Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (12 page)

I wouldn’t have minded so much if their criticisms of early
Doctor Who
had been in any way constructive or
perceptive
, but more often than not they simply focused on the show’s less-than-special special effects. When I told them that criticising a television programme for not including any computer graphics when computer graphics hadn’t actually been invented yet was an untenable position, they shrugged their collective shoulders and asked me how long it would take before we got to
Stargate SG-1.

And after a day of this, I would return home to the
prospect
of watching
Doctor Who
and writing about
Doctor Who
and thinking thoughts about
Doctor Who
that no one had thought before for a PhD that I knew in my heart would increase the sum of human knowledge not one iota.

Each man kills the thing he loves, wrote Oscar Wilde in one of the books I still haven’t read. But the combination of simultaneously both studying
and
teaching
Doctor Who
was proving almost fatal; I started to feel like the thing I loved was killing me.

Every time a student completes a module, they are invited to send anonymous feedback to their lecturer, just in case
their apathetic silence in the seminars hasn’t sent a clear enough message. This is just a small selection of responses from the students who took my Science Fiction module:

• Too much
  Doctor Who
  and not enough
  Third Rock from the Sun.
  
• More vampires please.
  
• I couldn’t find the reading list until the day after the deadline past (
  sic
  ).
  
• Change the time of the screening. Some of us have lives.
  
• Only one episode of
  Red Dwarf
  ? Smeg.
  
• Neil Perryman is a sad wanker who watches far too much
  Dr Who.
  

It was that last one that did it. For the final time, it isn’t
Dr Who
– it’s
Doctor Who
!

I stopped teaching on this module the same day I packed in my PhD. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Then I wondered what the hell I was going to do next.

Sue loves a good television-shopping channel. When I
suggested
that we watch QVC together that night, she must have thought her luck was in. It was only when she
realised
that Tom Baker was plugging a
Doctor Who
book for two solid hours that the scales fell from her eyes. Still, she attempted to make the best of it.

Sue leaves me to enjoy another rambling Tom Baker anecdote. While Tom’s stories are entertainingly louche, they are also impeding QVC’s ability to shift enough copies of the book he was sent there to promote. The shopping channel’s male presenter has to keep steering things back on track.

I feel like my stomach has just dropped through the floor.

Tom is confused and disappointed. I am confused and horrified.

Tom is clearly nonplussed. He can’t decipher Sue’s thick regional accent and the QVC presenter has to repeat the question.

Suddenly I get it. Tom thinks my wife is some sort of super-fan. But of course he does. Only a
Doctor Who
fan would telephone a shopping channel for the chance to quiz an actor about something that is obviously never going to happen and over which they have little or no control. I notice that Tom has segued into a very familiar – and very long – anecdote, so I seize the opportunity to rush upstairs. I find Sue in our bedroom, giggling down the phone. She holds up a single finger to hush me and I stand there in impotent silence, watching my wife
nodding
along with Tom Baker on the other end of the line. And then I realise that even standing in the same room where this phone call is taking place is making me feel sick with nerves, so I race downstairs again, just in time to witness Tom suggesting that he could play the Doctor’s arch-enemy, the Master. Sue laughs politely and pretends to know who the Master is.

Tom shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

I grab a pen and hurry back upstairs, scrawling the words BIG FINISH on my palm as I go, which I then wave
frantically
in Sue’s face. She thinks I must be telling her to wrap things up with a gesture everyone will remember – a song maybe – and emphatically shakes her head. Thankfully, Tom has finally remembered something about the audio adventures.

And finally, to my huge relief, Tom unleashes one of his trademark toothy grins.

Sue comes back downstairs and sits down.

And the thing is, I have to admit, I had quite enjoyed it. Sue was brilliant. Instead of being intimidated, she just went ahead and did it. It’s one of the reasons I married her – or she married me – her determination to get on with it and make things happen.

Which brings us back to the caravan.

Sue had wanted to build a house since I met her. She
tirelessly
searched for the right location for several years until she finally found the perfect property fifteen minutes down the road in County Durham. But there was a twist. Building a single house would have been too easy for Sue. Anybody could do that, she told me. No, Sue wanted to build
five
houses.

She made it sound straightforward enough: the enormous cowshed would be divided between us, Sue’s two brothers and her younger brother’s best friend. The fifth property would be finished and sold first, which would help us to
fund the completion of the other four. And even though it sounded like a huge undertaking, with considerable risks involved, Sue assured me that the building work would take a year at most.

I wasn’t that keen, to be honest. I enjoyed my home
comforts
too much. We’d just installed something called Sky+ at home – you could rewind live TV and everything – whereas this location was so remote, it didn’t even have a phone. The nearest shop was twenty minutes away by car (I still didn’t drive), there was no water supply (we would have to drill for it) and, worst of all, I would have to live in a static caravan for twelve months.

Still, it was only a year. And I owed Sue so much. She had given me a family, a home and a life to be proud of. She’d humoured me when I’d thought the world was going to end and consoled me when it hadn’t. Whenever I needed them, she’d put up more shelves. As we navigated our way through the cowpats and chicken entrails, I couldn’t say no to her. How could I?

How hard could it be?

We put our home on the market and prayed for a quick sale. A consortium of professional developers had taken an interest in the cowshed and our window of
opportunity
was closing fast. And then the sale of our house fell through, thanks to somebody being gazumped further down our chain, and it looked as if Sue’s dream would be
over before it could even begin. But Sue didn’t give up. She picked up the phone and she didn’t put it down again until she’d made a series of offers, counter-offers, deals and
complicated
promises. The paperwork was signed forty-eight hours later.

The next day, we bought the Lyndhurst 2000. It had two bedrooms, an en-suite toilet, a modest kitchen and a
decent-sized
living room. It seemed quite spacious when we paid for it, though once it was filled with two adults, a teenager, a fully grown Labrador and a cat it was a little on the cramped side. Or, as Sue insisted, ‘bijou’.

We moved into this caravan on 18 July 2004, the same day the BBC began principal photography on a brand-new series of
Doctor Who.
Experts believe the four most stressful situations in life are bereavement, divorce, moving house and making a new series of
Doctor Who
, so let’s just say the day was rather tense for all concerned.

And then everything started to go wrong. In our rush to complete the sale, we – and by we, I mean Sue – hadn’t checked the paperwork properly, and we discovered that there was a right-of-way issue with one of the farmers which meant we wouldn’t be able to transport any raw materials onto the site to build our houses until the dispute was resolved.

That would take more than a year.

We were driving to work one morning when Sue hit me with a spectacularly unexpected question.

No, I did not. How would she like it if I suddenly had a theory about bathroom fittings or the dimensions of our still-theoretical new kitchen? That was her domain.
Doctor Who
was mine.

For ten years, I kept
Doctor Who
and Sue apart – unless you include
The TV Movie
fiasco and that time she rang Tom Baker on QVC.
Doctor Who
was
my
thing. And while it’s true that I was on the cusp of giving it up for dead when the BBC suddenly decided to bring it back to life again, I still felt very possessive and protective of the programme. I suppose this is what it would feel like if Tangerine Dream had a Number One hit record and overnight everyone started using it for ringtones and adverts. So when my wife suddenly starting asking complicated questions about the Doctor’s past, it felt awkward. She desperately wanted to know who had started the Time War and why the Doctor had to destroy Gallifrey. If I hadn’t stopped reading the novels, I might have had an answer for her.

For the record, Sue’s theory was 100 per cent correct: Bad Wolf was Rose Tyler all along. I was hoping for the Master myself.

At least Nicol’s indifference was consistent. One Saturday she walked in on me when I was blubbing my eyes out over the episode where K9 is blown to smithereens (and I don’t even like K9).

When Rose Tyler left the programme under tragic
circumstances
a few weeks later, I paid Nicol to go to the cinema so she wouldn’t have to witness a grown man weeping again.
It was becoming embarrassing. You were compelled to cry only very occasionally when you watched the old series (e.g. Adric) but the new series tugged at the tear ducts every week. If Rose’s dad wasn’t being run over, the Doctor’s girlfriend was dying of a broken heart. Yes,
his girlfriend
. Things were different now.

John Paul was the only person I could talk to about
Doctor Who
without feeling self-conscious and odd. The plaudits from the press and the public surprised him as much as they did me. Everything seemed too good to be true. Even though Christopher Eccleston resigned the day after his first episode was broadcast, his successor was a self-confessed
fan-boy
named David Tennant and people couldn’t get enough of him. I would meet John Paul for a cigarette between our university classes to discuss the latest developments and we would shake our heads in disbelief. I told him that I’d heard the Cybermen were coming back and we both snickered like schoolboys just thinking about it.

I can’t remember for the life of me what the argument was about now, only that it was bad enough for me to storm off in a huff and lock myself in the site caravan. This was a cheap, dilapidated wreck we’d bought so the builders would have somewhere to store their tools and facilitate their endless tea breaks. It was bloody freezing, even with all four bars blazing on its portable electric heater, but I’d be damned if I was going to slope back to the Lyndhurst and apologise to Sue for whatever it was I had done wrong.

We were supposed to be attending a party at John Paul’s house that night, and he sounded very disappointed when I called to tell him we wouldn’t be coming. I pretended Sue wasn’t feeling very well, instead of the truth, which was that we weren’t talking to each other and probably wouldn’t be for several hours yet. This was because the site caravan had a portable TV. If it hadn’t, I would have been forced to
swallow
my pride and return to the Lyndhurst a lot earlier than I did, because there was no way I was about to miss tonight’s episode of
Doctor Who
, no matter how angry I was with my wife.

I was especially excited because tonight’s episode was called ‘Rise of the Cybermen’. There’s a title that doesn’t muck about, I thought. You know exactly where you are with a title like that. This wouldn’t be another ‘Earthshock’. You wouldn’t see me falling out of my chair this time.

But about twenty minutes into the episode, I fell out of my chair – well, off my stool; I was still shivering in the caravan. The Doctor and Rose Tyler are strolling through a busy thoroughfare on a parallel Earth, when suddenly, as if by magic, every pedestrian is halted in their tracks by a signal beamed directly into their ears. Perplexed, our heroes make their way through this frozen crowd towards a man in a dark blue suit …

That’s funny, I thought. The man in the dark blue suit looks like John Paul. Actually, he looks
a lot
like John Paul. I grabbed my mobile phone and composed a text to my friend.

Are you watching Who? Somebody looks exactly like u. LOL.

Before I could press the send button, my phone buzzed. It was a text from my friend Damon:

Is JP on Dr Who?

A text from Jonathan Grove followed a few seconds later:

Is that John Paul on the telly?

And then another, this time from Sue in the Lyndhurst:

Fucking hell. Are you watching this?

Then the phone rang. It was John Paul. He told me not to hate him.

I didn’t hate him. I envied him. My best friend was
sharing
the screen with a bloody Doctor and he wasn’t even an actor. He told me that a journalist had tipped him off that the show was looking for extras to appear in a crowd scene in Cardiff, and he thought he’d end up as an
unrecognisable
blur in the background. But then the director Graeme Harper picked him to appear in a dramatic close-up where Billie Piper has to stare meaningfully into somebody’s ear for several minutes. So John Paul was on screen for
ages
. In fact he’s so prominent that I thought they might bring out an action figure of him.

So
that’s
why he was throwing a party tonight. It all made sense now.

I hurried back to the Lyndhurst to confirm Sue’s
suspicions
.
It was the first time
Doctor Who
had ever brought us closer together, because in all the excitement the row was forgotten and never mentioned again.

A year after we moved into our caravan, building work began on our new home. Two and a half years after that, we moved in.

It took me a little while to readjust to life in a real house. Not only was it safe to flush the toilet in cold weather, I also had a working internet connection again. Cooking in a separate room felt almost decadent. And for the first time in years I actually got a good night’s sleep when it rained. Of course, I loved it. Sue had built a magnificent house – no, five houses – as I always knew she would. OK, it’s too big for us, it’s impossible to keep clean and it’s infested with spiders, but I loved it then and I still love it now. And the TV is
massive
.

During our bleakest moments in that caravan – not being able to cook Christmas dinner when the Calor gas tank froze was a lowlight – Sue always promised that she would pay me back one day. She told me that I could choose any project I liked when the house was finished. As long as I was
following
my dream, she said, she would support me every step of the way. After all, it was only watching TV. How hard could it be?

Now, where did I put those childish things?