'And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon'
...how a play by Donna Franceschild led to David Tennant's breakthrough moment
First, I need to do some “housekeeping” of sorts:
Though I said I would be taking a short hiatus due to my father’s death, a series of circumstances, i.e., a wave after wave of icy road conditions, and the fact my mother caught Covid when she was in the hospital visiting my father (and I shall not rant any further on how she caught it for the first time after five years in the ONE PLACE which should be working HARDEST to PREVENT infection!) have rendered me unable to drive cross country to take care of my duties as executor.
So…while I’ve been doing my best handling things remotely and I may have to drop things at a moment’s notice to go, I find myself with a bit of time on my hands. Who knows how long this will last until I must once again claim a hiatus, but until then, friends? You’re getting some posts.
Shall we?
If what you’re thinking after reading the title of today’s post is some version of ‘What? Wasn’t David Tennant’s breakthrough moment through Takin’ Over The Asylum by Donna Franceschild?’ then be assured - you’re right. It was. You’re not imagining things. David himself has said of Takin’ Over The Asylum that “every job I've had since, actually, has come as a result of this without a doubt.”
In the commentary track included on the Takin’ Over The Asylum DVD release for the episode ‘Fool On The Hill’, David and Donna Franceschild had a conversation about that time in his life:
DAVID: I got Slab Boys Trilogy at the Young Vic, and the National Theatre casting department [who was looking to cast Nicholas Beckett] came to see that and actually said, “We quite liked him, but we didn't think he was very good in this so we've decided not to pursue him.” My agent said, “No, go on and see him anyway.”
DONNA: They phoned your agent and said the person you're suggesting, is that the same person that was on Takin' Over The Asylum? And they said yes, so they said we're interested then?
DAVID: Yes! And it was because I'd done [Takin’ Over The Asylum], or else I'd have lost myself a job otherwise!
But it was a question put to me by a reader on Tumblr which made me want to do a feature about how Franceschild had begun the process of creating Takin’ Over The Asylum - in other words, why she even started writing it. After all, we David Tennant fans owe a huge debt of gratitude to Donna Franceschild. Without her brilliant writing, we may not have seen David’s career flower in the precise way it did.
And that, my friends, means we need to talk about And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon.
And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon (henceforth ACJM) began its life around 1985 as a play written in response to a tragedy in Franceschild’s personal life - her sister Nancy Nordine’s diagnosis with and eventual death from cancer.
A compelling, hard-hitting tragi-comedy, the 15 Aug 1991 edition of the Shropshire Star describes ACJM as
a personal, funny and moving play about four women patients in a Glasgow hospital ward. The women's confrontation with their breast cancer is the source of rigorously unsentimental comedy and of insights into their ambitions and frustrations. The barriers between them come down as Andrea, a former nightclub singer and mother of three, becomes the unlikely cornerstone of the group and spends her days consoling and fighting with a bewildered and terrified Eloise. It is a play which confronts and challenges preconceptions and prejudices about cancer, and explores the basis of how women view their bodies and themselves.
The play starred Gerda Stevenson as Andrea, Myra MacFadyen as Eloise, Nan Kerr as Mary, Primrose Milligan as Gladys, Sean Hay as Eddie, and Steven Wren as the hospital nurse. ACJM was directed by Ian Brown, then the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh-based Traverse Theatre.
ACJM became part of the Traverse’s autumn 1990 season and opened in November 1990 for a month. After its run there, it spent most of Feb-Mar 1991 out on the road on tour in Scotland, hitting such places as Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cumbernauld, Kirkcaldy, Stirling, St. Andrews, Newton Stewart and Kilmarmock.
By the finish of its tour, the wheels had been set in motion for ACJM to be adapted for BBC1 as a part of the last series of their prime-time, contemporary single TV play anthology series called The Play On One. Franceschild got busy re-tooling the play’s original script into a screenplay.
It’s here we come to the point of convergence between And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon and Takin’ Over The Asylum, and why the one might never have existed without the other.
You see, one of the minor characters in ACJM was a character called Eddie, the DJ of the hospital’s Ready Eddie Hospital Radio Roadshow. Eddie played only the smallest of parts in the stage play and the BBC adaptation; the play version of Eddie was described by The Stage as an “unbearable” hospital DJ, whose “career ambition overrides any concern he might feel for the patients”. In other words, he wasn’t a likeable sort at all.
But something about him must’ve stood out.
For the details, we turn to what Takin’ Over The Asylum’s director David Blair shared with me as part of a larger interview I did with him back in 2016:
The BBC – not myself – then commissioned Donna to adapt a stage play she’d written called And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon to fit a play strand we were doing at the time.
On the day of the studio, the producer overseeing the project was taken ill and they asked me to fill in for her ‘in the gallery’. (This was an old TV play where you worked in a rehearsal room for, say, three weeks then shot the whole thing – multi-camera – in a matter of days). Of course as a result, I became familiar with the material and was indeed taken by this minor character – Eddie – who was a hospital radio DJ.
After that, I asked Donna if she felt there might be mileage in creating a serial based around this character…It took her some time to finally come up with a first draft – the breakthrough, she told me, came when she switched from just a hospital to a mental hospital. After that, we worked the episodes one at a time getting precisely where we wanted to be on one, before moving on to the next.
So to recap: Blair got to know the material from ACJM and told Franceschild he thought the character of Eddie had some value and that she should consider writing something about him as a central character. And he continued to champion her as she wrote and rewrote the script until it moved to a mental hospital.
And Takin’ Over The Asylum was born.
As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, Blair wasn’t even supposed to be working on ACJM at all! He was only there because someone else got sick.
What were the chances, right? And aren’t we lucky all these things happened?
So, David Tennant fans: for anyone who seriously digs Takin' Over The Asylum and realizes and respects its significance regarding David’s career, watching And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon should be a given. Without it, we wouldn't have had our Campbell, Eddie, Francine, Rosalie and Fergus!
Not only do you get to see another drama by Donna Franceschild, you also get to see the “origin story” of the rather unlikeable minor character who blossomed into the version of Ready Eddie McKenna we know and love. And oh yes, that also happened to spawn the television show which became the launchpad for David’s career.
The television version of ACJM was broadcast on BBC One on 15 Aug 1991. It is archived at the British Film Institute on VHS, but luckily we don’t have to depend on a VHS version or an archive any longer. Someone's done all of us DT fans a serious solid and has uploaded the entire broadcast to the Internet Archive!
The Play on One: The Cow Jumped Over The Moon (1991)
So…you know what to do. Go watch it!
Too much fun. All the little golden threads that come together in a person's life. It almost makes one believe in fairies. Thank you for this.
Great post as per usual!! Good to hear from you, but do still take care 🫶