Adventures with the Wife in Space

by Neil Perryman

  When we got home, I cued up the 1984 story ‘Planet of Fire’.

  Meanwhile, on Lanzarote …

  Sue: It’s … it’s … it’s …

  Sue is pointing excitedly at Nicola Bryant.

  Sue: It’s Nev Fountain’s girlfriend!

  Me: Yes, it’s Nicola Bryant.

  Sue: I’m not going to say anything about her American accent because I know it’s not real. I know this because I’ve met her. She was lovely.

  As we progressed through the Court Jester’s time – which took little more than a month; Colin Baker had been the Doctor when the show went on hiatus – Sue began to wonder whether his whole run was a prank as ill-judged as his costume.

  Sue: It seems mean to say it, but he did put on a lot of weight, didn’t he? His perm is a disaster and he’s got Bonnie Langford as a companion. He must have done something really bad in a previous life. Maybe that’s why he’s such a nice man now. He wasn’t given a chance to be a proper Doctor. The scripts weren’t good enough. He didn’t stand a chance.

  When the time came for the Court Jester to regenerate, Sue was understandably confused.

  Sue: Right, so what the f**k just happened?

  Me: The Sixth Doctor fell off his exercise bike and regenerated. What’s not to get?

  Sue: F**k off. Come on, what really happened?

  Me: Colin Baker was understandably upset when the BBC fired him and he refused to take part in the regeneration. Either that or he was double-booked on Crosswits. Anyway, this was the best they could come up with at such short notice.

  Sue: Right, so that wasn’t Colin Baker lying on the floor just then?

  Me: No, that was Sylvester McCoy in a wig.

  Sue: It’s not a great start, is it?

  * In a good way.

  † Nev sent the text to Sue because when I arranged to meet him at the Tavern in 2001, I didn’t own a mobile phone and I ended up borrowing hers. I gave Nev Sue’s number and he must have kept it.

  Six Things We Might Do Next

  As the experiment neared its conclusion, our thoughts turned to what we might do together once it was over.

  1. Become Olympic archers

  Like so many others who watched the London Olympics, Sue has been inspired to become an Olympian herself. She says it would be something we could tell our grandchildren when we’re older, as if sitting through every episode of Doctor Who in public wouldn’t be worth bragging about. Sue’s first choice of sport – tennis – was ruled out because we are much too old, while mine – walking – was vetoed on account of it looking too silly. Then Sue had a brainwave. How about archery? She played darts for the county and appeared on Bullseye in 1989, and as darts had yet to be recognised as an Olympic sport, archery was the next best thing. Archery is not usually thought of as the poor relation of darts and I had to explain to Sue that you don’t go for a double top in archery. But she seems adamant. Don’t rule us out for 2016.

  2. Go off the grid for a year

  We are both hopelessly addicted to the internet, and the last two and a half years haven’t exactly helped. Having said that, the only time Sue wasn’t checking her phone for incoming messages, or browsing the web for ‘doer-uppers in France’, was when we sat down to watch Doctor Who together. When this is all over, I will probably never talk to my wife again, not unless she goes cold turkey and logs off for a while. No phone. No email. No Facebook. No French immobilier websites. Sue will have to quit her job if we go through with this, but that’s OK because it’s her turn, and she won’t be able to read any online reviews of this book either, which is also a definite plus.

  3. Sell a game show format and retire off the proceeds

  Sue is vigorously pursuing this dream right now, and to be fair she does have some form when it comes to developing television formats. In the early 1990s she came up with an idea for a programme where a panel of venture capitalists would give their money away for a share in someone’s business. She called the show The Entrepreneurs and I didn’t waste any time in telling her that it was the worst idea I had ever heard. No one would be interested in watching smug millionaires doling out cash to hapless inventors and failed businessmen, I told her. Unfortunately, for once she listened to me. Sue likes to bring this up quite a lot.

  At present Sue is developing a Top Secret idea about which she is understandably cagey. All she will tell me is that it involves John Barrowman, a coachload of people and a trip to the Australian Outback. It doesn’t sound very promising to me, but don’t be surprised if a programme called Barrowman’s Big Boomerang Charabanc appears on BBC Three next year.

  4. Follow Michael Bublé on every date of his 2013 European tour

  I am more than willing to accompany Sue on this jaunt, as long as she understands that its purpose is the decommissioning or ‘retirement’ of Michael Bublé, with a well-aimed poison dart if necessary.

  5. Get a divorce

  Sue refuses to see the funny side of assassinating Michael Bublé.

  6. Watch another TV series together and blog about it

  I would quite like to do this and have considered several possible candidates – Blake’s 7, Star Trek, even All Creatures Great and Small. The only exception is Doctor Who since its comeback. I wouldn’t want to commit myself to a blog that theoretically might never end and would probably result in something that looked like this:

  Sue: David Tennant is very easy on the eye. I would definitely run away in the TARDIS with this Doctor.

  Me: That puts the website’s ‘I fancy David Tennant’ counter at 583. And we’re only on his fourth story.

  And yet, for more than two years, visitors to the blog kept begging us to extend the experiment and do the new series as well. For all those people, and for anyone interested in Sue’s theory about the Doctor’s real name, I have included a very special treat in the epilogue to this book. The only possible thing that could persuade us to tackle Eccleston, Tennant and Smith in full – or as Sue calls them the Hard Guy, My Third Husband and the Pipsqueak – is a series of record-breaking pledges on Kickstarter. Actually, that’s not a bad idea …

  The Crafty Sod and the One-Night Stand

  ‘I thought you said you liked Doctor Who.’

  Sue had stopped asking me this some time ago. However, it was something I now thought about every day. Even though the end was in sight, I found the last few months of the experiment the hardest of all. I even contemplated including one final list of six things as a very brief chapter in this book: Six Things I Hate About Doctor Who

  The theme music

  The scripts

  The actors

  The camera work

  The fans

  Myself

  We were halfway through Sylvester McCoy’s first story when Al Jazeera invited me to appear on a programme called The Stream to talk about Doctor Who. All publicity is good publicity, said Sue. So I caved in and accepted the invitation. It was only when I logged on to Skype a few minutes ahead of my scheduled appearance that I was told that I hadn’t been booked to talk about the pros and cons of subjecting your partner to your favourite television programme, and I was there to take part in a debate about the ways in which online fandom can drive civic participation.

  I’m sorry … what?

  Put bluntly, Al Jazeera wasn’t interested in my wife’s battle with Doctor Who – they just wanted me to tell them how I was changing the world and promoting social harmony through my website. But I wasn’t promoting social harmony; if anything, Sue and I were winding people up. My fellow guests in the symposium were to be a My Little Pony aficionado (for some inexplicable reason, they like to call themselves Bronies), a cosplayer (which is a fancy word for someone obsessed with fancy dress), a hyperactive academic from the University of Pennsylvania and somebody high up in The Harry Potter Alliance. And, although I was not one, I was there to speak for the Whovians.

  Should I have pretended that Doctor Who fans are trying to make the world a better place? I knew perfec
tly well that most of them were only interested in making Doctor Who a better television programme. The best I could hope to do was muddy the waters by suggesting that the Doctor Who franchise was currently run by the fans themselves – the writers, directors, producers, even the actors, many of whom had grown up with the programme. The presenter didn’t believe me. In fact she obviously thought I was an unsafe interviewee and so cut me off in mid-sentence to get a more sensible point of view from the Bronie. Millions of viewers must have been left with the overwhelming impression that Whovians are selfish, uncaring fantasists. Watching myself back, I was half-inclined to agree.

  *

  The Seventh Doctor didn’t get off to the best of starts and his debut story, ‘Time and the Rani’, was awarded the only minus score of the whole experiment; Sue described it as the worst Doctor Who story she had ever seen. But when McCoy found his feet, and his companion, Ace, started to blow stuff up, Sue warmed to him. She didn’t even seem to mind that the Doctor was now a manipulative schemer who didn’t have any qualms about committing genocide on a regular basis.

  The Doctor tricks Davros into using the Hand of Omega. It destroys Skaro.

  Sue: Shit. Did that just happen?

  Me: Yes, the Doctor just committed genocide.

  Sue: F**k off! He can’t do that.

  The feedback from the supernova heads towards the Dalek ship …

  Sue: Has the Doctor just started the Time War?

  Me: Yes. Yes he has.

  Sue: The crafty sod.

  Ace isn’t convinced that blowing up a planet was the right thing to do.

  Ace: We did good, didn’t we?

  Sue: Ace doesn’t trust the Doctor. That’s very interesting. I don’t blame her, though. He’s a mass murderer!

  *

  Sue watched ‘Ghost Light’, didn’t understand it, but enjoyed it anyway. She thought ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ was ‘bloody brilliant’, and she felt sorry for the dead dog in ‘The Happiness Patrol’. And then, as we watched the Crafty Sod’s penultimate story, ‘The Curse of Fenric’, my wife stunned me with a confession:

  Sue: I’ll miss this when it’s all over.

  Me: I beg your pardon?

  Sue: This. I’ll miss it when it’s over.

  Me: What? ‘The Curse of Fenric’?

  Sue: No, this. Watching Doctor Who with you.

  *

  When the Seventh Doctor and Ace walked off into the sunset at the end of ‘Survival’ we felt euphoric, although the two bottles of champagne we consumed during part 3 probably helped. We had done it. Twenty-six consecutive years of Doctor Who. Over. Finished. Complete.

  Except it wasn’t quite over yet. We watched ‘Shada’ (an official recon of an unfinished Tom Baker story), the 3D EastEnders charity crossover ‘Dimensions in Time’, the ‘Thirty Years in the TARDIS’ documentary,* and the fan film ‘Downtime’ (6 out of 10 – higher than ‘The Robots of Death’). I kidded myself that I was prolonging Sue’s torment so I could replicate the feelings of despair I’d had during those years when Doctor Who was off the air. The truth was, now the experiment was almost finished, I didn’t want it to end.

  I always assumed that I’d be overcome with feelings of relief and joy when we finally crossed the finishing line but, over time, the journey for me became less about Doctor Who and more about my relationship with Sue. It was the fact that we were doing something together that was the important thing. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro without her; Sue built five houses with next to no help from me; I wasn’t there when Nicol was born. When we did do anything together it was always to do with work: in-joke in the middle of a departmental meeting or a rant about a new module in the car on our way home. But this had been different. We had been on the mission together. We were a team.

  I’m not suggesting that watching Doctor Who all the way through saved our marriage, or anything like that, but I had, accidentally, been correct when I predicted that it might bring us closer together, because it did. The adventure we had embarked upon not only provided a fresh insight into Doctor Who, for me and thousands of people like me, it also reminded me that if I had to choose between the programme I love and the woman I love, I would choose Sue. Every time. The really brilliant thing was, I didn’t have to choose.

  I thought about revisiting ‘Marco Polo’. A handful of readers hadn’t forgiven us for watching the condensed thirty-minute recon of this Miserable Git’s historical; and they were clamouring for us to remedy our oversight before we finished the blog. However, in the end I couldn’t go through with it. The thought of going backwards for the sake of completism seemed absurd to me. Besides, subjecting Sue to seven more black-and-white recons at this late stage would arguably have crossed the line into spousal abuse.

  Sue: So you’ve given up?

  Me: I admit it. I can’t do it any more.

  Sue: We should watch it.

  Me: Do you want to watch it?

  Sue: No, of course not. I’d rather watch All Creatures Great and Small.

  Me: Then we’re not watching it, and that’s final.

  Sue: Won’t people be upset?

  Me: Sod the completists. You’ve seen more episodes than most of them, anyway. Enough is enough.

  Sue: I thought you liked Doctor Who.

  Me: I do. That’s why we should stop.

  In a bout of cutting-edge ‘cosplay’ – thank you, Al Jazeera – we dressed up as the actors from ‘Marco Polo’ and restaged a selection of telesnaps in our living room instead. Sue’s impression of Tutte Lemkow, complete with eyepatch and stuffed monkey on her shoulder, was uncanny. Gary and Nicol joined in too, although Nicol was much too busy baking a celebratory Dalek cake to give our re-enactment her undivided attention. In the end, it would have taken us less time to watch the recon.

  I also had an ace up my sleeve: ‘The Underwater Menace’, part 2. The recovered episode hadn’t been released on DVD yet, but, thanks to an anonymous benefactor, we had been sent an advance copy. ‘The Underwater Menace’ part 2 would have been the coup de grâce. My wife could have finished the blog knowing that she’d seen more episodes than most of the people who read it. That would have driven a small fraction of our readership insane (the 9s and 10s who were up in the middle of the night) but, once again, I couldn’t go through with it.

  Sue: But I like Patrick Troughton. I wouldn’t have minded watching that one.

  Me: Do you want to watch a recovered Patrick Troughton episode completely out of context, just so I can parade you around on the internet like a freak?

  Sue: It’s a bit late to start worrying about that now, Neil.

  *

  I always intended to end the experiment with the first new episode of Doctor Who that Sue and I ever watched together, all those years ago in Christopher Street, when we were young and foolish and only weird people did things together on the internet.

  Unfortunately, thanks to Russell Toughnut Davies, Sue was convinced that Paul McGann’s Doctor didn’t count. It wasn’t that the Time War had erased all traces of the Eighth Doctor from the timeline. No, a conversation between two characters in his Channel 4 drama series Queer as Folk had lodged itself in her brain and wouldn’t budge. It’s understandable, I suppose. There are plenty of fans, just like the one portrayed in Queer as Folk, who like to believe that The TV Movie never happened, mainly because they don’t like it when the Doctor admits that he’s half-human on his mother’s side. And by ‘they’ I mean ‘me’.

  Sue: He’s like Spock. Maybe that’s why he left Gallifrey. Maybe all his friends were picking on him for being half-human and he got fed up with it and buggered off?

  And then Sue said this:

  Sue: The non-fans wouldn’t have enjoyed this. It’s too wrapped up in its past to appeal to a new audience. I bet the fans loved it, though.

  Me: Do you like it?

  Sue: Yes. It’s great.

  I’m saying nothing.

  Sue’s final commentary for The TV Movie is probably my favourite. Fo
r me, it’s a wonderful amalgamation of everything that made the experiment work. Sue misidentifies the Master, she becomes fixated on Grace Holloway’s wooden chairs, she doesn’t care if the Doctor is half-human, or even if he snogs a human lady. She even explained to me what a temporal orbit is, something I have been struggling to get my head around since 1996. For that, and everything else, I will always be grateful.

  Sue: Did Paul McGann make any more episodes?

  Me: Not on telly.

  Sue: Well, I’ve had worse one-night stands.

  Sue gave the one-night stand a 9 out of 10 and lots of people cheered, including some people who hated The TV Movie. Yes, even me.

  Me: Come here and give us a kiss.

  I switch off the TV.

  Me: It’s over. We’re free.

  Sue: Are we?

  Me: Yes.

  Sue: What shall we do?

  Me: Dunno. Kill Michael Bublé?

  Sue: Don’t push it, Neil.

  * Later, the documentary’s director, Kevin Jon Davies, recorded a podcast where he turned the tables on Sue by commenting on everything she said instead. Sue was flattered and frightened in equal measure.