Tennant on role as Guardian reporter who broke story

" I got a phone call from the police saying your name is in a notebook, and I joined one of the bundles of people who took that to court." says the actor David Tennant carefully. "I mean, at the time I was in Doctor Who, so I was useful for a story, I suppose.

- Daniel Boffey

"It didn't come as a massive surprise, but the whole thing had always felt like a gross invasion.

It felt like the world had gone a bit mad, that we lost a moral compass, that a layer of humanity was being stripped away by what was happening here." Tennant, 54, is one of more than 1,600 people who have settled out of court with the publishers of the now defunct News of the World over the phone-hacking scandal, which closed Britain's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper and shone a light on the cosy relationships between some parts of the media, government and police in the UK. He is cautious when talking about his experience.

"I get very confused as to what I am legally allowed to talk about," he admits.

It was all quite some time ago, too. The drip-drip of stories in the Guardian about illegal news gathering by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid; the collapse of the "rogue reporter" defence that sought to pin the blame for wrongdoing on the News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman; the public revulsion about the hacking of the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler; the trial of Rebekah Brooks (cleared and still head of Murdoch's papers in the UK) and Andy Coulson (jailed after being forced to resign as editor of the News of the World and, later, as David Cameron's spin chief).

The News of the World closed in 2011, with Murdoch apologising to a parliamentary committee - "the most humble day of my life", the media mogul said. The Crown Prosecution Service ended its investigation in 2015 and Tennant received his apology and payout three years later. An old story, then.

And yet it isn't, say Tennant and Jack Thorne, the scriptwriter who, with Stephen Graham, won an Emmy this month for the Netflix hit Adolescence.

Tennant and Thorne are talking via video call (Tennant is filming the second season of Rivals "in the middle of a field, God knows where") to promote The Hack, their new ITV drama series.