I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but the 1996 TV movie is... an oddity, to say the least. It came out 6 years after the original Doctor Who series had been cancelled, and it was supposed to be the start of a re-booted series (though obviously that didn't work out), and it just feels very... un-Who-like, like it just doesn't fit in with the rest of the series (neither the old series nor the new one). And part of the reason for that might be that it was mainly produced by Fox, and was therefore, essentially, American Doctor Who. ...There's a reason why that shouldn't feel right.
Anyway, because the movie was supposed to serve as the start to a re-booted series, there are a lot of, uh... well "reveals" doesn't sound like the right word, but, there are a lot of things that were sort of newly introduced to the canon in order to give the new series somewhat of its own identity and give the story more places to go. Russel T. Davies did a lot of that sort of thing with the 2005 series by introducing things like the Time War, but, uh, yeah, most of what Fox's Who was going for has since been thrown to the wayside.
...But, you know, there's still the matter of it all being technically canon, sort of... I mean, the movie was the only TV appearance of the 8th Doctor, and if Davies started the 2005 series out with 9 instead of his own version of 8, then, yeah, that would imply that the movie is canon. But, that gets tricky when you think about all the things that actually happened in that movie... the most noteworthy of those things being the reveal that the Doctor is half-human.
...Despite the fact that every writer from there on afterwards seems to be completely content pretending that that never happened, it is very difficult to justify from a continuity perspective (my personal theory is that the Doctor only said that because he was still loopy from his regeneration, but even that theory has some holes in it that I admit I can't explain...). So, it always just sort of seemed that, despite the fact that you really can't try to explain away that reveal as something else, it's still something that's never going to be acknowledged again and that the Doctor is only ever going to be 100% Time Lord and nothing else.
...But then they acknowledged it. And, the funny thing is, I actually saw a lot of theories floating around Tumblr just after Heaven Sent aired that the Doctor being "the hybrid" might've been a reference to the whole half-human thing, but I sort of just laughed all of those off because yeah, no, we just have to accept that that's never going to be canon ever again.
But then Me was all like "You're a pureblood Time Lord, aren't you...? Why would a Time Lord like that spend so much time on Earth...?" and I was just like "No, no no, no, you are not taking this where you sound like you're taking this..." and then she was like "You're half-human, aren't you?" and I was like "NO, NO, YOU DID NOT. YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE. WE AGREED TO NEVER SPEAK OF THIS EVER AGAIN. YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY ACT LIKE THAT'S A THING THAT HAPPENED. NOOOO" because I was just too in shock that they'd actually bring it up (it hasn't once been referenced ever since that movie! Not even as a joke!!) and just didn't even know how to react to that.
And theeeen the Doctor never gave a straight answer to that question, so, yeah...
This... probably means that that line was only included in there to freak out the Classic fans who were aware of that movie's existence, like me, but uh... yeah.
...They actually acknowledged it, though. That's a first.
