David Tennant Audios I’m Trying To Find: Supermarket Zoo (c2010)
I’ve been posting a lot about the rare and obscure David Tennant works I’ve been able to find, or ones he did early in his career, or…you know, pretty much anything weird and wonderful this incredible Scottish thespian ever did, no matter how niche! I spend a lot of time hunting that stuff down and oftentimes - as this story about my journey trying to find his short film, Bite, explains - I manage to score and find what I’m looking for in a big way.
But not always. So tonight, dear readers, I’ll switch gears and have a rant about talk about something I’m actually trying to FIND. Well….if he even did it at all, that is!
I’ll preface all this by saying I believe I’m only missing a few of David’s audio works (well, at least the audio works which I know he did.) Sadly, there’s no IMDb-like comprehensive source for the entirety of his audio work like there is with his film and television career: the closest thing to this is the BBC Genome Project, which - while remarkable! - is primarily a source which catalogues audio broadcast over the BBC, not a repository for the names of the actors involved in each audio. The Genome Project has some gems - for example, you can listen to David’s remarkably in-depth 45-min 2009 interview for Desert Island Discs, where he talks about his family life as a child, dealing with his fame, and what music he’d take on a desert island - but it doesn’t do as well for old audio broadcasts, mostly because prior to 2000 or so, the BBC didn’t really keep copies of audio broadcasts! The Project does have copies of the Radio Times, though, so often it is these which provide some clue as to David’s audio projects. But they’re not comprehensive, either.
All this to say, I think I have the majority of David’s audio work. I’ve found a few more over the years which weren’t attributed to him in any other place but his biography blurb in the programmes of his theatre work - and I’ve found those, too (a few very recently!) But David’s done a lot! He’s as prodigious with his audio as he is the rest of his career, and I would not be surprised in the least to learn that the list I have isn’t as complete as I think it is. He’s more than likely done more audios than I currently know about, because…he’s David, that’s why. The Energizer Worker Bunny!
Regardless…I do have a lot of his audios. Put it this way - I have over 120 audios he’s done since 1993, and if my list is accurate, I only lack five (!!) audios to make the list complete.
Three out of the five I need are early 2000s (when the BBC didn’t always archive their recordings), one is from 1989 when he was in drama school, and the last, weirdly, comes from c2011 and isn’t even from radio!
This last one is his narration of a children’s book called Supermarket Zoo by Caryl Hart, and illustrated by Ed Eaves.
Here are a few of Eaves’ illustrations for the book:
I would LOVE to find this audiobook…somewhere. Damn it!
Supermarket Zoo was published by Simon and Schuster and copyrighted 2010. The ebook was published in 2011, and I believe David recorded the narration for the audiobook sometime before May 2011. The audiobook music was written and composed by Iain Carnegie, and he lists it here on his website.
You can find copies of the book all over the internet. But try finding a copy of the audiobook! It may be because - as rumors have said - he may actually have recorded it, but never released it.
Arghhhh!