*
And so, time passed. I chased girls and learned the trumpet. I took my O levels and visited America. I graduated from the Spectrum to a Commodore 64. But what I didn’t do for the next three years was watch – or even think much about – Doctor Who. So I missed Peter Davison’s regeneration into Colin Baker, and then I missed Colin Baker.
I didn’t really notice that the programme was circling failure in a rapidly decaying orbit and so wasn’t much bothered when it was announced that it would be going ‘on hiatus’ for a year – even the BBC had noticed the show wasn’t attracting anything like the audience numbers of yesteryear. I didn’t really care about any of it because I had been on hiatus from Doctor Who for quite some time myself.
And then everything started to fall apart at home …
My parents divorced in 1987. However, instead of going their separate ways, they carried on sharing the house, in different rooms, with individual rotas for the kitchen and the bathroom; it was like a bad eighties sitcom, but without the laughter track. My sister and I continued to live at home, where we would occasionally be used as weapons in our parents’ ongoing war of attrition. Christmas that year was especially grim. You don’t easily forget sitting down to eat a roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings while your dad cooks beans on toast for himself in the kitchen next door. Happy days.
I now realise that my parents must have been going through a terrible ordeal, but all I can remember about this period of my life is a long string of pointless arguments between me and them. Arguments about failing to return my library books, arguments about money, arguments about curfews, arguments about the number of biscuits I’d left in the barrel; even the colour of the sky wasn’t off-limits. On my eighteenth birthday, the whole family had a massive fight because I had forgotten to post a letter for my sister. I can’t remember what was in that letter now, or why it was so important, but it must have been a big deal because two days later, after threatening to put my fist through the wall, I packed my bags and left home.
After I left, Mum threw out my red Palitoy Dalek, my Denys Fisher Tom Baker, my Target novelisations, my back issues of Doctor Who Weekly and my talking K9 (so it wasn’t all bad). She did not do this out of malice, but because all the evidence suggested I had grown out of Doctor Who and wasn’t coming back.
As so often before, she was only half-right.
Six Things I Love (not including Sue
and Doctor Who)
Amazingly, I don’t just love Doctor Who and my wife. There’s enough room left in my life to obsess about a handful of other things as well.
1. Tangerine Dream
My friend Jonathan Grove introduced me to the work of the German pioneers of electronic music Tangerine Dream after school one day. Their 1982 album, White Eagle, with its hypnotic, futuristic and slightly haunting electronic sound-scapes, sounded like the sort of music Drashigs would dance to. I was hooked and I went straight to Coventry’s lending library to borrow everything I could find with their name on it. And there was a lot.
Tangerine Dream have a ridiculously large back catalogue – 137 official albums at the last count. Some of these albums are seminal (the eerie, pulsing polyphony of Phaedra, or the majestic, repetitive beauty of Ricochet), but most of them aren’t. Nevertheless, I have bought and listened to them all. When my time comes, I would like their 1972 double-album Zeit played – in full – at my funeral. After a while, although people will still be crying, they will have forgotten why.
2. Cats and Dogs
According to Ghostbusters, when cats and dogs live together it’s a sure sign of the Apocalypse. But I disagree. Yes, you read me right. I disagree with Ghostbusters.
The thing is, cats are great and so are dogs. I love both animals dearly and I couldn’t possibly choose between the two, which is why Sue and I own three cats and a dog. With the dog I get adulation, loyalty and affection. With the cats I get passive aggression, a sense of entitlement and suspicion. If I’m feeling sad and lonely, I’ll give the dog a fuss; if I’m feeling confident and playful, I’ll worry a cat. So what if I can’t go on holiday any more, that the house stinks of damp fur, and friends with cat allergies stay away? It’s worth it for the silent companionship.
Please note: cats and dogs will also watch anything with you on television, even Tess Daly.
3. Jaws
Not only is Jaws the best film ever made, you can use it to teach a person everything they need to know about the art of film-making. I know this to be true because that’s exactly what I did when I worked as a university lecturer. My students would get hung up on the rubber shark and the film’s lack of nudity, but what did they know? Nothing. That’s why I made the sonsofbitches watch Jaws every week.
The direction, editing, lighting, writing, acting, music – Jaws is a masterclass from start to finish. It may have traumatised me as a child, and I’ll never swim in the sea or go near a yellow barrel again, but it’s more than made up for it. Jaws is the perfect film. If you told me that you didn’t like Jaws, or, even worse, that you hadn’t seen it yet, I couldn’t, in all good conscience, be your friend.
4. Walking
I know this is what people put on their CVs when they can’t come up with an interesting interest, but I’ve recently taken up walking. It’s not that I didn’t – or couldn’t – walk before, I just decided to take it more seriously. And by seriously, I mean spending over £500 on a waterproof Berghaus jacket and another £50 on a pair of hiking socks.
This passion for ludicrously expensive walking began in 2008, when I was going through my inevitable mid-life crisis. I couldn’t afford a sports car (and I can’t drive), and a love affair was completely out of the question (as I said, I can’t drive), so I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for charity instead. Why did you climb Kilimanjaro, Neil? Because, like Tangerine Dream’s back catalogue, it was there. I trained for a year, which mainly consisted of me walking up and down a country lane for hours on end, sometimes with the dog, listening to the Risky Business soundtrack on my iPod.
Walking up Mount Kilimanjaro was relatively easy. As a committed smoker, my lungs weren’t bothered by lack of oxygen when our expedition reached the most dangerous stages, which must have annoyed the trail of ultra-fit vegans who were vomiting and fainting behind me. I planted a scale model Cyberman on the summit of the mountain, 20,000 feet up in the air, where, I like to think, impervious to the cold, he is plotting the next great Cyber-assault on we puny humans. Just spare the cats and dogs, OK?
5. My PS3
You remember how I felt about my ZX Spectrum as a teenager? Thirty years later, my PlayStation 3 inspires a similarly intense rush of feeling. You can do almost anything with a PS3. You can watch DVDs and Blu Rays with it, you can stream digital photos from your computer to it, you can even use it to play music files other than those by Tangerine Dream.
You can play games on it too. My favourite PS3 game is Call of Duty, a first-person shooter that lets you blast complete strangers in the face with an M16 rifle without fear of arrest. You can even taunt them about it later over a Bluetooth headset. Nothing beats the thrill of reducing an American teenager to tears when you interrupt their buzz kill.
My PS3 is very old – its fan stopped working six months ago, which means it now reaches temperatures as hot as the sun, and sometimes, usually in the middle of a film, it sounds as if a Boeing jet engine is idling in the corner of our living room. But I still love my PS3, and it will be a very sad day indeed when I bin it for the forthcoming PS4, which I already know I will without a backwards glance.
6. My friends
I know I may have painted a self-portrait of an isolated loner who can only relate to animals, violent videogames and gory films – neighbours say I am a quiet man who keeps himself to himself – so I think I should also point out that I actually have quite a lot of friends and not all of them are imaginary or from the internet.
In fact my idea of heaven is watching Jaws on my PS3 with a cat on my lap, my
dog at my feet and my closest friends by my side. When the shark has been blown to smithereens, we will go for a serious walk, where we’ll discuss our favourite moments from the film (I like the bit where Chief Brody’s son copies him). I won’t inflict any Tangerine Dream on them, though, not even Jonathan Grove. I love them all too much for that.
Resurrection
Doctor Who walked back into my life – or I walked back into Doctor Who – in October 1988.
Despite a pronounced lack of study and a self-imposed bout of homelessness, I had still managed to pass all my exams and had been accepted into the prestigious grove of academe that was Sunderland Polytechnic.
It was Wednesday night at 7.30 p.m. In the communal television room of my hall of residence, a handful of freshers had gathered to watch Coronation Street. Having already spent all my money for that week on subsidised beer, I took a seat, watching Coronation Street being marginally better than sitting alone in my room feeling homesick.
But a few minutes later, a denim-clad student in the front row stood up to change the channel. Immediately, another student, this one dressed in a bloodstained rugby shirt, stood up and changed it back. After a brief pause, Denim Man got up and changed it back again, only this time he stayed on his feet and shielded the television’s controls with the palm of his hand.
Rugby Man: What the fuck is this?
Denim Man: What the fuck does it look like?
Rugby Man: TISWAS, mate. Put Corrie back on.
Smart Blazer Man at the back of the room: No, wait. Leave this on.
Denim Man: Yeah, leave it alone. Let’s watch this instead.
‘This’ was Doctor Who. Rugby Man looked furious but sat down, crossed his arms and waited for ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ to impress him.
I hadn’t seen an episode of Doctor Who since the Myrka fiasco four years earlier.
First impressions weren’t great. Did this new Doctor – Sylvester McCoy – really have to roll his ‘Rs’ quite so much? Why was his pullover covered in question marks? You can’t be much of an enigma if you have to advertise the fact, surely? Was this impish incarnation of the Time Lord brilliantly unorthodox or a complete prat? To this day I’m still not sure. And then there was the incidental music, which sounded like it had been composed by me on a ZX Spectrum.
When the programme had finished, Rugby Man stood up.
Rugby Man: Well, that was bloody shit.
But Rugby Man was wrong. It was a little bit shit but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot.
The Doctor is trapped in the cellar with a Dalek. He runs up the stairs …
Sue: F**king hell! A Dalek is flying up the stairs!
And then the theme music crashes in.
Sue: That’s how you do a cliffhanger.
Me: ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, part 1 got me back into Doctor Who. It was the first episode I’d seen in four years. I saw it by accident, in a halls of residence TV common room in my first week away from home in the north-east. It was the cliffhanger that pulled me back in.
Sue: I can see why. It’s really good.
Me: If I’d been a child prodigy, and I’d gone to university a year earlier, I would have walked in on ‘Time and the Rani’ instead, which you gave a score of minus 1 to.
Sue: And we wouldn’t be sitting here now, doing this.
Me: And I would have no friends or any interests to speak of. Yeah, 1988 was a big year for me.
Sue: I gave birth to Nicol in 1988 so I think I win that one.
*
The thing about ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ is that it had obviously been made by fans of the show. So not only did the story feature the Doctor’s deadliest enemies, it also took place in November 1963, the month Doctor Who was born. It even featured the same Shoreditch School from that first episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’. The show was treating its own history with a slightly stalkerish kind of affection. I was impressed. The Doctor’s new companion, Ace, wasn’t bad looking either.
I bought the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine the very next day, my first since 1984. I found the issue in the children’s comic rack, sandwiched between Jackie and Bunty. Kneeling down to rummage through the children’s section of WHSmith felt reassuring somehow. It harked back to a much less complicated time. I should add that I bought the Guardian as well.
The following week in the TV room, I faced down a challenge from Rugby Man, who had brought along a few burly mates to back him up. However, the majority managed to watch episode 2 of ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ in a tightly anxious silence, certain that at any minute the opposing group would rush to the front and form a scrum around the TV. As a result, as soon as the episode had finished, I was so relieved I could hardly remember anything about it. But once again, I felt like I had enjoyed it.
I may have fallen under the Doctor’s spell again because I was feeling vulnerable and homesick. Maybe I was grasping for a connection to my childhood, something reassuring that I could fall back on because my new student life was stressful and unfamiliar. And it wasn’t like I could go home – with Mum and Dad divorcing, home wasn’t really there to go to.
Sue: Or maybe you just really liked Daleks?
She’s right, of course – some things are better with the Daleks. As soon as my student grant cheque turned up the following week, I bought a second-hand portable colour television, and as a result I saw the Doctor blow up the Daleks’ home planet, Skaro, I grappled with the left-wing allegory of ‘The Happiness Patrol’, I thrilled to the celebratory pomp of ‘Silver Nemesis’, and tried to forget the surreal postmodernism of ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’, without having to worry about a challenge from the First XV. And in between all that, I even found time to lose my virginity.
Sue: You just can’t help yourself, can you? You want to tell everyone that it’s possible to have sex and watch Doctor Who at the same time. Well, not at the same time exactly, but you know what I mean.
When I moved into rented accommodation the following year, my flatmates couldn’t have cared less about Doctor Who. Not that they ever mocked it – that would have required them giving it a second thought. They didn’t even comment when I hung a poster of Tom Baker and some Sontarans on the door to my room (a free gift with Doctor Who Magazine). They probably thought I was being ironic.
So, alone in my room, I watched Doctor Who on my trusty portable and, without irony, I was happy.
I was happy until I saw ‘Ghost Light’.
Broadcast over three weeks in October 1989, ‘Ghost Light’ seriously messed with my head. It didn’t make any sense. Not even remotely. Not in a ‘this doesn’t make any sense and is therefore complete rubbish’ sort of way, but in a ‘this doesn’t make any sense in the same way that a David Lynch film doesn’t make sense, so it must be amazing’ sort of way.
‘Ghost Light’ was made for the video generation. It was so complex, it had to be watched again, so it could be analysed, dissected and, well, made sense of, I suppose. And this would have been great if I’d owned a video recorder, because analysing Doctor Who came naturally to me. I’d just spent a year being trained in the basics of semiotics and postmodernism, so ‘Ghost Light’ came along at exactly the right time. I’d even read The Unfolding Text and not found it particularly silly. I knew it was possible to treat the programme as a serious subject, and if there was ever a story ripe for serious discussion, ‘Ghost Light’ was it.
Sue: OK, I’ve definitely got it, now. This isn’t a real house. It’s a time travelling zoo. They are actually travelling backwards in time and that’s why all the dead animals are coming back to life and the ghosts think they exist, when they don’t. It’s not that hard to work out when you put your mind to it.
And then a few seconds later …
Sue: Actually, maybe I’m wrong. I can’t get my head around this.
Me: Stop guessing, then.
Sue: I hope this makes sense in the end. That’s all I’m saying.
When Ace and Inspector Mackenzie
explore the attic, they find Mrs Pritchard and Gwendoline hidden under some sheets.
Ace: They’re just toys. They’re just Josiah’s toys.
Sue: Oh, I get it. They’re robots.
Me: Stop guessing!
Sue: OK, I give up. I’m lost. It doesn’t make any bloody sense.
But I had no one to share my theories with. Nobody wanted to discuss the mysterious life cycle of Josiah Smith and how the story’s over-arching theme of change was a metaphor for the series as a whole. Not a single person. Even when I was in a room filled with people who were funded by the taxpayer to talk about nothing but television morning, noon and night, no one wanted to talk about Doctor Who, and that included my first serious girlfriend, Candice.
Sue: Did Candice like Doctor Who?
Me: We never really talked about it.
Sue: Were you ashamed of it?
Me: A little.
Sue: Oh. I was joking.
I tell a lie. There was this one time when I tried to convince Candice that the Doctor’s companion, Ace, was a feminist role model:
Me: Doctor Who is very progressive these days. It’s nothing like it used to be. The companions don’t scream at the monsters any more – they throw high explosives at them instead. In fact, the companion is almost as important as the Doctor.
Candice: Sorry, what? I wasn’t listening.
I do have one abiding memory of watching Doctor Who with Candice, though. Well, perhaps not with; she was in the same room as me when the final episode of the classic series was broadcast in December 1989. It was in her flat and she was packing for our Christmas break. In fact, I’m sure I missed large chunks of that episode because Candice kept asking me for my advice about which clothes to take with her. And because I was a good boyfriend, I tried to give her my undivided attention, even when the Doctor and the Master were engaged in a fight to the death just a few inches away from her.
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 6