Gordon Brown has just got off a plane from a speaking engagement in the US, and arrives at Somerset House in London with his questions for David Tennant written out on a scrap of boarding pass. Tennant is soon to set off to film another season of the randy Eighties classic, Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. After season one, he thought he should rebalance himself with some Shakespeare, and took on Max Webster’s innovative “binaural” Macbeth – the one with headphones – which Brown saw at the Donmar and enjoyed.
Their shared Church of Scotland work ethic is just one of the things that unites the pair, who have met many times. While Brown was writing op-eds aged 11 suggesting Harold Wilson for prime minister, Tennant was deciding, aged three, that he wanted to be Doctor Who. He is about to star in ITV’s drama The Hack as the investigative journalist Nick Davies, who played a key role in uncovering the News International phone-hacking scandal. It is a subject close to Brown’s heart: in 2011, he spoke out in the Commons about Rupert Murdoch’s “criminal media nexus” and just last month issued a new complaint against his empire.
Tennant is an ambassador of Brown’s Multibank initiative and has just filmed an ad for it, giving one of his Midas-like voiceovers to a concept he finds “really simple, and really clever”. Brown unfolds the boarding pass, and they begin.
Gordon Brown: We are both sons of ministers. Your father seems to have been someone who could have been an actor as well?
David Tennant: Definitely. There was a lot of theatricality in his preaching. He did say that there was a moment when he wondered if being an actor was something he’d like to do. But if there were very few precedents in my life, there were none in his. It was just not something that he felt there was any access to. He grew up in Bishopbriggs and I don’t think he knew anyone who’d ever done anything like that. Initially, he went into trade, you know, and he worked on cars, and then he was called to the ministry. That was his performance.
GB: Growing up, what I was aware of was that the attention was on you as the child of a minister; it was almost like a pressure. I think your father was the chaplain to the school as well? And so was my father. You’re trying to become anonymous, or you’re trying to be different and suddenly, everybody will say, “Ah, that’s your father!”
DT: I didn’t mind when my father came into the school, because he wasn’t difficult to watch. He’d always come with something quite entertaining. I think he was aware of his audience!
Kate Mossman: Is it true that you wanted to be an actor from the age of three?
DT: Yes. It doesn’t really make sense. And now, having recently had children who are three, I think how could I have possibly understood what that was? It was watching Doctor Who that sparked it. That’s how I can date it, because it was Jon Pertwee turning into Tom Baker, which was in 1974, so I was three years old.
GB: It was quite an amazing phenomenon, Doctor Who; I mean, it changed the whole nature of television, really, because it was other-worldly, it was sort of eccentric, but also just brilliantly scripted.
Then did you start performing at school?
DT: As much as I could. Gypsum’s Journey was a big one, in Primary 6: it was my first sort of title role. The music teacher wrote the songs for it. I can still remember a couple of them – I’m not going to give you a rendition now, because it wouldn’t work in cold, hard print. But I remember the lines for that better than for work I did a few weeks ago.
In your line of work, you have to remember statistics and facts, and they have to be very specific – there must be times when you’re addressing the UN and you get your statistics muddled up…
GB: The good thing about statistics is people are bamboozled by them, and if you get them wrong, nobody quite knows for sure until a few hours later, at least. I have made mistakes.
So you get to the age of five and you’re already two years into your…
DT: My acting career! I knew I was headed to drama school. I don’t think everyone else necessarily accepted that that was inevitable. As you should, as a parent, mine said, “Make sure you get as many exams as possible, make sure you get a wide range of qualifications”, because even if you make it into drama school, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll work at the other end of it. But I did; at 17 I went to what is now the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow. I had to audition, and I was very green, I didn’t really understand what was appropriate. You have to do a classical and a modern work – a speech from each. And I did Hamlet, because we were studying it in school. I did “Now might I do it pat”, when he’s about to kill Claudius, and I brought a kitchen knife and had it in my hand, because I thought I needed props.
GB: A danger walking the streets!
DT: I know, I could have been arrested. And then I did a bit of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman, which I’d also done at school, who was a sort of 65-year-old man: a brilliant, brilliant play – utterly inappropriate for a 17-year-old from Paisley!
KM: Gordon, you’re a big Shakespeare reader – which of his characters are you most invested in?
GB: You know in the original pre-Shakespeare story of Macbeth, Banquo is complicit with Macbeth. They changed it for the Shakespeare version because the censor would never have allowed it through: Banquo was now seen to be an ancestor of James I, and therefore he had to be rehabilitated as a good person. It’s interesting how much censorship there was. Shakespeare couldn’t really go head-on; he could send messages, but he couldn’t go head-on.
Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, as I understand it, to warn people about the break-up of the kingdom if someone like Macbeth takes over from the good Duncan, so it’s really to say James VI is OK. But Julius Caesar was written when Queen Elizabeth I was still around, and its message is: “Don’t play around with the possibility of tyranny, because you think you don’t like the person who’s ruling you – you replace them and it’s anarchy.” It shows how killing Caesar led to all sorts of other consequences – not that he was a good guy, but that what happened afterwards was brutal.
KM: There seems to be a bit of a golden age of political theatre at the moment – what have you learned about Westminster from our modern political plays? Can Shakespeare tell us just as much?
GB: I’ve been to some, but I don’t say, “This is what I want to watch.” I’ve never watched, for example, the Murdoch series – Succession – because I feel I lived through it! I don’t watch any of these films or plays about contemporary events.
DT: I’m not sure if it’s a golden age. Politics and playwrighting have always gone together. Shakespeare’s history plays are all pretty political, John Osborne shook the cage in the Fifties, the agitprop theatre of the Seventies and Eighties was making – often quite unsubtle – political points.
These days we’ve got James Graham and Jack Thorne and a slew of writers who are continuing the tradition of writing about the world and society in a way that’s political and personal. Drama is always political because it’s about human beings and how we interact with the world around us. Maybe it just seems more political when the personal feels so close to the politics of the day. We’re right in it at the moment…
KM: David, you’re due to star in The Hack, the ITV series about the phone-hacking scandal, in which Gordon is played by Dougray Scott.
GB: Dougray came to Kirkcaldy to see me, and I didn’t quite know why. We talked for an hour, and he clearly was trying to get all my hand movements. Do you do the same when you’re preparing for a part?
DT: Well, I play the journalist Nick Davies in The Hack. I met him a few times, and there’s also quite a lot of footage of him, so you can study that. But it’s not really about an impersonation as such, and also most members of the public aren’t going to be aware of exactly what Nick Davies is like. But it’s still a useful starting point, if you’re able to meet someone.
Gordon, what’s the experience of watching yourself being portrayed, because that’s happened a few times?
GB: The thing you think – well, you must be the same – is: “The Scottish accent, how is that being done?” Though in Fife, people say my accent is not that Scottish…
DT: Well, that’s the danger of being an ex-pat, isn’t it? [Tennant’s wife] Georgia accuses me, whenever we’re in Scotland or around Scottish people, of my accent becoming very broad. Do you get that?
GB: Oh, yeah. Same, same. I’m sure I do that!
DT: Yes, I deny doing it, but it is probably true, and probably inevitable.
KM: Gordon, you’re proposing so many reforms to the way that charity works: could you talk a little bit about the importance of philanthropy? Have you both had more of an involvement with charity work because of your upbringing?
GB: My father stands before me like a mountain. And I think it must be something a bit similar for you, David. He wasn’t oppressive, I was never asked not to do something or told not to do something, but there was a sort of moral core about him.
But David – Cancer Research, Baby Lifeline, LGBT, Circle, kids’ Scope, mental health, Children in Need, Big Night In, Comic Relief. I mean, that is only a small sample of the number of charities that you’ve been helping.
DT: I don’t know that I ever feel like I do very much, though. I don’t know that I necessarily always have a particular reason to be following a particular cause. Somebody presents something and it sounds like a good idea, and you kind of think, “Well, that’s connecting with me right now: that feels like it’s worthwhile. I’ve been thrilled to be part of the Multibank. It’s a brilliant idea, a really clear, simple idea. And then sometimes I support a cause because it’s not loud enough and maybe I can help make it a bit louder. But, listen: I think I could do a lot more than I do.
GB: You’re sounding Scottish – the old Presbyterian…
DT: I know, but you know what it’s like. It’s that Presbyterian ethic that has you believe you can never actually be doing enough; that you’re never as good a person as you’d like to think you are and that there must be a hair shirt somewhere you should be struggling into!
GB: What I think is happening at the moment is that there are a lot of people who want to help, but we don’t always find the best ways of helping them do it. One of the things that’s broken down to some extent is community engagement: the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute just don’t have the kind of memberships they used to have. The Boys’ Brigade don’t have the kind of memberships, trade unions have about half the members they had at their peak. Political parties are the same. You’ve got less engagement in your communities, and I think that’s one of the reasons that people feel distant from what’s happening around them. Is
the alternative social media? But you’re talking to people in silos…
DT: And it’s not face-to-face connection. There seems to be a race to cruelty in that world – it feels very difficult to have rational debate.
GB: I think we need to encourage more volunteering and new types of endeavour. What kind of organisation would young people relate to now? Park runs, for example, are becoming very popular, but traditional organisations are not working. And then, how do you persuade people to give more financially? The tax system could be better in offering a greater incentive. Companies could do more; some of the biggest companies in Britain give very little to charity. The whole point of the Multibank was to bring together companies who’ve got surplus goods, charities who know the people who need these goods, and foundations that can help finance the sort of distribution and the transportation. It’s environmental as well, because it’s anti-pollution and it’s trying to create a circular economy.
Child poverty is something that you feel as strongly about, David, as I do. Is there anything that you feel from your experiences – both as a parent and from seeing, going round Britain – that would make a difference?
DT: I think it’s allowing people to find the joy in intervention. It feels quite hard to get out from under the sense that you are powerless. We need to empower everyone to believe they can make a difference, that there’s something they can do that will effect actual change. Because if everyone can do a bit, we will manage a lot. But that’s quite hard to hold on to when the world feels difficult and onerous and like there are forces at work that are just so beyond our control.
GB: As far as the poverty problem in the United Kingdom is concerned, what would you want the government to do?
DT: [Laughs] That’s not a question for me…
GB: Do you know this great story about Lula? Before Lula became president of Brazil, he was a young trade union leader. “When I was a trade unionist,” he said, “people would say, ‘Things are terrible in Brazil, what’s gone wrong, who’s to blame?’” And he used to reply, “The government.” And he said, “Then I became the leader of the trade union and people would say, ‘Things are still going wrong, who’s to blame?’” And he said, “The government”. “And then I became the leader of the opposition, people said, ‘Who’s to blame?’ – the government. And then I became the government, and people said, ‘Who’s to blame? Things are still awful.’” And he said, “America”! That’s the end of his story!
[See also: Gordon Brown: Child poverty is a scar on our national conscience]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic