Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (2 page)

It’s Saturday 3 February 1973. A silver-haired man and a young, pretty woman are hiking through a swamp when an unfamiliar sound stops them in their tracks. They hear it again: a plaintive, mournful cry. They scan the horizon for the source of this strange noise when suddenly, without warning, the landscape explodes with a blood-curdling scream. ‘Look!’ cries the woman, as a ferocious dog with an impossibly long neck rises out of the mud to tower above them, marsh water dripping from its razor-sharp fangs.

The woman stares in wide-eyed horror as an identical monster forces its way out of the ground to join its kin. But wait
…
That isn’t its neck
…
That’s its body. The head of a vicious dog on the body of a giant, hairy slug.

This isn’t just my first memory of
Doctor Who
; it’s my first memory of
anything
.

My name is Neil because I was born on Monday 6 October 1969. For a while, my parents Sandra (a nurse) and Michael (a welder) seriously considered naming me after the second man on the moon, which means you might now be reading a book by Aldrin Perryman. I would have preferred Buzz. Either way, it would probably be quite a different book from this one.

The details of my early childhood are frustratingly vague because, perhaps fortunately, Mum seems to have
forgotten
nearly everything. We may never know what really happened on the Swiss border that day in 1970. There’s no actual proof that the woman in question was a lesbian; according to my mum, she just ‘dressed like one’. And as Mum correctly surmises, I don’t remember any of it, since I was only a few months old and full cognitive powers were still some way off.

A few weeks shy of my second birthday Mum and Dad gave me a baby sister. Her name was, and is, Joanne. I don’t recall her arrival
chez
Perryman, but there is a black-
and-white
photograph taken the day she was brought home from the hospital. I am wearing black leather lederhosen and
grizzling – I look like a resentful member of the Hitler
Kindergarten
– so we can assume I was unhappy about either (a) the lederhosen, (b) Joanne or (c) both. But who knows? It’s pure guesswork.

So, the first three years of my life are mysterious to me. But this all changes on Saturday 3 February 1973 at 6.13 p.m.: the precise moment that my brain’s inbuilt recording
equipment
finally whirrs into action, just in time to capture an image of a silver-haired man in a green velvet smoking jacket traipsing through a swamp.

My wife isn’t convinced.

She does have a point. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have thrilled to the cliffhanger of ‘Carnival of
Monsters
’, episode 2. I definitely saw it again at the age of twelve, thanks to a BBC Two repeat; when it was released on video cassette; again in 2003 when it came out on DVD (I took the day off work especially to watch it). And because you can never own too many copies of ‘Carnival of Monsters’, I happily bought it again when the BBC re-released it as part of a box set, carefully remastered for optimum glove-puppet clarity. And that doesn’t include all the times I’ve seen it in trailers, documentaries, YouTube mash-ups and, of course, my dreams.

As an adult – of sorts – I know practically everything there is to know about that scene. I know that it was filmed at Tillingham Marshes in Essex, for example, and that the
monsters’ name – Drashig – is an anagram of ‘dishrag’. I am also fully aware that they are not real monsters, and that the effect employed a technique called CSO, or colour
separation
overlay, today known as blue screen, although in those days they used a yellow backdrop (in reality a curtain), which would often result in a fizzy Ready Brek line around the monster. I also know that this era-specific technical
phenomenon
has its own name – fringing.

But I don’t remember only the fringed Drashigs. I also recall the colour of our carpet in Lavender Avenue (brown), its walls (dark pine), and its curtains (orange). I can see myself sitting bolt upright in an armchair (black-and-white stripes) clutching a beaker of squash in one fist and a
half-eaten
Farley’s rusk in the other. But there’s more: Auntie Angie is there. She might have been babysitting, or she might have come to say goodbye. It’s my last memory of her for a very long time, because she emigrated to New Zealand the following week. When we finally visited her six years later, I was elated to discover that New Zealand TV showed daily vintage episodes of
Doctor Who.

Aged three, I wasn’t afraid of the Drashigs.
Doctor Who
didn’t scare me – yet. The fear would come, but I was still too young to fully understand it. In another memory I can see a group of angry lizard men shouting at the Doctor. Nothing else. Just that. The image is in black and white, so I probably watched it on my nana’s TV. I can also work out when I first saw a Dalek – Saturday 14 April 1973: ‘Planet of
the Daleks’, episode 2. I still wasn’t scared, but I remember feeling sick: my head resting on my mother’s lap and her telling me not to worry – ‘Your tummy ache will go away soon’ – as she gently stroked my hair. When I watch ‘Planet of the Daleks’ now I still wish someone would stroke my hair and tell me that everything is going to be OK.

No, fear arrived a few weeks later. Icy cold tendrils of pure terror first wrapped themselves around me during a story called ‘The Green Death’.

You may have heard of this one. When people talk about old episodes of
Doctor Who
they often talk about ‘The Green Death’ – or ‘the one with the giant maggots’, as it is often referred to. And these maggots – created not with CSO but by inflating some condoms – are pretty scary. But for me, aged four, it was what those giant maggots were destined to become that traumatised me.

In ‘The Green Death’, ordinary maggots have grown huge after being irradiated by poisonous sludge, so when they emerge from the larval state they metamorphose into giant toxic flies. Like normal flies, they vomit to aid digestion. However, because they are giant, irradiated and
toxic, their spew is green and noxious, and if just the tiniest amount of it touches your flesh, you’ve had it. Painfully. It’s my first memory of watching
Doctor Who
that brings up feelings of genuine dread and terror: that giant fly,
squatting
malevolently on a coal slag in Wales, with its ruby red eyes and twitching antennae … Just thinking about it now makes me feel a little uneasy. When push comes to shove, you could easily outrun a giant maggot, or just step over one. The maggots crawled around aimlessly, hissing, and could probably be popped with a pin anyway. But I was convinced the fly had a personal grudge against Neil Perryman, and it was coming to spew its toxic, green vomit mercilessly over
me
.

That summer, the suburb of Coventry where we lived was invaded by a colony of flying ants. I was too scared to go outside for three days, convinced that I would die screaming if one of them landed on me. I had glimpsed mortal terror in a handful of glowing CSO vomit. My mother, not
unreasonably
, didn’t let me watch
Doctor Who
for ages after that.

The next story I remember vividly was ‘Planet of the
Spiders
’, which was broadcast a year after ‘The Green Death’, but not much had changed. Once again I was reliably and predictably terrified of the spiders.

Is ‘Planet of the Spiders’ responsible for my acute
arachnophobia
? When I jump on tables to avoid them, or scream in public places like that woman in the swamp, is it
Doctor Who
’s fault? Or did
Doctor Who
unknowingly compound an already inbuilt fear of the eight-legged creatures? If it’s the former, then this story has caused me more missed
heartbeats
, more embarrassment and more nightmares than I
care to recall. But if it’s the latter, I don’t hold it against the writers and producers. They were only doing their job.

When I was four, I didn’t just like
Doctor Who
. I liked playing in the park on the swings and roundabouts; I liked sticklebricks, Lego, Play-Doh,
Play School
, Andy Pandy and playing with the kids next door. I liked scoffing Curly Wurlys, bathing with toy frogmen and sleeping with stuffed Wombles. But the thing I loved more than anything else – and probably still do – was being scared by
Doctor Who.

For me, though, what I remember most about ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is that the Doctor was scared.

This horrified me at the time. The Doctor was never scared. It didn’t matter if he was faced with Daleks, Ice
Warriors
or savage dogs with impossibly long necks, the Doctor was always in control. Even when things looked really bad (usually towards the end of an episode), I was never
that
worried. The Doctor would sort it out in the end. Those were the rules.

But in this particular episode, the Doctor has that look on his face. The look that says: someone has poured me into a tight pair of leather lederhosen against my wishes. The
Doctor
looked like he was going to cry. And with good reason. At the end of the story, the Doctor died.

When I was five years old, my record collection consisted of just one LP:
TV Favourites and Other Children’s Songs.
I can still see the cover (I just Googled it): a painting of Rupert the Bear, the Pink Panther and Dougal from
The Magic Roundabout
. But I didn’t care about them. Only one thing interested me about this record, and that was Side 1, Track 5: the
Doctor Who theme.

Nothing sounded like the
Doctor Who
theme. The
unmistakable
throb of the dum-de-dum bass line, foreboding and thrilling at the same time, accompanied by that strange, undulating wail, which is then slowly consumed by a
rumbling
, whooshing crescendo which leads inexorably to a liberating scream of …

My record sounded nothing like that. It was a bad cover version, the
Doctor Who
theme arranged for parping
Stylophone
, piccolo and snare drum. I knew it was wrong (there were trumpets in the middle eight, for heaven’s sake), but it was still marginally better than nothing, so I played it to death, at least until it was time for me to hear the real thing again, on a Saturday afternoon, from a mono speaker on our television set.

The
Doctor Who
title sequence was terrifying but
compelling
. The first title sequence I remember begins with a
rippling sea of coloured lights, which twist and bend
themselves
into the face of a man with an enormous nose, silver hair, and a very thin smile. His face turns a bright shade of green, and then it melts into the background as the words DOCTOR WHO bleed magically onto the screen. The words fade and a spinning blob takes over, rotating
backwards
and forwards, hypnotising me, drawing me in …

However, just when I got used to this title sequence, the people who made
Doctor Who
decided to change it.

The music was exactly the same but everything else was different. A tunnel of tiny stars merge to form a turquoise whirlpool (aka the space-time vortex) from which the
Doctor
’s face appears once again, only this time he isn’t smiling. The Doctor looks upset.

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor scared me, and it wasn’t just because his face loomed out of the space-time vortex like some elderly ghost. It was because the Doctor could be more frightening than the monsters. When he wasn’t barking at
the villains he was shouting at his assistants, especially the Brigadier, who always seemed to be in his bad books. But there was something reassuring about the Doctor, too. Yes, he was intimidating and strict, but he was also the only
person
in the room who could stop the monsters. So I trusted him, even though the only time he looked truly happy was when he was beaming from the wrapper of a Nestlé
chocolate
bar. The Doctor definitely didn’t look very happy when he was being flung backwards into the space-time vortex in this new title sequence, his arms folded indignantly across his chest.

But if I couldn’t identify with the Doctor, I could latch on to his assistants. The Doctor was never alone. There was Jo Grant, the girl from the swamp. When she left, Sarah Jane Smith replaced her, and she was both beautiful and brave. In fact the Doctor had loads of friends, far more than I did. Most of them were soldiers who liked to blow things up. They asked the questions I wanted to ask, they faced the monsters I dared not face, and they stuck by the Doctor through thick and thin, even though he was often really rude to them.

The Doctor’s friends never appeared in the
Doctor Who
title sequence, which is a shame, but when the programme makers decided to modify that whirling vortex again a year later, they chose to incorporate his principal mode of
transport
.

The Doctor’s TARDIS is a space-time machine that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It also looks like a police telephone box. I got my head around the first concept remarkably quickly, but the significance of the
Doctor
’s choice of a blue box puzzled me for ages. There weren’t any police boxes in Coventry in the 1970s so I never got to pretend that the Doctor’s TARDIS had suddenly
materialised
at the bottom of a suburban street, although I did feel a rush of excitement whenever I passed our local police station, mainly because of the signage and the fact that its doors were painted a similar shade of blue.

One day, I learned that the Doctor’s time machine looked like a police telephone box because it didn’t work properly. I can’t remember who told me this – it might have been the Doctor, an episode of
Blue Peter
, or perhaps even my mum – but it made perfect sense. Stuff broke down all the time in the 1970s: the telly, the buses, even the electric went on the blink every now and again. The TARDIS was supposed to blend into its surroundings but it had got stuck in the shape of a police telephone box
in the 1960s, back when police telephone boxes were still relatively commonplace. The Doctor seemed not to care that his TARDIS didn’t work properly in much the same way that my dad seemed not to care that the central
heating
in Lavender Avenue didn’t work properly. You had to grin and bear it in the 1970s.

The next thing to appear in this title sequence is the diamond-shaped logo. A logo that was notoriously
difficult
to draw on a pencil case without the aid of a compass and protractor. And then the title of the story appears in white, bold letters – a warning of what to expect: planets infested with spiders, invading dinosaurs, or a monster on Peladon. But every once in a while, the title would contain a word that I recognised. A word that would send me over the edge …

The first time I encountered a Dalek was outside
Coventry
’s indoor market. This Dalek – bright red with blue orbs – looked incongruous next to the double-decker buses,
tractors
and a choo-choo train, and I only sat in it when all the other vehicles on the motorised merry-go-round were
occupied
. The Dalek didn’t scare me. I just didn’t understand it yet.

This lasted until I saw the Daleks on television. It was the voice that did it. That grating, hysterical staccato,
bubbling
with anger and hate. The Doctor could be a grumpy sod sometimes, but the Daleks were angry
all the time.
Utterly unreasonable, malicious and cruel, they even had their own catchphrase, and while I knew you couldn’t imitate a Dalek perfectly – that was the whole point, they didn’t look even remotely human – if I stuck my arms out like one and talked like one, people seemed to fall for it.
EXTERMINATE!

The next time my mum took me to the market, and we approached the merry-go-round, I felt a mixture of excitement and dread. But even though this strange
pepper
pot-shaped object had a sinister aura about it, I never wanted to sit in a tractor or a choo-choo train again.

The title sequence over, I am immersed in the world of
Doctor Who.
It’s Proustian, Pavlovian, even Freudian: the unearthly sounds and hallucinatory visuals have primed my brain to embrace the impossible. And for the next twenty-five minutes, the real world no longer exists.