's got to put it on hiatus while he works on something else (something that pays!). But while he's got the bandwidth for it, I'll be ready to listen to whatever guest he's got.
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