Adventures with the Wife in Space

by Neil Perryman

  *

  Saturday 13 May 2006: County Durham

  I can’t remember for the life of me what the argument was about now, only that it was bad enough for me to storm off in a huff and lock myself in the site caravan. This was a cheap, dilapidated wreck we’d bought so the builders would have somewhere to store their tools and facilitate their endless tea breaks. It was bloody freezing, even with all four bars blazing on its portable electric heater, but I’d be damned if I was going to slope back to the Lyndhurst and apologise to Sue for whatever it was I had done wrong.

  We were supposed to be attending a party at John Paul’s house that night, and he sounded very disappointed when I called to tell him we wouldn’t be coming. I pretended Sue wasn’t feeling very well, instead of the truth, which was that we weren’t talking to each other and probably wouldn’t be for several hours yet. This was because the site caravan had a portable TV. If it hadn’t, I would have been forced to swallow my pride and return to the Lyndhurst a lot earlier than I did, because there was no way I was about to miss tonight’s episode of Doctor Who, no matter how angry I was with my wife.

  I was especially excited because tonight’s episode was called ‘Rise of the Cybermen’. There’s a title that doesn’t muck about, I thought. You know exactly where you are with a title like that. This wouldn’t be another ‘Earthshock’. You wouldn’t see me falling out of my chair this time.

  But about twenty minutes into the episode, I fell out of my chair – well, off my stool; I was still shivering in the caravan. The Doctor and Rose Tyler are strolling through a busy thoroughfare on a parallel Earth, when suddenly, as if by magic, every pedestrian is halted in their tracks by a signal beamed directly into their ears. Perplexed, our heroes make their way through this frozen crowd towards a man in a dark blue suit …

  That’s funny, I thought. The man in the dark blue suit looks like John Paul. Actually, he looks a lot like John Paul. I grabbed my mobile phone and composed a text to my friend.

  Are you watching Who? Somebody looks exactly like u. LOL.

  Before I could press the send button, my phone buzzed. It was a text from my friend Damon:

  Is JP on Dr Who?

  A text from Jonathan Grove followed a few seconds later:

  Is that John Paul on the telly?

  And then another, this time from Sue in the Lyndhurst:

  Fucking hell. Are you watching this?

  Then the phone rang. It was John Paul. He told me not to hate him.

  I didn’t hate him. I envied him. My best friend was sharing the screen with a bloody Doctor and he wasn’t even an actor. He told me that a journalist had tipped him off that the show was looking for extras to appear in a crowd scene in Cardiff, and he thought he’d end up as an unrecognisable blur in the background. But then the director Graeme Harper picked him to appear in a dramatic close-up where Billie Piper has to stare meaningfully into somebody’s ear for several minutes. So John Paul was on screen for ages. In fact he’s so prominent that I thought they might bring out an action figure of him.

  So that’s why he was throwing a party tonight. It all made sense now.

  John Paul: Oh, one last thing. I’m in another episode later on. Don’t tell anyone but it’s got the Daleks in it. Bye!

  I hurried back to the Lyndhurst to confirm Sue’s suspicions. It was the first time Doctor Who had ever brought us closer together, because in all the excitement the row was forgotten and never mentioned again.

  *

  A year after we moved into our caravan, building work began on our new home. Two and a half years after that, we moved in.

  It took me a little while to readjust to life in a real house. Not only was it safe to flush the toilet in cold weather, I also had a working internet connection again. Cooking in a separate room felt almost decadent. And for the first time in years I actually got a good night’s sleep when it rained. Of course, I loved it. Sue had built a magnificent house – no, five houses – as I always knew she would. OK, it’s too big for us, it’s impossible to keep clean and it’s infested with spiders, but I loved it then and I still love it now. And the TV is massive.

  During our bleakest moments in that caravan – not being able to cook Christmas dinner when the Calor gas tank froze was a lowlight – Sue always promised that she would pay me back one day. She told me that I could choose any project I liked when the house was finished. As long as I was following my dream, she said, she would support me every step of the way. After all, it was only watching TV. How hard could it be?

  Now, where did I put those childish things?

  Part Three

  I tried to get my wife to watch ‘Genesis of the Daleks’

  once.

  STEVEN MOFFAT, writer and producer of Doctor Who

  Cyberspace Backslash Flashback Backlash

  In 1995, I had a life changing experience I needed to share with Sue.

  Me: It’s this thing called the internet. You use it to talk to people from all over the world on a computer. It’s incredible. I was talking to a man from Austin, Texas about cattle farming yesterday. Can you believe it?

  Sue: What do you know about cattle farming?

  Me: More than I did yesterday.

  Sue: I don’t see the point. If you want to talk to someone, talk to me.

  Me: OK. Did you know there’s a type of agricultural fertiliser sold by the city of Austin, Texas wastewater department that contains actual human sewage sludge?

  Sue: I didn’t, no. What’s this thing called again?

  Me: The internet.

  Sue: I can see why it might appeal to you. You love talking shite.

  I admit most of the online conversations I had when I first discovered the internet were banal at best. The pattern was always the same: small talk about the weather followed by a discussion about the time difference – everyone I talked to seemed to be American back then. But it didn’t really matter because I was making the impossible happen. I was communicating with someone on a different continent with real-time text. It didn’t get much more sci-fi than that in 1995.

  Sue: You do realise that half these people aren’t who they say they are. That woman you are talking to right now is probably a man.

  This didn’t concern me in the slightest. The idea that on the internet you could be anybody you wanted to be – younger, older, sexier, wiser, even a different gender – intrigued me but it also seemed like an awful lot of effort; I couldn’t be bothered.

  Me: Hi, I’m Neil from England. I teach video production at a university. What’s the weather like where you are? It’s 1 p.m. over here. You should try this, Sue, it’s brilliant!

  Sue: Jesus, what are you going be like when you find out about the telephone?

  One of my first one-to-one online chats was with a law student from Ohio. We were discussing capital punishment when the name Jeremy Bentham came up. Several minutes later, I realised that we were chatting at cross-purposes: he was referring to the renowned eighteenth-century English philosopher while I was talking about the co-founder of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. In fact, Bentham the Younger is a descendent of Bentham the Elder; and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the feeding pool of internet early adopters, the American law student had been through this rigmarole before. And that’s how he came to give me the directions to a special place on the internet where I could discuss Doctor Who to my heart’s content. It was here – in the rec.arts.drwho newsgroup – that I finally found true fandom.

  I knew that other Doctor Who fans existed before this, of course. I was aware there was a Doctor Who Appreciation Society, though I had never joined it; and I knew that there were conventions and local clubs, but I never had the guts to go to either, mainly because I suspected that most of the people who went to them were nutcases.*

  But rec.arts.drwho was the perfect compromise. I had stumbled into the world’s largest room of like-minded people but I could leave whenever I wanted. I didn’t even have to say anything – I could just eavesd
rop at the back of the room on the virtual conversations that were already under way without anyone giving me so much as a funny look (or emoticon). Many of these conversations were bewildering at first: debates about Sylvester McCoy’s Scottish accent, fiery arguments over the U.N.I.T. Dating Controversy, whatever that was, and endless exegeses about which Dalek story was the best one. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked.

  After several weeks of lurking, I finally summoned up enough courage to post something myself:

  To: rec.arts.drwho

  From: Neil Perryman

  Date: 31 March 1995

  Subject: Functionaries

  Is it just me or are the Functionaries from ‘Carnival of Monsters’ the worst example of make-up in the entire history of the series? I nearly fell off my chair in shock when they first shambled onto the set. Bits of latex flapping around like no one’s business! And it wasn’t just one of them – all of them were flapping about! It was unbelievable!

  It doesn’t surprise me that my first internet post was about Doctor Who. What does surprise me is just how bitchy it was. I was being unkind to ‘Carnival of Monsters’, the first Doctor Who story I ever saw and the source of my first childhood memory.

  Did Angela Seyfang (the make-up artist, and I use the term loosely) ever work again?

  Wow. That was a bit harsh. And just for the record, she did. Regularly.

  There are two possible excuses for my behaviour. The first is that I genuinely felt upset when I wrote those words. My post coincides with the release of ‘Carnival of Monsters’ on VHS, and it would have been the first time that I’d seen this particular story since the ‘Five Faces’ repeat in 1981. I was still in a period of adjustment – old stories rarely measure up to your childhood memories of them and ‘Carnival of Monsters’ had looked somewhat cheaper than I remembered. The second possibility is that I’d convinced myself that the best way to make an impression on this newsgroup was to wade in with a bold, opinionated statement, featuring plenty of exclamation marks, sarcasm and cynicism. And that’s because my earliest memories of rec.arts.drwho is as a place where everyone was a little on the grumpy side.

  I sat back and waited for the debate to begin. But nobody replied to my first post. After that disappointment, I didn’t contribute to the newsgroup again for quite some time – the language labs were locked over the Easter holidays. However, when I returned in May I dove right back in and, soon enough, I was swimming with the grumpy sharks, trading cynical, sarcastic jibes with the best and worst of them. The smiliest smiley cannot express how much I loved it.

  It was in the rec.arts.drwho newsgroup that I learned which directors were OK to like and which ones I should dismiss out of hand; which authors to praise and which ones to scorn; which actors to follow and which ones to avoid at all costs, especially if you ran into them at a convention bar. It was here that I learned how to use words like ‘rad’ and ‘trad’ without blushing, where I tried to make sense of something called the Cartmel Master Plan, and where I took my side in the infernal Pertwee versus McCoy flame war. It was also in this newsgroup that I learned about the Tavern, a pub in Fitzrovia where a powerful cabal of fans would gather on the first Thursday of every month to plan for the day when they would control the programme themselves and, on a good night, fight each other in the street to decide who would get first dibs on being producer; the T in Russell T. Davies stands for Toughnut.

  But newsgroups and chatrooms were just the beginning. There were also FTP archives, where you could download images of Leela in her loincloth or TARDIS dematerialisation sound effects (whatever floated your boat), and there was the World Wide Web, where I found Doctor Who episode guides, fan-fiction and some TARDIS-based pornography that I’d rather not discuss. I spent so much time in the university language labs between 1995 and 1996 that Sue finally decided it would be for the best if we bought our own PC so we could connect to the internet at home. That way, at least she’d get to spend some time with me, even if she was staring at the back of my head while I argued with some moron from Montreal about the merits – merits! – of The TV Movie.

  I tried to convince my bosses at the university that we should be teaching the internet to our students but they seemed to think it was just a passing fad. I didn’t listen to them; instead I spent every spare hour I could learning how to build webpages by hand, with raw HTML code at first and then with increasingly sophisticated software. It took me several years and countless sleepless nights but in the end I got to grips with it. I soon became master of my own domain, which I bought for £1.50 from supernames.co.uk.

  In 2001, the university finally saw the light. They asked me to design an undergraduate syllabus that would cover both the theory of the internet as well as the practical side of building websites. Coincidentally, this was also the year I won rec.arts.drwho’s coveted Rookie of the Year Award (I neglected to remind them that I’d been hanging around the place for five). NB I didn’t win this award because I had anything particularly interesting to say about Doctor Who. I won this award because of all the websites I’d devoted to it.

  Cue list.

  * Someone calling themselves ‘bombonstilts’ recently posted the following reminiscence at an internet forum called Roobarbs, neatly summing up what I feared all such meetings would be like:

  ‘I went to a local group occasionally when I was about twelve or so. The first time I went, the only people there for the first hour (apart from me) were … developmentally and mentally challenged is probably the least loaded way of putting it. Without wishing to speak ill of anyone, I was expecting to meet with likeminded people and discuss the show I liked, rather than being stuck with people a few of whom I had actually seen shouting at nothing in the centre of town.

  ‘After an hour the Guy With The Videos showed up with his clearly terrified wife and dropped off his nth generation copy of The Time Warrior and scarpered. Luckily the place where they met was slap bang in the middle of the red light district so my mum came to pick me up before it got too late, but that was the longest and most awkward two hours of my life up to that point.

  ‘Not the best introduction to fandom.

  ‘The second time I went someone asked me if I’d let Sarah Jane shit on my chest. But then I did also win a calendar, so it wasn’t all bad.’

  (www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/showthread.php?30454-Meeting-grumpy-Who-stars&p=898810&viewfull=1#post898810)

  Six (not very successful) Websites

  1. Views from the Gallery (1998–1999)

  My first website was dedicated to the American science-fiction series Babylon 5. The site used such cutting-edge technologies as framed navigation, blinking text and animated GIFs. However, what it lacked in aesthetics it more than made up for in content. Because I couldn’t be bothered to review every single episode of the space opera myself, I recruited like-minded fans from the internet to write them for me. This collaborative approach not only saved me time and effort, it also resulted in the formation of a close community of virtual friends – virtual friends being the best kind, i.e. ones you never have to meet.

  2. The Eclipse Café (1998–2001)

  My old school pal Jonathan Grove and I were running our very own online social network long before Facebook came along and ‘stole’ our idea. Jon, who was as obsessed with the internet as I was, had invested some money in his own private server and he wanted to experiment with some virtual community software that he’d bought. However, while Jon had the technical know-how, he didn’t have a ready-made community to test it on, and that’s where I came in. I convinced my Babylon 5 friends to join the new network, which they then used to swap intimate details about their private lives. Sadly, unlike Facebook, the Eclipse Café peaked at nineteen members, the intimate details of a group of Babylon 5 fans proving to be not merely a hermetically closed circle but one with nothing very interesting in the middle of it.

  3. Tachyon TV (2001–2006)

  Tachyon TV was supposed to be like The Onion for science-fic
tion fans. It was basically a monthly website with a single page of topical spoof news stories but with a telefantasy twist. DOCTOR WHO LOGO DESIGNERS FOUND HIDING IN FALLUJAH was one hilarious headline; IS SADDAM HUSSEIN SECRETLY BUILDING IMPERIAL AT-AT WALKERS? was another. It hasn’t aged very well, mostly because it was pretty old to begin with.

  Despite Tachyon TV’s shameless derivativeness, the site built up a small but loyal audience, until one day it caught the attention of a TV production company. They invited me to a meeting in their offices to discuss a Top Secret project with them, so I bought a new suit and caught the first train to London. The brief they gave me was, well, brief: watch the news on television for a whole week and then write some funny jokes about it. The week I was assigned to watch the news was the week of the Soham murders. On the Friday night, I submitted five pages of gags to the production company. I never heard from them again.

  It was a valuable learning experience. Nowadays, I could easily sell that material to Frankie Boyle.