Inspirations: The Runaway Bride

The Runaway Bride began life as a potential one-off, mid-season episode for the 2006 series. 

Russell T Davies elected to hold it back and develop it further when he was asked to provide two Christmas Specials to follow the successful 2005 series.

The Doctor and Rose would have encountered the mysterious bride in the TARDIS, in a story that would have pretty much followed the outline of the finished piece, apart from a climax set at Stonehenge.

After Billie Piper's departure, RTD elected not to introduce the new companion in the Christmas Special, preferring to have a stand-alone companion figure for this story. A friend recommended Catherine Tate.

The title has been used before. It was also the name of a 1999 Richard Gere / Julia Roberts movie.

This was described as a "Screwball Comedy", and this is exactly what RTD was trying to replicate with his Doctor Who story.

Screwball comedies were very popular in Hollywood from the 1930's through to the mid 1950's. It is a sub-genre which is still popular to a lesser extent today.

The films are characterised by having a pair of protagonists who come from very different backgrounds - usually one male and one female, though some feature a ménage-a-trois scenario. The third person is generally a man who is engaged to the woman, of the same background, but would not make for a happy marriage.

The differences can be of age, social class or simply personality. A stuffy academic might be matched with a streetwise showgirl, or a rich society lady with a wise-cracking sports reporter. The comedy arises when these 'chalk and cheese' characters are thrown together due to some unexpected circumstance, often involving having to travel somewhere together. They encounter various mishaps along the way, and are initially antagonistic towards each other due to their differences. By the film's end they have generally grown closer together, and romance blossoms.

Some classic examples include 1934's multi-Oscar winning It Happened One Night (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, directed by Frank Capra); and 1938's Bringing Up Baby (Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, directed by Howard Hawks). A more recent movie like What's Up, Doc? (1972 - Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, directed by Peter Bogdanovich) was very much inspired by the 1930's movies.

The Runaway Bride follows all the rules of the screwball comedy. We have the man and woman from wildly different backgrounds, thrown together by circumstances outwith their control. They are initially frustrated and annoyed by each other, but by working together through a series of adventures they grow to like and respect each other. The "third wheel" in this instance is Lance, who turns out to have been a big mistake for Donna, and so the Doctor saves her from what would have been a loveless marriage (had he not been eaten by giant spiders anyway).

This is the second Christmas Special, so there have to be some festive trappings on show. (Unfortunately, the episode was filmed in the middle of summer - and it shows. At no point does it ever look wintry).

The robot Santas are back from the previous Special, albeit with new plastic faces. We also have another deadly Christmas tree - suggesting that they might already be starting to run out of Christmassy things to subvert as dangers. Here the tree remains quite static, but it is the decorations which are deadly - exploding baubles.

The Racnoss spaceship is star-shaped - referencing the Star of Bethlehem which the Three Wise Men and the shepherds used to guide them to the stables in the Christmas story.

The Christmas Invasion had featured a stunt involving the TARDIS (its crash-landing on the Powell Estate) and here RTD builds on this to have a much more elaborate and spectacular TARDIS car chase. This was something he had been hoping to include in an episode for a while - since that original version of this story in fact. He claimed that he had imagined the TARDIS flying along a motorway ever since he was a child on long car journeys.

Transport was to have been a bigger part of the story - in keeping with the structure of screwball comedy films. Cuts meant that this wasn't as big a feature in the finished programme. As well as the attempts to get to the church and the TARDIS / taxi chase, the Doctor, Donna and Lance would have used a variety of different transport methods to get to H C Clements - including a very slow, tiny car, a bus and then the segways once inside the basement corridors. 

Members of David Tennant's family would have been seen on the bus, as well as Mrs Croot from Love & Monsters (Bella Emberg). Of course, there ought to be no buses running on Christmas Day in London.

The people behind the drilling project and H C Clements prove to be Torchwood - just introduced in the previous story and now the home of Captain Jack in his own spin-off series. When Donna claims to be astonished that there is a secret base under a major London landmark this is a nod to the previous year's Special, when we learned that UNIT were now based under the Tower of London.

The Series 3 story arc features with a mention of Mr Saxon, who has given the order for the army to fire upon the Webstar.

The notion of flooding the Torchwood chamber, with the water pouring down the shaft, arose from the traditional method of ridding the bathroom of unwanted spiders - washing them down the plug-hole.

When Donna mentions a film about dinosaurs at the centre of the Earth she is probably referencing At The Earth's Core - the 1976 Amicus adventure film starring Peter Cushing and Doug McClure. The 1959 film adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which starred James Mason, also featured dinosaurs.

Lance's popular culture references include The X-Factor, the TV talent show which began in 2004; Pringles crisps, which have been around since 1968; "Brangelina" - Hollywood super-couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who first got together in 2005; and the Atkins Diet, popularised since the 1970's.

The wedding reception venue has a 'Manchester Suite' - as did Platform One in 2005's The End of the World. Manchester was RTD's second home.