Adventures with the Wife in Space

by Neil Perryman

  Sue: I rest my case. You know far too much about it. It must be a false memory.

  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.

  Me: I have a vivid memory of watching this particular scene when I was three years old. All I know is that I was definitely ill at the time. Stomach ache, I think. It’s a very sketchy image, but I’m definitely lying on the settee with a hot water bottle on my tummy. I can remember it like it was yesterday.

  Sue: Really? I’ve just seen it and I’ve forgotten it already.

  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.

  Cue Titles

  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 …

  Me: OOOOH-EEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOH!

  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.

  I can’t wait to show Sue the title sequence for season 11. The diamond-shaped logo! The space-time vortex! Jon Pertwee’s legs!

  Sue: They’ve changed the titles … And they’ve missed a bit.

  Me: What?

  Sue: The bottom left-hand corner. They’ve missed a bit. There’s a hole in the titles. I like the new theme music, though.

  Me: They haven’t changed the theme music!

  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 B
rigadier, 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.

  Back at the naval base, the Doctor does something horrid. Forget blowing up Gallifrey, this is much, much worse. The Doctor steals some sandwiches from a clearly famished Jo Grant.

  Sue: What a c**t! He had a sandwich in the last episode! That’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen the Doctor do.

  Me: Calm down. It’s just some harmless comedy.

  Sue: There’s nothing even remotely funny about it. Poor Jo. Why does she put up with it? She’s like an abused wife who keeps coming back for more. It’s terribly sad.

  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 Doctor decides to fix his ship’s chameleon circuit, and to do that he will need to survey a real police box on Earth.

  Sue: So the Doctor is finally going to fix his TARDIS? After all this time, he’s actually going to fix it?

  Me: Yes.

  Sue: I know why he’s suddenly decided to do it now. He’s jealous of the Master, isn’t he? He wants a TARDIS like his. One that can sit down in a chair and fire laser beams from its eyes. And who can blame him?

  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 …

  Me: DALEKS!

  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.

  Sue: The Daleks look rubbish. How could anybody be scared of them?

  Me: What? It’s the same design that still scares kids today. It’s a design classic.

  Sue: Oh, they work fine today. They are built very nicely today – very sturdy. This lot look like you could lift up their lids with a nail file.

  Later, our heroes disarm a Dalek and Ian clambers inside it. Sue is, to put it mildly, incredulous.

  Sue: What the hell are they doing? They can’t do that, can they? That just makes it blatantly obvious that the Daleks are being driven around by middle-aged men in cardigans.

  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.

  Regeneration – and not a moment

  too soon

  There’s one element of Doctor Who that I haven’t mentioned yet: regeneration. In a way, it’s the most important, because without it, the show wouldn’t have lasted for five years, let alone fifty. If the lead actor becomes too ill, or too difficult, or too unpopular, he can simply be replaced.

  It was Doctor Who’s then-producer, Innes Lloyd, who came up with this idea after the First Doctor, William Hartnell, had become increasingly erratic in his ability to play the part. Because the Doctor was an alien being, he thought, there was nothing stopping him from renewing himself into a younger, healthier person. The character of the Doctor could be defined by the person who played him. Suddenly, a programme that had a finite shelf life could now last for ever, continually reinventing both the lead character and the format of the show.

  I learned that other Doctors existed on Saturday 8 June 1974, the day the Third Doctor became the Fourth. An hour before the episode was broadcast, my mother sat me down and told me, in no uncertain terms, that my childhood hero was going to die.

  Mum didn’t use the word regeneration. No, this would be a resurrection. Just like Jesus, she said. Or the time our goldfish threw itself out of its bowl, or when next-door’s cat was run over by a milk float. And in much the same way that the next-door neighbours got themselves a new cat, and we might get another goldfish one day (we never did), today everybody would get a new Doctor Who.

  The regeneration itself lasts all of five seconds. It’s a simple visual effect – as simple as it gets. The camera is locked-off, the actors lie down in the same spot and then they mix the two images together. But it’s still one of the best tricks Doctor Who ever managed to pull off.

  When the Doctor dies, Sue doesn’t say a word. And I can’t say anything either because I’m too choked up, and if I look at her she might see just how choked up I am, so I honestly don’t know how she’s reacting right now. And then she breaks her silence …

  Sue: That was a good
scene. I can’t say I’m disappointed to see Jon Pertwee go but, yeah, that was very nicely done.

  And then the Doctor transforms into …

  Sue: It’s Tom Jones!

  To date, the Doctor has regenerated eleven times. I imagine you could name the twelve actors who have played the part on television, but just in case you can’t, they are: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, John Hurt, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith.*

  However, it could be argued that many more actors have taken on the role of the Doctor, even if the part they are playing is incorrectly referred to as Doctor Who. These Doctors exist in a non-canonical alternative Whoniverse of comedy sketches, feature films and stage plays outside of the main Whoniverse (don’t bother looking in the dictionary, it’s not there).

  Discussions of what is and what isn’t part of the Doctor Who ‘canon’ are to the programme’s fans what angels dancing on the head of a pin were to medieval theologians. Friendships can be wrecked over whether, say, Tom Baker’s appearance in his Doctor Who costume on Disney Time in 1975 means that it was actually the Doctor who materialised on Bank Holiday Monday to present Disney Time during the four-month break between ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ and ‘Terror of the Zygons’ (for the record – of course he bloody didn’t).