10 Doctor Who Characters More Important Than You Realised

In a notorious (and hilariously bad-tempered) interview with Doctor Who Magazine's Benjamin Cook, the late Clive Swift – who played Mr. Copper in Voyage of the Damned – said that there were "much bigger things than this Who business."

Now that may well be true, but his character is a surprisingly significant figure in this apparently unimportant and tedious world of Doctor Who.

The epic two-part finale to David Tennant's final full series revealed that Mr. Copper invented the Sub-Wave Network. The Sub-Wave Network, if you remember, was the technology used to root out anybody with a connection to the Tenth Doctor. It was this technology that disgraced former Prime Minister Harriet Jones used to contact the Doctor in the TARDIS.

Without Mr. Copper's invention, the Doctor might never have found where the Daleks had taken the Earth (and the other stolen planets) used to power Davros' reality bomb. Mr. Copper effectively saved reality itself, making Clive Swift's character one of the most important in all of Doctor Who.

Which is a pretty hilarious retort to Swift's notoriously grumpy Doctor Who Magazine interview!