Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (15 page)

When a group of her students pitched a documentary about parachuting to Sue, she didn’t hesitate to volunteer me as its subject. She told them that my fear of heights alone would give them everything they needed to make a compelling television programme. There’s no way I’m going anywhere near a plane, a parachute, an airfield or any of your students, I told her. The next thing I know I’m clinging on to the wing of a Cessna 3,500 feet in the air, while an ex-army sergeant yells in my face to let go.

Unfortunately, the students who were supposed be documenting my jump into the wild blue yonder were drinking coffee in the aerodrome’s cafeteria when the instructors finally prised my fingers off the fuselage and I fell, screaming every inch of the way. As a result they failed to get any footage of me crashing to earth in a nearby field, which meant that I had to jump out of the plane again. Sue insisted on this because she didn’t want her students to fail and also she was the one who suggested that they go for a coffee in the first place.

Sue was adamant that Nicol come with us on our honeymoon to Florida, which meant that my dad had to come along too.
We lounged by the pool, with my dad. We went on Space Mountain at Disneyland, with my dad. We dined beneath the twinkling stars, with my dad. To be fair, it was a memorable family holiday but it was not especially romantic.

Now that Nicol has grown up and left home, in order finally to experience the joy of a proper honeymoon I have suggested to Sue that we renew our wedding vows somewhere idyllic – a beach in Hawaii, maybe, or a balcony overlooking Niagara Falls – but she says it won’t feel the same without an old man standing next to us, chain smoking and complaining about his IBS.

One day, when Nicol was six, she was feeling poorly and down in the dumps so Sue asked me to cheer her up. I wanted to show her
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
but Sue had a much better idea. And that’s why I ended up parading around the living room in Sue’s bra and skirt as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It did the trick, though – Nicol thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen and everybody laughed. And yes, I enjoyed it too. It felt like a nice thing to do. Making Nicol laugh I mean, not the dressing-up part.

But Nicol wouldn’t let it lie. In the weeks that followed she told
everyone
that I liked to walk round the house in women’s clothing – her friends, her friends’ parents, her teachers, even our neighbours – until half of Christopher Street thought Nicol and her mum were living with Norman Bates.

It’s an unfunny joke that has run for twenty years. Every time
Psycho
is on; every time Vic and Bob said ‘Are you
looking at my bra?’; every time a hard-hitting documentary about transvestism appeared on television; every time David Beckham wore a sarong or we were served in a café by a waitress with big hands – oh, how they laughed.

I have tried reminding them what Norman Bates liked to do when he dressed up in women’s clothing but to no effect.

One day, Sue sat me down and told me that, if teaching wasn’t fun any more, if my heart wasn’t in it, then I should get out and let somebody else have a go. She was fed up with hearing me moan every single day on the way to work about the current state of higher education and how it isn’t like it used to be. Unlike me, Sue has lost none of her enthusiasm for teaching and none of her commitment to her students. She would chuck someone out of a plane – twice – if she thought it might help them achieve their goals. And she must be doing something right, because her students keep winning awards.

Sue is a great motivator. She made me believe I could do anything. Obviously, the blog would not have been a success without her – we never would have got past the recons, for a start – and I certainly would never have finished this book without her standing at my shoulder, urging me on.

Sue:
Couldn’t you come up with six things? All the other lists in this book come in sixes.

The wife went through a lot in those first six months. She dealt with giant insects (‘Did that ant really just run headlong into that camera?’); she visited Swinging London in the sixties (‘Are the Pink Floyd in this one?’); she watched the Daleks’ Master Plan fall apart (‘Twelve parts. Twelve. Bloody. Parts.’); and she couldn’t understand why nobody ever mentioned the Time War (‘The last time I was this lost, I was watching
Lost
.’).

The one constant through all this was the irascible presence of William Hartnell’s Doctor – or as Sue christened him, the Miserable Git.

Sue didn’t like the First Doctor very much and the truth is, neither did I. Seen in relatively quick succession, his behaviour in these early stories was often inexplicably appalling – he was startlingly rude and he kept trying to ditch his companions, or on one occasion kill them. He abandoned his own granddaughter on the Dalek-ravaged ruins of future Earth without even asking her if she minded. Matt Smith he wasn’t.

There was also another problem. Some of the Miserable Git’s so-called adventures were just so …
dull
. Take ‘The Sensorites’, for example. I had attempted to watch ‘The
Sensorites’ several times over the years but without success; I had never even managed to crawl to the end of the first episode – and ‘The Sensorites’ is six episodes long.

Sue gave ‘The Sensorites’ 5 out of 10, so either she’s much more forgiving than I am or she’s completely insane. I would have scored it significantly lower and that was before she made me sit through the whole thing.

I think this is one of the reasons why Sue’s episode commentaries became so popular so quickly. If she’d hated everything, then the blog would have been a soulless and predictable chore, not only for us, but for our readers as well. But she didn’t hate everything. Far from it: she actively enjoyed ‘The Aztecs’; she liked ‘Planet of Giants’ and nobody likes that one; she even went so far as to call ‘The Time Meddler’ ‘superb’ and ‘The Myth Makers’ ‘excellent … very funny but still very bleak’. And that was a recon.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ was so appalling (and possibly racist) that she refused even to score it. The only reason the ant-based epic ‘The Web Planet’
achieved 1 out of a possible 10 was because the Spanish dub of episode 6 made her laugh. However, she kept coming back for more. And when my head went down or I questioned whether it was worth going on, she was always there with the same response.

That’s right, I had to keep reminding myself; I thought I did.

When the time came for us to watch the second Peter Cushing Dalek movie, I decided to do something a bit different. Instead of presenting Sue’s opinions to the world via the medium of transcribed prose, I would make her speak to our audience directly.

I’d wanted to record a podcast commentary for ages, if only to prove to everybody that my wife actually existed. No one had accused me directly of conjuring up an imaginary wife – I am a
Doctor Who
fan, after all – but even I thought this new
Who
-munching version of Sue seemed too good to be true. It was time to put her to the test.

Sue telephoned me forty-five minutes later.

Five minutes later, she rang again.

When I returned home, Sue was very merry indeed, which explains why in her commentary she believes that Neil Tennant played the Tenth Doctor. But it did prove one thing: not only did my wife exist, if something happened to me she should be able to complete the experiment without me.

And then, after eighty-six episodes, thirty-three recons and two films that don’t count, we reached the experiment’s first milestone. The Miserable Git was about to regenerate into Charlie Drake.

When we began our experiment, the Second Doctor’s first twelve episodes did not exist in the archives; Sue didn’t see Charlie – or Patrick Troughton, to give him his birth name – move properly for two whole weeks. Even then it took her a while to warm to him. She thought he was too silly and too dishevelled to take seriously.

It wasn’t until Troughton’s sixth story, ‘The Faceless Ones’, that everything seemed to click into place.

From that point on, even if the story wasn’t very good, Sue didn’t have a bad word to say about the Scruffy Drunk. It didn’t matter if he was fighting Daleks (‘You can’t take your eyes off him’), Cybermen (‘Troughton’s
great
’) or Yeti (‘He’s very good, which definitely goes without saying now’), his performance was always sublime. She even forgave him when he played a Mexican doppelgänger in ‘Enemy of the World’ with a disgracefully fruity accent (‘It’s Inspector Clouseau meets Speedy Gonzales’).

When we reached ‘The Krotons’ – the same lousy story I couldn’t finish when I was twelve – I decided the time had come to shake things up a bit. I invited Sue’s brother, Gary, to join us on the sofa.

Sue gave ‘The Krotons’ a generous 6 out of 10; her brother was less impressed and awarded it a 1. And even though Gary’s assessment was much fairer than Sue’s – ‘The Krotons’ only seems to get worse as the years go by – his opinions didn’t go down very well on the blog.

When I launched a website survey a few weeks later and asked our readers if there was anything they didn’t like about the blog, 32 per cent simply said: Gary.

This was one of those moments where writing the blog and its effect on our real lives intersected in quite an
uncomfortable
way. We shielded Gary from the ensuing backlash. He didn’t discover total strangers were calling him a massive c**t until three months later when it was casually mentioned on local BBC radio. Sue was appearing on the station to talk about the experiment so far when she admitted to the show’s host, Bob Fischer, that Gary was loathed and despised by the vast majority of our readers.

Later that night, I apologised to Gary and asked him if he felt OK about it.

We were celebrating Sue’s fiftieth birthday when a friend told me that a missing episode had been discovered in an old man’s shed. I should have jumped for joy, or at least smiled, but all I could think was: of all the episodes they had to find, why did it have to be an episode of ‘Galaxy 4’? Nobody stayed awake at night worrying about what had happened to ‘Galaxy 4’. Why couldn’t they have found one of the good missing episodes instead?

My friend swore me to secrecy. The recovery would be officially announced at a ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ event at the BFI in three months’ time, and he begged me to keep the news to myself until then, even though he clearly hadn’t been able to do that himself, which is why I didn’t feel too guilty when I betrayed his confidence a few hours later. Of course I had to tell somebody. Privileged information like that didn’t come along every day, even if it was vaguely disappointing. I just had to make sure that I told somebody who wouldn’t yell it from the rooftops (or worse, a
Doctor Who
forum). So, naturally, I chose Sue:

Apart from Sue, I never told another soul about ‘
Galaxy
4’. And then, two months later, something even more remarkable happened …

I decided to feign ignorance so my friend could savour this moment. Who knows, I thought, I might even be able to fake some excitement this time, too.

Wait a minute. ‘Galaxy 4’ wasn’t a Troughton …

People continued to leave comments on the blog. Most of them were positive, some of them were troubling, and one of them was put to music. It arrived in an email, sent in the middle of the night, with the subject line: ‘A Song for Susan’. When I clicked the link contained inside it, and the song began to play, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or call the police.