Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who

This story begins in a static caravan that was not, I can promise you, bigger on the inside.

I lived in this caravan (a Lyndhurst 2000) with my wife Sue, my teenage stepdaughter Nicol, a golden Labrador named Buffy, and a ginger tomcat named Gallifrey
for three and a half years
. I would have got less for manslaughter, which I considered a few times, because it was Sue’s fault that we ended up living in the middle of nowhere, with
frozen
toilets, no telephone line and hardly enough room to swing Gallifrey. At least in prison I would have got a good night’s sleep, especially when it rained.

We moved into this caravan in July 2004, and for eight months I focused exclusively on moving into a real house. However, on Sunday 6 March 2005 I had something to take my mind off our not-temporary-enough living arrangements.

Yes,
Doctor Who
was coming back. After a hiatus of sixteen years, the BBC had finally seen sense and
commissioned
a brand-new series. It was going to be amazing: thirteen episodes; a decent budget; a traditional Saturday evening timeslot; a respected and influential writer at the helm; Christopher Eccleston, one of the greatest actors of his generation, cast in the lead role; and the pop star Billie Piper as his companion, Rose Tyler.

As a
Doctor Who
fan, this made me very happy. (Except for the part about Billie Piper: that bit really worried me.)

If there were a scale that measured how much of a
Whovian
you are, where 1 is a Trekkie and 10 is someone who names their firstborn Adric, I’d be a 7, maybe even a 7.5. If the term Whovian didn’t make me prickle with
embarrassment
, I would probably be an 8. However, in all conscience, I cannot award myself a 9. I cannot reel off production codes like some of my more specialist friends; it’s been known for me to confuse the 1976 serial ‘The Seeds of Death’ with 1969’s ‘The Seeds of Doom’. Or is it the other way round? And, aside from a school cricket match in 1982, I’ve never consciously dressed up like the Doctor, an activity which must be considered the summit – or trough – of
Whovianity
, unless you happen to be one of the actors who have played the part. And I do know they are actors. Even more importantly, I possess some social skills. So I won’t ever be a perfect 10.

On the other hand, I have studied for a PhD in the
subject
of
Doctor Who
. I have had a short story, which I set in an Ann Summers lingerie store, published in an officially licensed
Doctor Who
anthology. For six years I ran a website called Behind the Sofa. In addition to this, I’ve interviewed several
Doctor Who
actors and writers for a series of podcasts, my best friend has appeared in an episode of
Doctor Who
and I have been the guest at a wedding where the happy couple walked down the aisle to the accompaniment of the
Doctor Who
theme music played on the church organ. I even named an innocent cat Gallifrey. So I am not what you would call a ‘casual fan’. I really, really like
Doctor Who.

When I awoke that Sunday morning in 2005, and I learned that a Canadian had leaked the first episode of the
new series all over the internet, three weeks before it was due to turn up on BBC One, my celebratory dance set our caravan a-rocking. However, because – and this point bears repeating – we lived in a caravan without a broadband
connection
, I couldn’t download it. In the end I had to beg a friend to send a copy over in a taxi. I made Sue and Nicol huddle around the laptop with me to watch it. Nicol made it as far as the scene with the belching wheelie bin before going outside to walk Buffy, but Sue stayed to the end.

That new episode of
Doctor Who
was great. No, actually it was
really
great – all the things
Doctor Who
can be when it’s done right: scary, funny, exciting, thought-provoking, unique. When it was over, holding back tears of relief and joy, I asked my wife what she thought of it.

And although neither of us realised it at the time, this was the beginning of a great idea.

In 2005
Doctor Who
didn’t just come back, it took over the world like one of its own villains. Suddenly everybody loved
Doctor Who
. Even my wife. Colleagues at work wanted to share their wild theories about the meaning of Bad Wolf – the story arc of that first season – and friends who had relentlessly taken the rise out of the programme when it wasn’t on television were suddenly texting me to tell me how brilliant Billie Piper was. But of course she was. I always knew she would be. Ratings remained consistently high; Christmas Day became
Doctor Who
Day; even the most
highbrow critics heaped praise on it. For the first time since the 1970s, life without
Doctor Who
became unimaginable.

And if that weren’t fantastic enough, I got to live in a real house again.

Skip forward to a Monday evening in late January. The year is 2011 and Matt Smith is the Doctor. I’m sitting on the sofa with Sue – in our real house – and we are trying to get into
Downton Abbey.

I was talking about the original series of
Doctor Who,
which ran for twenty-six years and had been ignored by Sue for almost fifty. I had attempted to introduce her to it when we first met, but despite a positive reaction to ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, she hadn’t paid much mind to vintage episodes of
Doctor Who
since then.

It was a very good question. But I had a very good answer:

But there was a catch:

It was the twenty-first century, I told her. This was the age of the internet, where everyone shared everything, even if 90 per cent of it seemed to be related to cats. Why should we be any different? We could even include our own cats (we now had three: Captain Jack, Rose and Tegan; Gallifrey had died of old age). I also told her that
Doctor Who
fans loved the internet. If she could entertain them with her honesty, wit and swearing, she’d be performing a valuable public service by keeping them off the streets.

I failed to mention that if we did this as a blog, and people actually read it, I could use that to pressure her into
continuing
when she inevitably begged me to stop.

Watching all of
Doctor Who
from the very beginning with my wife had never been a life-long ambition of mine but, as I gently reminded her, perhaps the thousand-plus days I had spent living in a static caravan so she could pursue her life-long ambition of building a house should be taken into account.

But in the end she agreed. After all, it was only watching TV. How hard could it be?

When we launched the blog Adventures With the Wife in Space, I called it an ‘experiment’, hoping to conjure up images of the Ludovico technique from
A Clockwork Orange
– leather restraints, bloodshot eyeballs, that sort of thing. But then something surprising happened. I quickly felt as though I was the one in the Ludovico chair. What was supposed to be a bit of inconsequential fun was now being scrutinised by a growing number of readers. Some of our
audience thought we were engaged in an important
ethnographic
study, others enjoyed the way Sue would say things a fan wouldn’t usually say, or notice things a fan wouldn’t
usually
notice (invariably involving the quality of an episode’s carpentry). And in turn, as ‘a few months’ stretched to over two years, Sue never thought about giving up and letting our followers down. Not once. She never begged me to stop, not even when Captain Jack had a life-threatening urinary tract infection.
‡
She was indomitable.

I, on the other hand, proved laughably domitable. In the two years the experiment took to run, I thought about giving up before, after or during nearly every episode. But I couldn’t – it was me who felt pressured into continuing because it was all happening online. People were
commenting
, arguing and watching us. We were being monitored by an enthusiastic panel of 8s, 9s and even some 10s who
converted
Sue’s scores for each story into statistical data and bar charts. And as we slogged our way through 157 different stories and nearly 700 different episodes – including more than a hundred that technically didn’t exist any more – something even more surprising happened.

Strapped to our sofa, eyes fixed forcibly on the TV, I began seriously to rethink my love for
Doctor Who
, a love that began forty years ago.