—
Look. It was this or the ironing, OK? Seriously, it took me an hour. It came about because of a repeat viewing of ‘The Runaway Bride’, which Thomas wound up enjoying very much, although for me it merely served as a reminder of how bloody irritating Donna was in that first appearance. But amidst all the posturing and slapping and an accent that wouldn’t have been out of place on Eastenders (or perhaps that should have been ‘aaahhht of place’) there was one word that stuck out / aaaahhht, and it’s there in the title.
“I’m surprised and a little disappointed,” said Gareth, “that there weren’t more of them.” He’s got a point. I went through transcripts from every episode in that series (and ‘The End of Time’) and picked out every single occurrence, including a few that are borderline. The use of ‘Oi’ tails off mid-series when they’re making Donna very straight-laced, before building an entire scene around it in the meta-crisis sub-plot in the finale. Nonetheless, it’s the closest she got to a catchphrase, and by and large assistants aren’t around long enough to get catchphrases, and for that I suppose we should be grateful.
The bit at the very end, by the way, was put in exclusively for the benefit of my children, who found it hilarious, even if I don’t…
When I watched it, I was assuming that they were all from “The Runaway Bride”, since you’d just watched that one. It didn’t seem that implausible, and as I’ve never bothered re-watching any New Who, I didn’t recognise clips being from particular episodes. That’s why I was so surprised when you told me it was all of them from the whole series!