Adventures with the Wife in Space

by Neil Perryman

  However, should you ever find yourself ensnared in a tricky pub-quiz situation, and you are asked to name more than twelve actors who have played the Doctor, here are some of the less well-known regenerates:

  Trevor Martin. Trevor Martin is a fabulous actor with an impressive CV of film and stage roles. However, in 1974 he played Doctor Who in a West End stage production entitled Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday. For one small segment of the population, this means the actor’s numerous appearances in plays by William Shakespeare and the like pale into insignificance compared to the three weeks he spent hanging around the stage of the Adelphi Theatre, waiting for a Dalek to trundle onto its mark.

  Richard Hurndall. For the twentieth-anniversary story, ‘The Five Doctors’, neither Tom Baker nor William Hartnell was available to take part, one because he was sulking and the other because he was dead. Hurndall stepped in, giving an uncanny impersonation of the irascible First Doctor, except for the fact that he managed to deliver all his lines without mucking them up.

  David Banks. More usually concealed inside a Cyberman costume on television, David Banks was also Jon Pertwee’s understudy for a 1989 musical stage play called Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure. When Pertwee fell ill one day, Banks grasped the nettle with both hands, and for the lucky people who saw that matinee performance, it is said, not least by David Banks, that he gave the definitive portrayal of the Doctor. Unfortunately, the number of people who claim to have seen David’s Doctor far exceeds the seating capacity of Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre, so this hyperbole should be taken with a pinch of salt.

  Richard E. Grant. Two for the price of one, here. Grant has played the part twice, once in 2004 in a computer-animated story called ‘Scream of the Shalka’, and previously in 1999 when he appeared alongside Rowan Atkinson, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley in a sketch for Comic Relief. None of them inhabited the part with a tenth of the conviction of David Banks.

  But the most famous non-canonical Doctor of them all is surely Peter Cushing. After the success of the Daleks on TV, producer Milton Subotsky was responsible for bringing them to the big screen in the movies Dr Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD. The veteran Hammer Horror star Cushing was cast in the mistitled lead role. Now, these movies have their admirers – current producer Steven Moffat, for example – but as a child, I knew these films weren’t kosher and this guy playing ‘Doctor Who’ was emphatically not the Doctor; as well as having the wrong name, he was just too human. Besides, rather than laser beams, the movie Daleks fired lethal blasts of compressed air – in a big-budget film, for God’s sake! Like Milton Subotsky could give a shit.

  Sue: What the hell is this? This is in colour.

  Me: Well spotted.

  Sue: This is the movie, isn’t it? This wasn’t part of the deal.

  This wasn’t the reaction that I’d hoped for. I thought she would be grateful for a splash of colour.

  Sue: WHAT THE F**K?

  As far as Sue is concerned, everything is wrong. Not just different. Wrong. The TARDIS interior; the Doctor; his extended family; the music; the Daleks; even the film’s aspect ratio gets under her skin.

  Sue: They called him Dr Who. That means his daughter’s name must be Barbara Who and that must be little Susie Who. This is stupid. Why are we watching this again?

  I persuaded her to stick with it, and while there were a few isolated moments that met with Sue’s approval (explosion-based, mainly ), they still couldn’t mitigate for the wrongness that permeated every frame.

  Sue: The most interesting thing about the film is that they made it so close to the TV show. It’s not as if we are watching a remake thirty years later, with loads of expensive CGI. And yet they appear to exist in two completely different timeframes. On the one hand, the film is clearly much more impressive – it’s quicker, bigger and better made – but at the same time it’s a lot less impressive than the original. And the original wasn’t that impressive to begin with.

  She refused to give the film a mark out of ten.

  Sue: It doesn’t count.

  * Quantity and names of actors who have played the Doctor correct at the time of going to press.

  Tom

  The boys I went to school with were football crazy, football mad. All they wanted to do was talk about Saturday’s goals and swap Panini stickers. All I wanted to do was swap Doctor Who Weetabix cards and speculate about how the Doctor might escape last Saturday’s cliffhanger. Even the boys who did watch Doctor Who didn’t want to talk about it. But then again, what do boys talk about? Even as adults, most of our interactions tended to consist of: ‘Got … Got … Need … Swap … Got’ and ‘Tag! You’re it!’

  So I defected to the girls, who were a much more chatty and imaginative bunch. When we played Doctor Who in the playground, I was always the Doctor and the girls were always Sarah Jane Smith or, better yet, one of the monsters. I am still warmed by the memory of Bethany McKenna and Beverly Sharpe crushing me to death between their chests as they pretended to be the robotic bear-hugging mummies from ‘Pyramids of Mars’. Bethany and Beverly, if you are reading this, please be aware that I am hoping to restage this event in 2015 as part of this classic story’s fortieth anniversary celebrations. Do get in touch.

  *

  Tom Baker was my Doctor. I forgot about Jon Pertwee within the first ten minutes of Tom’s debut. With his wild staring eyes and insane toothy grin, he was some way from the suave dandy played by Jon Pertwee, but by the time the Fourth Doctor had donned his floppy hat and wrapped his inordinately long multicoloured scarf around his neck, I was hooked. Mum thought he was ‘much too silly’ but she was wrong.

  The new Doctor discharges himself from the infirmary but the medical officer, Harry Sullivan, manages to intervene before he can escape in his TARDIS. The Doctor believes that his new nose is a definite improvement on the last one.

  Sue: Your entire face is a definite improvement! Cheer up! You’re not Jon Pertwee any more!

  The Doctor bamboozles Harry during an exceedingly strange medical, but Sue seems to enjoy it.

  Sue: He is certainly larger than life and very charismatic – you can’t take your eyes off him. But he will tone it down eventually, won’t he? He’s a bit full on at the moment.

  As the scene plays out, Sue laughs. A lot.

  Sue: He’s very funny, but I’m not sure that the kids would have felt the same way. I think the Doctor’s eyes popping out of his head would have frightened half of them to death.

  As much as I had loved the Third Doctor, he had silver hair, which meant I thought about him the same way I’d think about a grandfather or a kindly uncle. The Fourth Doctor was different; we didn’t know anyone like him. He looked like a nutcase, behaved like a nutcase, and, I would later learn, was being played by a nutcase. But what a nutcase.

  In his second story, ‘The Ark in Space’, the Doctor has a famous speech about the indomitable spirit of mankind as a species. Tom Baker plays it like he’s onstage at the Globe Theatre, and when I watch it now, it makes me profoundly grateful that the BBC happened to cast an actor who saw no reason not to take the part of a time-travelling extraterrestrial extremely seriously. He had all the mischief and all the heroism and wisdom of previous Doctors, but he was, perhaps, the first actor who really believed he was the Doctor.

  I remember two things about watching ‘The Ark in Space’ as a child. One, it scared the willies out of me, and two, I couldn’t wait to reproduce the terror I felt in the school playground the following Monday.

  The monsters in ‘The Ark in Space’ – the Wirrn – were giant insects, and as you will have realised by now, giant insects always gave me trouble. This lot were a swarm of intelligent wasp-like monstrosities who wanted to impregnate you with their babies, and you knew you were in trouble if your flesh started to break out in green weeping pustules, an effect the cash-strapped BBC special effects department achieved by wrapping the actor’s hand and lower arm in painted
bubble wrap.

  Body horror translated well to the playground. Everyone knew how the dreaded lurgy worked. I remember Beverly Sharpe walking around with her hand stuffed in her pocket – a sure sign that she’d been infected by the Wirrn – and when she tried to strangle me with it later, I was impressed to find that she’d gone to the trouble of wrapping several layers of Sellotape around it. Beverly was the first girl I ever kissed, by the way. On the lips and everything.

  The Doctor tries to reason with Noah, who is now acting very strangely indeed.

  Sue: So this is basically Alien?

  Me: There are certain similarities, yes.

  Sue: How did they sneak this idea into an afternoon teatime slot? It’s horrific.

  Me: This story gave me nightmares when I was a kid.

  Sue: Yes, and you’ve been terrified of bubble wrap ever since. So when was Alien released?

  Me: 1979.

  Sue: So Ridley Scott might have seen this before he made Alien?

  Me: It’s possible.

  Sue: Maybe he showed it to his crew and said, ‘I want it to look like this, but with decent lighting, sets, monsters and music.’

  *

  I never hid behind the sofa when I watched Doctor Who. For a start, we called it a settee, not a sofa, and it was pushed right up against our living-room wall. So I’d sit on the floor with a cushion in my lap, and if things got too frightening for me, I’d bury my face in its folds. And if the sound effects were too disturbing, I’d press the corners into my ears.

  I did this a lot when Tom Baker was playing the Doctor, especially during the end-of-episode cliffhangers. Like the time Sarah Jane Smith fell from some scaffolding at the end of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, part 2. I was so convinced that she couldn’t possibly survive this fall, I ran into the kitchen to find Mum.

  Me: Sarah Jane’s dead! Sarah Jane’s dead! Sarah Jane’s dead!

  Mum: Calm down and stop crying. The Doctor’s friends don’t die. I’m sure he’ll catch her in the next episode.

  (I didn’t feel cheated when part 3 began with Sarah Jane falling safely onto a gantry that wasn’t there the week before. She was still alive. That’s all that mattered.)

  The playground games fizzled out by the end of 1976 and our last hurrah was a homage to ‘The Hand of Fear’, which was ideal for the girls because all they had to do was walk around in a trance, a palm face up in the air, repeating the phrase ‘Eldrad must live! Eldrad must live!’ over and over again. Even I could have done that.

  ‘The Hand of Fear’ was also Sarah Jane’s last story.

  I didn’t see it coming. One minute the Doctor and his best friend are running rings around Eldrad on a planet made from ice, the next minute he’s dropping her off in Croydon because he isn’t allowed to take her to Gallifrey. It didn’t seem fair, not after everything Sarah had been through.

  Sarah Jane’s departure hit me for six. I wasn’t used to companions leaving, and while I could vaguely recall her predecessor, Jo Grant, I had been too young to form any meaningful attachment to her. Sarah Jane was my first proper companion. She was the big sister I never had, the one I wanted to baby-sit me.

  I wanted the Doctor to change his mind and return for her the following week, but he didn’t. It was at these moments that Tom Baker really made you believe he wasn’t quite human because a human being would have gone back for her.

  *

  There was one thing more frightening than watching Doctor Who, and that was missing Doctor Who.

  Take Saturday 6 December 1975, for example. It’s 5.55 p.m. and I should have been settling down to watch ‘The Android Invasion’, part 3 at home, but instead I was playing pass-the-parcel at some kid’s birthday party. Seriously, what kind of idiot throws a birthday party when Doctor Who is on?

  And then there was ‘The Ribos Operation’, part 1. Dad had taken me to see a non-league football match. I remember that it rained the whole time, there were no decent seats, the roof was leaking, neither team scored a goal and I was bored to tears. The only thing that made this treat bearable was the knowledge that a brand-new series of Doctor Who was due to start when I got home.

  The match finished at 4.45 p.m., which gave us a good hour to make it home in time. However, because Dad didn’t drive, we had to wait for a lift from his friend, Bob. Bob couldn’t have been a Doctor Who fan; he wanted to have a quick pint instead. I stood in the cold, draughty corridor with a packet of pork scratchings because I wasn’t allowed into the bar. The quick pint wasn’t quick enough.

  I knew we wouldn’t make it back in time when, after several more quick pints, Bob finally decided to leave. I sulked all the way home about missing Doctor Who, which at least took my mind off being driven home by someone who must have been over the legal limit. Maybe, his judgement clouded, Bob actually put his foot down because in the event I only missed the first quarter of an hour. However, in the age before repeats, videos or the internet, I would not actually get to watch those missing minutes of ‘The Ribos Operation’ for another seventeen years. Thanks, Dad.

  *

  And then I saw Star Wars.

  Mum: You were Star Wars mad. Doctor Who went out the window when Star Wars came along. You were obsessed with it. Especially the toys.

  My mum is half-right here.

  When Star Wars was released in 1978, I, like every other small boy in the entire country, thought it was the most mind-blowing film I had ever seen or was ever likely to see. By the end of the 1970s, my bedroom had become a shrine to Kenner’s range of Star Wars action figures. It was a drop in the ocean compared with what was out there, but enough for me to stage some very impressive battles at the bottom of our stairs. My favourite action figure was Bossk the bounty hunter (a crocodile in a yellow jumpsuit), but I had a soft spot for Luke’s Landspeeder too, until Joanne stepped on it and snapped its wheels off.

  However, I still liked Doctor Who and Tom Baker – a lot. Although the programme couldn’t compete with the lavish special effects of Star Wars – no noticeable bubble wrap in sight – its lead actor, four years in, was still unassailable. The programme had grown noticeably sillier in recent months, in an attempt to appease an old lady named Mary Whitehouse, but Tom remained as exciting, weird and mercurial as ever. And Doctor Who could still satisfy some part of my imagination that nothing else could. The only reason I was playing Star Wars on the stairs is because the Doctor Who franchise didn’t have anything like the same amount of toys available, and by this stage of my life, I’d moved beyond the realm of pure imagination and I needed some props.

  For my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a red Palitoy Dalek; for my ninth, I got a Denys Fisher Fourth Doctor doll to go with it. I now know that a manufacturing cock-up meant that Tom Baker’s head had to be substituted at the last minute with Gareth Hunt’s from The New Avengers. This didn’t bother me at the time as the head in question looked about as much like Tom Baker as it did Gareth Hunt (quality control on the New Avengers toys must have been half-hearted at best). There was a Denys Fisher TARDIS, too, but at £5.95 it was probably too steep for my parents’ budget, and I never got the Denys Fisher Cyberman either – the only Cyberman with a nose.

  Here are a few more Doctor Who toys and tie-ins that I did have:

  A board game entitled War of the Daleks. I remember that the little Dalek figures didn’t have the right proportions – irritating – and I’d only had it a couple of months when one of the pseudo-Daleks went AWOL and the game was completely ruined.

  The Typhoo Tea and Weetabix card collections, which you’d get free in packets of tea and cereal. Free, unless you counted all the tea and cereal you had to consume to get at them. At one stage I was eating twelve Weetabix a day just to get my hands on more cards, and I hated Weetabix. However, looking back, this may be the most balanced diet I’ve ever had.

  Palitoy’s talking K9. I hated K9. What was the point of him? The phrases the toy came out with included: ‘Affirmative, Master’, ‘I cannot appear in this story
because the floors are uneven’ and ‘You don’t need me, you have a sonic screwdriver’, although I may be recalling this wrong.

  The notorious Doctor Who underpants, which when worn showcased the classic 1970s Tom Baker face looming out of your crotch area. It is rumoured that Tom Baker himself sported these pants on his honeymoon night.

  Target novelisations of past adventures. We will come to them in the next chapter.

  *

  In 1979, Tom Baker’s Doctor Who was arguably at his most popular. Just over 16 million people tuned in to watch the final episode of ‘City of Death’. It helped that, although ‘City of Death’ is a wonderful story and Tom is magnificent throughout, there was nothing on the other side owing to industrial action at ITV. It was during this period of Baker’s apotheosis that I went to live in New Zealand for five months.

  We stayed with Auntie Angie and her husband, Uncle Mike, on their farm on the outskirts of Queenstown on the rural South Island. It was in the middle of nowhere – the nearest shop was miles away – but it was surrounded by beautiful countryside, there were gorgeous views of the mountains, and there were sheep. There were lots and lots of sheep. Plus, repeats of Doctor Who were on every day of the week.

  I have so many wonderful memories of that time I spent in New Zealand: the tiny Honda motorcycle that I used to ride up and down the country lanes, pretending I was Poncherello from CHiPs; catching and killing my first fish (I cried when Uncle Mike told me to bash its head in); skiing on Coronet Peak; white-water rafting; flying in a helicopter for my tenth birthday. I was even a poster boy for a deer park while I was out there.

  I kept a scrapbook of my holiday in New Zealand (and of the stopovers we made in Los Angeles and Singapore) and while the first half of this memento is filled with the sort of things you’d expect – sachets of thirty-three-year-old sugar from the plane that flew us there; a blurry photo of Jaws from the Universal Studios tour; a certificate that proves I successfully milked a cow – the second half is filled with black-and-white pictures of Doctor Who.