6. Other People
Yes, I know I said I loved other people elsewhere in this book but I was talking about my wife and my friends. It’s everybody else I have a problem with – and not just the mayonnaise-loving, New-Year-revelling Jaws 4 apologists, either. Take you, for instance, reading this book. You’re all right I suppose, though the chances are you probably like Doctor Who, which makes you a bit suspect in my eyes. Don’t you think you ought to grow out of it? I bet you loved The TV Movie too, didn’t you? People like you always do. Don’t you get it? The TV Movie is shit! It’s SHIT!
I need a cigarette.
1996
Wednesday 22 May
It’s 9.30 a.m. and I am on the horns of a dilemma. Not for the first time this morning, I let my fingers play across Paul McGann’s handsome, shrink-wrapped face.
Am I dreaming? Is Doctor Who really coming back? Did the BBC really manage to negotiate a multimillion-dollar US co-production deal, and did they really cast one of the best actors of our generation – and Sylvester McCoy – to play the Doctor? And if I wanted to, could I really remove this videocassette from its box, slide the tape into my VCR, and watch a brand-new episode of my favourite TV show for the first time in six and a half years, right now?
No, I couldn’t. Not yet.
Not until Sue gets home.
Her parting words to me as she left for work this morning:
Sue: Whatever you do, don’t watch it without me.
I was down at Woolworth’s before they opened. I didn’t want to run the risk that the shop would be swamped with eager fans like me and they might sell out of stock, and, sure enough, a small crowd had already gathered when I got there. But as it happened, I was the only one queuing outside the doors who didn’t work for Woolworth’s. Copies of the tape hadn’t even made it to the shelves yet, and the staff suggested I go for a walk while they hunted through their stock room. I declined. After a tense fifteen-minute wait – still no other fans around – I returned home, £12.99 poorer, to begin the longer, no less agonising wait for Sue.
I studied the box again. Paul McGann was wearing a stiff-looking wig and a frock coat. Well, there was no shame in that. After all, William Hartnell had worn a wig and a frock coat too. (Jon Pertwee’s bouffant and Tom Baker’s curls only looked like wigs.) I scanned the blurb on the back of the box again, just in case I’d missed something vitally important the seventeen times I read it previously, and I thought about removing the shrink-wrap and just staring at the cassette for a bit.
Sue: Whatever you do, don’t watch it without me.
I decide to leave the shrink-wrap alone.
To be honest, I was anxious about this new Doctor Who. The omens weren’t good. And it wasn’t just the wig and the frock coat – everything about the BBC’s intended reboot of the franchise seemed slightly off. They hadn’t even come up with a proper title for it, not ‘Return of the Doctor’ or ‘The Deadly Regeneration’ or anything like that, just The TV Movie. Worse still, the movie had been shown in America and Canada already. I mean, seriously, Canada? I wouldn’t have minded so much if the BBC had released the VHS a week earlier, like they’d promised to, but last-minute editing delayed its release until it eventually went on sale just a few days before it was due to be broadcast on BBC One. Or as Sue put it:
Sue: Why not save your money and wait for it to turn up on the telly for free?
Because that’s not how we Whovians roll, as no one said in 1996.
Furthermore, this unexpected delay severely disrupted my dream of sharing the return of Doctor Who with Sue.
This had been the original plan: because I couldn’t drive, Sue would take me to the special midnight opening at HMV in Newcastle. I would queue from 9 p.m. and she would visit her brother, Gary, who lived in nearby Gateshead. She would return for me at 12.15 a.m. and we would be home by 1 a.m., and we would watch the first new Doctor Who to be produced since its cancellation in 1989 together. And it would definitely be brilliant.
It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, the tape’s release got pushed back to a date when Sue was working, and the only midnight opening still scheduled to take place was down in London; I did ask Sue if it might be possible for her to drive me to the capital in her battered Renault Clio, but her answer was both unequivocal and peppered with four-letter words, none of which were ‘okay’, ‘sure’ or ‘good idea’.
So here I am. It’s 10 a.m. and there are another eight hours to wait until Sue gets home.
Sue: Whatever you do, don’t watch it without me.
What did Sue mean by that, I wondered. Did it mean she was as excited about Doctor Who’s imminent return as I was? Was her display of total indifference in the weeks leading up to its release just a clever smokescreen? Was it possible she was losing as much sleep over the return of the show as I was? Or – and this was much more likely – was she taking the piss? If she was taking the piss, I could go ahead and watch it without her, no harm done. But what if she wasn’t taking the piss? What if it was a sincere romantic gesture on her part?
Hmm. Maybe it was possible to re-seal shrink-wrap with wood glue or something. Or maybe I could return to Woolies to buy a second copy. If I watched that one instead, I’d still have a pristine, shrink-wrapped tape in my hands when she returned. Money was tight, though, and even if I could afford two copies, could I really go three days without a cigarette? Plus, while we watched it together, I would have to pretend that I hadn’t already seen it earlier in the day, probably several times, and feign spontaneous surprise or suspense or delight at this new Doctor’s adventures, and that seemed wrong somehow – like cheating.
Behind his plastic prison, Paul McGann sure looks tempting. But it’s no good. I can’t do it.
I want to watch it with Sue.
*
My heart skips a beat when I hear Sue’s car pull up outside just after 7 p.m. In just a few minutes we will be watching new Doctor Who together. Thankfully, Nicol is staying at a friend’s tonight. I wasn’t that upset to learn she’d miss Paul McGann’s debut as the Doctor as she’d only spend the evening throwing salt and vinegar hula-hoops at his face, because right now she’s only eight.
I wave the tape in Sue’s face as she takes her coat off. Its shrink-wrap is still unblemished, except for a very small tear where I’d rubbed Paul’s face a little too hard.
Me: I haven’t watched it yet. Look, it’s still in its wrapper.
Sue: That’s nice, love, I thought you’d have worn it out by now.
Me: But … but you told me to wait for you.
Sue: I was joking, you idiot. But it was very sweet of you to wait … Hang on a minute – you didn’t buy two copies, did you?
Me: The thought never even crossed my mind. Now, can we just sit down and watch it? Please?
Sue: Can I get something to eat first? I’ll only be a minute.
She sat down next to me on the sofa forty-five minutes later, a plate of lasagne balanced delicately on her knee. Swallowing a mouthful of pasta, she motioned towards the television with her fork.
Sue: Off you go, then.
Me: But you won’t be able to concentrate on the plot if you’re eating at the same time.
Sue: I’m fine. I can listen to it. Press Play.
Ninety minutes later …
Sue: That wasn’t bad.
Me: Yes it was. It was a disaster!
Sue: Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll get it right when it goes to a series.
The Master: The Doctor is half human!
Sue: Eh? Since when?
I pause the DVD.
Me: What do you make of that, then?
Sue: It makes sense, I suppose.
Me: WHAT?
Sue: Well, he’s obsessed with Earth. He can’t keep away from the place. Why isn’t he saving Mars every week? There has to be a reason for it and that’s a good enough reason as any.
Me: So, do you think Paul McGann counts?
Sue: Of course he f**king counts. Why wouldn’t
he?
*
When Sue went to bed, I stayed up and watched The TV Movie again, just to be sure. Yes, the Americans had achieved the seemingly impossible – they had taken the thing that nobody liked very much and ruined it.
It wasn’t just that the Doctor was being played by someone good-looking or that the character was half-human all of a sudden. This Doctor kissed women on the lips. His TARDIS could bring people back from the dead. The plot felt both rushed and too complicated. The music was blaring and intrusive. The whole production looked unsustainably expensive. There was no way this version of Doctor Who, or one like it, would ever go to a series.
It was time to face up to it. The hiatus was back on – possibly for ever. And do you know something? I was almost relieved. There was some stuff I had to get on with.
Hiatus 3: Living Without Doctor Who
Sue: You remember how Neil only agreed to come back to my place that time so he could watch repeats of Doctor Who on UK Gold? Well the only reason he asked me to marry him in 1999 is because he thought the world was about to end. He says he became convinced civilisation was on the brink of collapse shortly after they showed that Doctor Who movie with Paul McGann. I thought he might be having a breakdown or something but he says he just really hated it. (I don’t know why, I thought it was OK.) Anyway, he says it was an article about the Millennium Bug in an in-flight magazine that did it. The one that said brilliant technologists from Silicon Valley were building shelters in the middle of the desert to prepare for the effects of a computer bug that would bring society to its knees.
Me: I completely fell for it. These were intelligent people, or at least that’s what I thought, so they had to know something we didn’t. And then the media got hold of it and everywhere you turned there were tales of impending doom, from documentaries outlining how to survive societal disintegration to scaremongering leaflets being posted through letterboxes. By the middle of December 1999 I had stockpiled enough tinned soup, bottled water and candles to survive just about anything except New Year’s Eve (see above).
Sue: And that’s why, in July, Neil decided to marry me. He thought it was only going to last six months.
Me: Which would still have been longer than your first marriage.
Sue: Fair enough.
Me: But we both know there was more to it than that. There was Nicol to consider.
*
Nicol has never called me Dad; I’ve always been Neil to her. And I’m OK with that, because she’s never once screamed, ‘You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my real dad!’ in my face either. For this and numerous other reasons, I’m a lucky man.
It’s never bothered me that Nicol isn’t my biological daughter. For example, in the unhappy event that she was diagnosed with a hereditary disease, Sue couldn’t blame me for it – result! And from my perspective, I arrived in Nic’s life at just the right time, having missed the sleepless nights, the dirty nappies and the ‘terrible twos’.
Did it take me longer to bond with Nicol because I wasn’t around to see her take her first steps or hear her first words? Probably. The truth is it took me ages to get to grips with being a responsible Neil. One minute I was an unattached, decidedly immature twenty-three-year-old, the next I was attending parent evenings, dressing up as Santa Claus and developing coping mechanisms for multiple episodes of Rugrats. But slowly we got there. In fact, I have only two regrets when I look back on Nicol’s childhood: (1) she never gave Doctor Who a fair chance, and (2) she never tested my uncertain skills as a parent.
Sue insisted that we give Nicol as much freedom as possible when she was growing up. I just kept waiting for something to go wrong. Maybe Nicol would fall in with the wrong crowd. Maybe she’d be bullied. Or maybe she actually would fall prey to a terrible illness. Nothing. Not so much as a broken bone or a bad school report. In fact, all I have are happy, carefree memories of Nicol’s childhood: our trip to Disneyland, cheering her on at sports days, taking her trick-or-treating, explaining terrorism to her (actually, that wasn’t so pleasant) and being there for her when the Spice Girls split up. And Rugrats is pretty good once you get into it.
So Nicol – and Sue – made parenthood ridiculously easy. I’d already decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with them long before I proposed. I couldn’t imagine the world without them in it – unless the world came to an abrupt end, of course. But I wasn’t crazy about the concept of marriage; I think anyone whose parents are divorced has a tendency to feel this way. Marriage was just a piece of paper, it didn’t mean anything. What finally changed my mind was Nicol.
In 1998 Sue lost her dad to cancer; her mum had passed away eighteen months earlier, doing what she loved – she was going for double top in a darts tournament and suffered a massive heart attack. For the first time, I started to worry about what might happen to Nicol if anything happened to Sue; Sue loved darts. And it dawned on me that a piece of paper can mean a lot.
So I asked Nicol if I could adopt her. And after I’d explained to her what adopt meant, she flung her arms around me and said yes. It would not be an exaggeration to describe this as the best moment of my life because it was the best moment of my life. And then I asked her if it was OK if I married her mam as well, and all she wanted to know was what colour her bridesmaid’s dress would be. When I told her she’d be changing her surname to Perryman, she wasn’t so thrilled.
Sue and I were married in a register office in Hartlepool on Friday 23 July 1999. The bride wore cream and the bridesmaid wore cream too. The registrar asked Sue to take me as her lawfully wedded wife and she agreed before he could correct himself. It’s still legally binding, I think.
Sue: I suggested Neil change his name to Perrywoman but he wasn’t having it.
*
In the summer of 2000 – the summer I feared would never come – I experienced an epiphany. I was reading a Doctor Who novel in bed one night when it suddenly occurred to me that I was thirty years old and I hadn’t read any Dostoevsky yet – seventy-one novels by Terrance Dicks, yes, but not one by Tolstoy, Hemingway or a woman.* I had to broaden my horizons before it was too late.
I never finished that Doctor Who book – which ends, I believe, with the Eighth Doctor destroying his home planet, Gallifrey (like that would ever happen in the TV series) – and when I placed it neatly on my bookshelf to gather dust I felt like the proverbial weight had lifted from my shoulders. No longer would I have to keep up with the BBC’s punishing release schedule, which left me both out of pocket and with little time to do anything else. At last, I was letting go.
One day, I sold half my Doctor Who tapes to a friend. I didn’t do this because I needed the money – in fact, I let them go cheaply. The rest of my Doctor Who VHS collection went in the attic; by the time they came back out again, the format, a bit like my passion for Doctor Who, was on the wane – or at least, at a manageable level. As Sue liked to say, I had more important things to worry about now.
Since 1993 I had been a part-time university lecturer.† My teaching career didn’t get off to an auspicious start. During my first seminar I was so nervous, I opened the camera case upside down and as a £3,000 camcorder bounced off the linoleum floor, I had to pretend that I’d done it on purpose so the students wouldn’t repeat the same mistake. Camcorder safely secured to a tripod, I thought I’d show them how to focus the camera and adjust its lens and, because it seemed to be going reasonably well, I decided to toss in a gag.
Me: And this is what we call a crash zoom. Or, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, a Dalek just turned up!
Silence.
When the students filed out of the room at the end of the lesson, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But then I noticed that one of them had stayed behind. Was he was going to complain about my teaching methods? In my nervousness, had I spoken too fast for him to keep up?
The student glanced furtively around the room, as if to make sure that we were alone.
Student: I was just wondering … Are you by any
chance? You know … I just thought you might be … Well, erm …
I swallowed hard. I’d read about this sort of thing. He was going to ask me out.
Student: It’s just that … OK, I’m just going to come right out and say it. Are you a Doctor Who fan?
And that’s how I met John Paul Green. We were to become firm – though platonic – friends. We were a similar age, we both came from the West Midlands and his appreciation for 1970s Doctor Who was almost as limitless as mine. It seemed a bit weird that he was my student and I was his mentor, not least when I had to fail him for leaving his tripod’s base plate on a bus. It was even weirder when he slept with my sister. Nevertheless, six years later he was our best man; and we didn’t make him wear cream.
*
Between 1993 and 1999 I screened Jaws to my students so many times I wore the tape out and the university had to buy me a new one. I discovered I loved teaching, and not just because I got to watch Jaws a lot; it felt like I’d accidentally stumbled into a vocation.
By rights, I should have been a terrible teacher. I wasn’t really a ‘people person’ and I found students irritating even when I was one myself. But I worked hard to compensate for my lack of experience and, with lots of help from Sue, I got quite good at it. Teaching is part knowledge transfer, part performance art; what I lacked in the former, I made up for in the latter. In 1997, despite breaking down in tears during the interview because I so desperately wanted it to go well, I was made a full-time member of staff.
One of my responsibilities as a full-time university lecturer was that I had to be ‘research active’. This basically meant I was expected to commit to a PhD immediately. So the first thing I had to decide was what subject I was going to study in depth. I cast around for an alternative to Jaws, about which I knew an awful lot. Naturally, there was only one.
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 10
