4. Watching Too Much Telly (2003–2005)
I took up blogging because I figured if I wrote something new every day, I’d eventually get better at it. I didn’t really care if anyone read what I had to say or not, and not a lot of people did, but the routine I set myself – to write at least five hundred words about a TV programme I’d seen the night before – felt like it might lead somewhere eventually. Occasionally I would post something other than a review – usually a rant about living in a caravan, building a house or my never-ending battles with BT’s Customer Complaints Department – but most of the time I just published withering commentaries about the latest series of Big Brother or that week’s EastEnders. And then one day, I posted a review of a documentary about the art of parkouring, or as I put it:
If you ever find yourself facing an obstacle when you are running down the street, don’t go around it – jump over it! But only if said obstacle is really, really small and it makes you look like a right prat.
I was lucky if any of my blog posts attracted a couple of comments at most, but this particular review ended up with ninety-one responses. The parkouring community was furious with me. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have described them as ‘demented baboons in hoodies’. I tried to shrug off their virtual vitriol, but there was one comment that really got under my skin:
YOU SPEND EVERY WAKING SECOND NO DOUBT ON YOUR FAT ARSE!
The commentator then imagined what would happen if I ever attempted to parkour myself:
I believe that you would bounce … roll to a halt and fucking cry like a fat motherfucking tard while he sucks his fat motherfucking thumb then gets hungry and fucking eats his thumb.
Something in me snapped. I persuaded Sue to photograph me jumping through our building site. I leapt from beams, hurdled over tractors and rolled through dried-up cow dung. This would show those parkouring baboons! I ended up on the roof of our caravan where, as I was waiting for Sue to bring me a stepladder so I could get back down again, I tripped over some loose felt and plummeted to the ground, breaking both ankles. I cried like a motherfucking tard and was crippled for months but I still posted the photos. And no one has ever called me Fat Boy again.
5. Behind the Sofa (2005–2011)
I was still blogging when Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, so it felt natural to combine my two interests. Once again, I recruited like-minded souls from across the internet to help share the workload, and this allowed me to stagger reviews of a single episode over a whole week, which meant that people kept coming back for more. In fact Behind the Sofa became so popular it made numerous recommended lists on TV websites, and when one of the new series writers, Steven Moffat, left a very nice comment on a review, I remember thinking that blogging couldn’t get any better than this.
6. Tachyon TV 2.0 (2006–2011)
One of Behind the Sofa’s most prolific contributors was a man named Damon Querry, and because he lived just a few miles away from me, and because he didn’t sound like he was a total nutter, I suggested that we meet each other face-to-face. We chose a local Doctor Who convention in Stockton-on-Tees as neutral territory and Damon brought a friend along with him for moral support. This man’s name was John Williams. Not only was John an expert on soap operas set in the north of England – he still insists on calling Emmerdale, Emmerdale Farm – he was, and remains, the funniest man I have ever met. The three of us decided to join forces and re-launch Tachyon TV as a weekly series of irreverent Doctor Who-themed podcasts, the hot new medium. If we could make each other laugh, maybe we could make other fans laugh too.
When we ran out of amusing things to say about classic episodes of Doctor Who, we branched out into interviewing celebrities instead – though this might be pushing the term ‘celebrities’ past its breaking point. One Thursday at the Tavern in Fitzrovia, we plied Bentham the Younger with lemonade until he admitted – on the record, no less – that Torchwood was ‘a mistake’. Step aside, Woodward and Bernstein! And we chatted to actors and producers and writers from the classic era and the new series and no one called anyone a motherfucking tard, at least not when the mic was on.
I loved working on Tachyon TV but, as with all my previous online projects, I started getting restless after a while. There are only so many times someone who knows everything about Doctor Who can ask someone else who knows everything about Doctor Who a question fans who know everything about Doctor Who already know the answer to.
I needed a new challenge, a new domain to conquer and legally register. It was time for the Adventure to begin …
Spoiler Warning
Congratulations! You have reached the part of the book where Sue’s epic journey through twenty-six years of Doctor Who, and my two-year battle with a blog about it, really begins. While you don’t have to have read our blog to understand, and hopefully enjoy, what follows, readers should know that I reveal many of Sue’s episode scores and opinions along the way, plus most of the endings of every Doctor Who story ever made. If you’ve never visited our blog before – or if you’d prefer to discover these things on the blog first – now might be a good time to find a bookmark, pop it in here, and head over to www.wifeinspace.com. It’s only half a million words so it shouldn’t take you that long to get up to speed. We’ll wait here until you get back.
The Experiment Begins
Done? Let’s go!
It wasn’t my intention to watch Doctor Who from the very beginning with Sue, or with anyone else for that matter. I planned to go it alone for a new blog.
I had been thinking about re-watching the classic series ever since I read the first volume of Toby Hadoke and Rob Shearman’s Running Through Corridors, where the pair watch and review every episode of Doctor Who in chronological order. Because Hadoke and Shearman are funny, engaging writers, reading this book was a thoroughly entertaining experience. But it also reminded me that, although I called myself a Doctor Who fan, and other people called me a Whovian, there were quite a few episodes of Doctor Who I had never actually seen.
John Williams: The first rule of watching Doctor Who from the beginning is you don’t watch Doctor Who from the beginning. You start with ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’. Everybody gives up in the middle of ‘The Sensorites’.
Me: But if I start with the tenth story, won’t that be cheating?
John: Look, do you want to do this or not? You can watch the first nine stories at the end if it bothers you. If you get that far. How are you going to watch them?
Me: When Sue’s gone to bed, I suppose.
John: That will never work. If you watch them late at night, you’ll fall asleep before you reach the first cliffhanger. If I were you, I would follow Andrew Pixley’s* advice. He watched them while he was having his tea.
Me: If I do embark on this marathon, I might write it up for Tachyon TV. I could make it a regular feature.
John: Really? What could you possibly say about Doctor Who that hasn’t been said a million times before?
John was right, of course – the last thing the world needed was another Doctor Who blog. But I couldn’t get the idea of blogging a television series from the very beginning out of my head, though I baulked at John’s suggestion of ‘Emmerdale Farm’. And, perhaps arrogantly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Doctor Who had some mileage left in it. There had to be an angle that nobody had considered before, I just had to find it.
And then …
Sue: Haven’t you got a DVD we could watch instead? This is terrible.
She had a point, Downton Abbey was awful.
Me: We could watch Doctor Who.
The rest, as Neil Perry would have said, is herstory.
*
I made sure that the viewing conditions were just right the night we started our experiment: the curtains were drawn, the cats and dog had been fed, our phones were switched off, our ashtrays were empty and our lighters were full. Sue was cradling a mug of tea and I was nursing a stiff drink.
I reached for the remote control
and pressed Play …
DOCTOR WHO: AN UNEARTHLY CHILD BY ANTHONY COBURN
Twenty-five minutes later …
Sue: Eh?
Sue absorbed the first episode of Doctor Who in respectful silence and this was her first audible reaction to it as the credits rolled.
Me: Is that all you’ve got?
Sue: I thought it would be a lot longer than that.
Of all the opening gambits I could have expected – from a gushing ‘Wow! Now I understand why you love this show!’ to a rueful ‘We missed The One Show for that?’ – that wasn’t on my list.
Me: So what did you think, then? It’s a classic, so no pressure.
She sighed deeply, and then she told me she was shocked by William Hartnell’s curt, abrasive manner, and how it was hard for her to believe that this Doctor was the same character played by David Tennant and Matt Smith.
Sue: The Doctor was arrogant, snide and spiteful. He’s a bit creepy, to be honest.
Sue awarded an ‘An Unearthly Child’ 7 out of 10.
The idea of awarding scores for episodes or stories was meant to be a joke – the sort of thing one might expect from a stat-obsessed Whovian. But I was rather irritated by this 7. Many fans – myself included – would argue that ‘An Unearthly Child’ is as good as 1960s Doctor Who ever gets. A 7 out of 10 didn’t inspire confidence because the scores would only get lower from here.
Sure enough, the next three episodes, which featured hirsute cavemen questing for fire, only scored 4 out of 10 apiece. But that was all right because those episodes aren’t very good. But then it was the turn of ‘The Daleks’. This is the story that introduced an unsuspecting public to the eponymous villains for the first time, and, practically overnight, the bungalow-loving bastards transformed Doctor Who from an offbeat curiosity on the brink of cancellation into a bona fide phenomenon.
Sue gave ‘The Daleks’ 3 out of 10.
Sue: Is that score too low? Will the fans be upset with me?
Me: Forget about them. I want to record your honest reactions.
Sue: 2/10, then.
Me: Are you joking?
Sue: I don’t have anything to compare it to, apart from the new series. And ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, which this story seems to contradict, I might add.
Getting into Dalek chronology right now could be fatal, so I sulk instead.
Sue: OK, OK. I’ll give it … 3/10.
Me: You do realise that if it wasn’t for this story, the series would have been cancelled after just a handful of episodes. We wouldn’t be watching Doctor Who today if it wasn’t for ‘The Daleks’.
Sue: Can I change my score back to a 2?
The scores were low and the commentary was withering. However, Sue was clearly enjoying herself. My favourite part of the experiment so far was not watching the episodes but writing them up for the blog afterwards. I knew it was working – not only was it funny, Sue was genuinely saying things no one had said about Doctor Who before – at least not outside of a 1960s living room.
However, I was still a little worried. It wasn’t the thought of seven hundred episodes of Doctor Who that bothered me (that would come later), it was how Sue might be treated by the Doctor Who fan community. Years had passed since rec.arts.drwho but they were no less grumpy and cynical – in fact they were worse. I hesitated before publishing Sue’s lukewarm assessment of ‘An Unearthly Child’ because I knew when I did I would be offering up my wife to ridicule, scorn and possibly the odd death threat. And I still went ahead and published it anyway.
And then the feedback started:
This is superb. You have to keep her at it, regardless of the effect on your marriage.
Keep going. This is more fun than watching The Persuaders.
Susan must have the patience of a saint! Your Susan that is, not the unearthly one.
Laugh out loud hilarious. Please keep up the experiment.
I love it! (You’re not really going to inflict the recons on her, though, surely?)
There was a warning, too:
I think that you should look up the statistics on this before you seriously think of continuing. Do you know that one in three marriages fail before the ‘Ambassadors of Death’?
Really? I thought it would be a lot higher than that.
Sue pretended not to care about the comments until I caught her reading some of them one night. She told me that the positive reactions had surprised her – she thought the fans would be appalled by her lack of respect. I told her to take nothing for granted and that she should wait until I published her review of ‘The Daleks’, which was even more contentious.
Sue: If this was a modern Doctor, you’d just assume that he was playing with them and he had a plan up his sleeve, but with this git you really believe that he’ll sell everyone out just to get away. What a total knob. They should have called the show Ian. 3/10.
But I needn’t have worried:
I think her score is spot on! Good on you, Sue.
I don’t blame her for giving it a 3. I love it to bits but I’m looking at it through rose tinted specs.
Sue seems a sensible and wise individual.
I look forward to her reactions to ‘The Web Planet’, which I recall is 246 episodes long. Sue is my new Perfect Woman™
Sue liked that last comment a lot.
Thirteen episodes down, only another six-hundred and eighty-four to go! But we were about to head into uncharted territory.
* Esteemed television historian, renowned Doctor Who archivist and thoroughly nice man.
Here Be Recons
When I told Sue that more than a hundred black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who no longer existed, she was delighted.
Sue: What a relief.
Suffice to say, this is not what fans think of the BBC’s policy of wiping much of its archive of classic television during the 1960s and 70s. Doctor Who fans consider it to be at best a short-sighted business decision and at worst an act of cultural vandalism and betrayal. But Sue was not a Doctor Who fan.
Sue: It means we can skip about a hundred episodes, doesn’t it? I don’t know what you were worrying about, Neil. This is going to be a piece of piss.
I told Sue that, unfortunately for her, we wouldn’t have to skip any missing episodes if we didn’t want to.
Sue: I’m not reading any of your books. You can forget about that for a start.
Me: Don’t worry. You won’t have to read anything, although you will have to concentrate quite hard.
Sue: I get it. You’re going to read the books to me one-by-one, I’m going to imagine them in my head, then I’ll tell you what I think about the imaginary acting, writing and carpentry, give it a mark out of ten and you’ll write it all down.
Me: To be honest, that sounds more fun.
Although these episodes no longer existed on videotape or film, fans had resourcefully combined black-and-white photos taken in front of the TV and domestic audio recordings made during the programmes’ original transmission in the 1960s – the family dog can occasionally be heard barking in the background – with modern computer technology to produce rough approximations of what the stories may have been like.
Sue: Are these the reconstructions that everyone keeps going on about on the blog? Rob Shearman says we shouldn’t watch them. He says it’s too dangerous.
Me: You don’t even know who Rob Shearman is.
Rob Shearman was correct, though. It could be a step too far. The best recon could only ever be a shadow of its former self; and if the original story wasn’t up to much, any recon, no matter how skilfully or lovingly rendered, could only be worse – much worse. If I didn’t fancy wading through 106 black-and-white slide shows to the accompaniment of the muffled barking of a long-dead dog, I was pretty certain that Sue would feel the same way.
So I compromised. For a DVD release, the BBC had edited the missing seven-part story ‘Marco Polo’ into a single thirty-minute episode, which meant that Sue could both experience a reconstruc
tion – referred to by hip Whovians as ‘recons’ – and a notoriously long historical saga – referred to by hip Whovians as ‘historicals’ – in one fell swoop.
Sue: I’m enjoying this a lot more than some of the others I’ve seen. It’s a lot faster for a start.
Me: To be fair, the original version would be a lot slower than this. This is three hours edited down to thirty minutes.
Sue: Can we watch all of them like this? It would save us a lot of time.
She is convinced that the lack of moving pictures improves things because she isn’t distracted by poor camera work and flimsy sets.
Sue: I really enjoyed that. I also think it helps that these are real, historical people, and not silly cavemen or aliens.
Me: So, how do you feel about us watching more recons?
Sue: Not a problem. Bring ’em on.
‘Marco Polo’ proved to be an early turning point in the progress of the blog. When I told Sue that most of the fans I knew had never sat through a single recon, she took it as a challenge to watch more. When I told her that those fans included her own husband, she was incredulous.
Sue: Fucking hell, Neil! And you call yourself a Whovian!
Me: I don’t, actually.
Sue: Quite right too. All these years, I’ve been married to a lightweight. It’s like I don’t even know you.
In my life as a Doctor Who fan, recons had always felt like something I would get round to later. I didn’t have the patience to sit through episodes that no longer existed, especially when there were plenty that did. And in truth, reading the novelisations of missing stories was both easier and kinder; the acting, writing and carpentry of my imagination were likely to be of a far higher standard than the fuzzy, jerry-built reality.
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 13
