it is a fabulous tour de force of an episode and Catherine Tate is the BOMB she is so fantastic and is hilarious...unlike some of the previous episodes i can watch this and it gets better every time(seen 8 times now)it has a great villain for Donna and the doctor to face and all my family managed to sit down and watch it and ENJOY it.
Sarah Parish makes a great arachnid (haha)i want an action figure of her on my shelf(why no box set of the figures any way?).
i'm glad that Donna made her come back in series four(which is the best series so far(only 3 episodes to go))Catherine and David are really competitive with their acting which makes the chemistry on screen an excellent watch.
i love this special but unfortunately series three didn't have all the episodes reach the same standard(gridlock...c'mon:/),.
love this!!

I don't know why every Christmas I expect it to be different, expecting Dr Who to hit the heights as shown in episodes like The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, The Girl In The Fireplace and Blink. Yet every Christmas the same old turkey is delivered to us on Christmas Day. We don't get a special episode, we don't even get a quality episode, we get the most awful "adventure" of the entire year.

This year was quite possibly the worst with Catherine Tate being especially terrible. You can't help but spend the whole time waiting for her to do her own so-called comedy " Am I Bovvered!" routine.

Doctor who is much better than this, if only they could capture that magic more than once or twice a year.

Dr Who + Christmas specials = disaster, as far as I'm concerned. The recent Voyage of the Damned was atrocious and this is nearly as bad. The presence of the supremley annoying Catherine Tate makes this a real effort to sit through and god help us as she's now the new companion. The Runaway Bride (dreadful title too!) is just pureile, inane rubbish that should only appeal to juveniles and people with a low attention span. The bottom of the Dr Who barrel in my opinion. Avoid!

ok well i am a suprisingly big fan of doctor who and own all but 2 of the dvds of the doctors comeback, 1 of the 2 is this christmas special.The main reason is the price .I do not really enjoy Dr who confedentail so for me i would be paying the same amount of money for ONE episode that i would normaly spend on 3.
The episode itself was good apart from the giant spider ,though i did like it being there because it made me laugh when it flew its arms everywhere as though it was swatting an unwanted fly ,no this hilariose spider was looking forward to a much bigger dinner.

The episode is decent, although catherine tate's character was a bit annoying to begin with she became tolerable towards the end. The baddie is brilliant, and we see the doctor in a new light when drowning the racnoss young. Tennant is excellent again.

As i said it is a decent episode but really not worth buying on a DVD on its own. Series 2 and 3 could easily have been combined with the Christmas specials on 4 DVD's and their insistence on stretching them to 5 is annoying. The extra on here isn't anything special by any means. This hour long episode costs around the same as Series 3 volume 2 which contains 4 full length episodes.

So this is one to avoid for anyone but the completists.