Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (19 page)

Sue threw more than thirty cushions at me over the course of the experiment – or one cushion more than thirty times – although only one projectile ever caused me any serious harm (I was drinking hot tea at the time). Reasons for a cushion in the face were many and varied. Maybe I’d been too complimentary about the attractiveness of a female guest star. Maybe I’d misled Sue about the number of
episodes
she was about to sit through. Maybe I’d accidentally on purpose led her to believe that the Doctor was about to regenerate when he quite clearly wasn’t. What can I say? It kept me amused.

Sue could have shut this down any time she liked. A quick visit to Wikipedia could have told her that the next story featured the Daleks. There was nothing preventing her from reaching over and reading the back of the DVD cover either. The comments section of the blog was riddled with spoilers, too, because some of our readers just couldn’t help themselves:

The idiots.

One title that I didn’t need to hide from Sue was ‘
Earthshock
’. This was the story that had made me fall out of my chair when I was a teenager back in 1982, and I couldn’t wait to see if the Cybermen turning up at the end of part 1 would have the same effect on Sue. When it came down to it, she didn’t fall out of her chair, but she did lean forwards a teeny bit, which was almost as satisfying.

Sue gave ‘Earthshock’ 9 out of 10 and the blog’s readers were thrilled, although somebody did accuse my wife of letting the side down because she didn’t approach the story with the mindset of a twelve-year-old amnesiac.

But there was more to ‘Earthshock’ than just its brilliant reveal of the Cybermen. There was also Adric’s unexpected death to cope with.

Sue liked Adric at first (‘He’s adorable’) but her affections soon turned to loathing (‘He’s a thick, whining brat’). In fact, one of the most entertaining things for me was watching Sue slowly fall out of love with the Alzarian pup. One minute she wanted to mother him, the next minute she wanted to smother him (‘He can’t act – and it doesn’t take a boy genius to work that out’), and when Adric was finally blown to bits, she definitely wasn’t moved to tears.

On the blog, several people suggested that one possible explanation for my wife’s reaction to ‘Earthshock’ is that the experiment was a complete success and I’d turned Sue into a
Doctor Who
fan. More
prima facie
evidence for her transformation into a fangirl could supposedly be found in her commentary for the twentieth-anniversary celebratory romp, ‘The Five Doctors’.

But people needed to read on a little further to see Sue wasn’t about to turn into a fully fledged Whovian.

I believe that there’s a simpler explanation for my wife’s ebullience during this phase of the experiment: she fancied Peter Davison, aka the Fit One. She wasn’t keen on some of the Fifth Doctor’s stories (‘“Time-Flight”? They should have called it “Time-Shite”!’), but when she noticed that he was sporting black underpants under his cricket whites in ‘Castrovalva’, it was clear to everyone that she was smitten.

In fact the only time my wife wasn’t ogling the Fit One was when she was drooling over Adric’s replacement, Turlough,
aka actor Mark Strickson, aka the Ginger One. As far as Sue was concerned, this was an era in
Doctor Who
’s history when it had ‘something for the mums’ for a change.

Peter Davison has been quite open in dismissing most of his stories as ‘crap’. And with some justification. He had to put up with not just the Myrka but also pink inflatable snakes, homicidal woodlice and an increasingly tedious and inept Master. Sue was mostly in agreement but she still seemed to be enjoying the adventures of the Fit One. If some of his stories had starred anyone other than Peter Davison – with the possible exception of David Tennant – she might have been less forgiving. When the Fifth Doctor bravely sacrificed himself to save the life of his companion in ‘The Caves of Androzani’, I noticed that my wife’s bottom lip was wobbling.

Sue didn’t have any preconceptions about Colin Baker when we started this. All she knew about him was that (a) he didn’t play the Doctor for very long and (b) he once shouted at me at a convention. However, by a strange quirk of fate, just as we were preparing to engage with the Sixth Doctor, Colin appeared as a contestant on the reality TV show
I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!

I was concerned that Sue’s newfound love for Colin Baker would skew her opinions of his Doctor. But within minutes of starting the Sixth Doctor’s first story ‘The Twin Dilemma’, it was clear that normal service had been resumed.

Around this time, we took a break from the blog and spent a few days in London. After a quick pint at the Tavern in Fitzrovia (we were quite safe, it was the wrong Thursday), we decided that it would be a good idea to get hold of tickets to the mentalist
*
Derren Brown’s live theatre show. During the interval, Sue’s mobile phone lit up with a text from an unrecognised number:

I can see you

We scanned the auditorium for a familiar face but couldn’t spot anyone we recognised. I was convinced the text must be part of Derren Brown’s act so I found it hard to relax and enjoy the second half; I kept thinking Derren was about to ambush us. When the curtain eventually came down, there was another text waiting:

It’s Nev and Nicola

Phew. Nev was Nev Fountain, the comedy writer best known for his work on the satirical impressionist show
Dead Ringers
and
Private Eye
magazine, as well as various plays for Big Finish and comic strips for
Doctor Who Magazine
.
†
Nicola, meanwhile, was Nev’s girlfriend. But this wasn’t any old Nicola. This was Nicola Bryant, the actress who played the Sixth Doctor’s companion, the American biology student Perpugilliam Brown – or Peri for short. We arranged to meet up after the show, even though I wasn’t too keen; I was terrified of accidentally calling Nicola Peri. But it was OK, I didn’t disgrace myself and nor did Sue – and nor, for that matter, did Nicola.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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 …