Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (6 page)

In early 1984 I began to get interested in girls. Perhaps not coincidentally, at around the same time, I stopped
watching
Doctor Who
for three years. Final childhood memory of the show: Ingrid Pitt karate-kicking a sea monster called the Myrka in the face. After that … nothing. It was
becoming
increasingly difficult to reconcile the demands of early adolescence with the exact and opposite demands of being a teenage Whovian. At this point in history, being a
teenage
Whovian was just about the worst thing it was possible to be.

It was Myrka’s fault.
Doctor Who
’s past is littered with ropey special effects and unrealistic monsters, though that had never bothered me before. But there was
something
arrestingly, preternaturally dire about the Myrka. It was operated by the same men who brought Dobbin the pantomime horse to life in
Rentaghost
, but Dobbin was a far scarier prospect than the floppy green waddlefuck that
staggered
along a corridor, bumping into the walls, in episode 2 of the story ‘Warriors of the Deep’.

I was thirteen when I started noticing the female of our species. Up until then, the only girls I’d been interested in were the Doctor’s assistants, and that was purely platonic. But then one day – practically overnight – girls stopped being my classmates with the funny clothes, long silly hair and giggly voices, and they became the most alluring
creatures
on this or any other planet. I’d even been on a date with a girl, if you can call paying for Sharon Wilkins to watch
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
at the local ABC fleapit as long as she agrees to sit next to you, a date.

It wasn’t just a conspicuous love of
Doctor Who
that was cramping my style. My physical appearance definitely contributed to my failure to make any headway with the opposite sex: my pudding-bowl haircut (cheers, Mum), my squashed boxer’s nose (thanks for that, Dad), and my
delightfully spotty face (nice one, Curly Wurlys). In
addition
to which, my Mum, in an effort to save some money, took it upon herself to kit me out in a pair of safety boots that she’d liberated from the factory where Dad worked. The first time I wore them to school, my classmates took it in turns to sing UB40’s ‘One In Ten’ at me. I didn’t get it at first, and they had to explain it was because I walked around with a size-one foot in a size-ten shoe. This went on for about a year.

So to recap: comedy shoes, Mr Logic hair, chronic acne and a big squashed nose. Where girls were concerned, I could ill afford the additional handicap of a deep
enthusiasm
for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of,
Doctor Who
. So
Doctor Who
had to go.

One night in 1984 Amanda Williams, the girl of my dreams, asked me round to her house to watch
Lace. Lace
was a very steamy (at least by 1984 standards) television
mini-series
based on the equally steamy novel by Shirley Conran, the
Fifty Shades of Grey
of its day. It would have been a
fantastic
opportunity for a quick fumble if Amanda’s mum and dad hadn’t been sitting in the same room as us. I made it as far as the second ad-break before sheer blushing discomfiture got the better of me and I had to make my excuses and leave. When I got home, I was too embarrassed to tell my mum where I’d been, and she only got the truth out of me when she threatened to take my ZX Spectrum away.

Ah yes, my ZX Spectrum, another reason for
abandoning
Doctor Who
. I loved my Spectrum like the girlfriend I didn’t have. While Peter Davison was fighting Daleks and the combined uselessness of the BBC prop department, I
was copying reams of machine code into a cheap lump of plastic, just so I could play an electronic version of
Hangman
on it several hours later, instead of using, say, the pencil and paper right next to me. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was painstakingly transcribing pages from the
Daily Mirror
newspaper onto our television screen in BASIC, because no one had invented the World Wide Web yet. But most of the time, I just played games on it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.