And I wish Neil would pass through a CVE
Then it would be just sweet Susan and me
The Wife in Space – la la la la la la (and repeat)
If you’re not a Doctor Who expert, a CVE is a charged vacuum emboitment, which is just a fancy way of describing a large hole in space. Anyway, if you were to pass through a CVE, you’d end up in a completely different universe, and that’s where this budding singer/songwriter wanted me to go, so he could make a move on my wife.
The song was accompanied by a video* but I hesitated before I showed it to Sue.
I wasn’t sure how she’d react to a young man in his early twenties crooning his affection for her, especially when he had taken the trouble to source a photograph of her from the internet, which he was now stroking seductively during the song’s middle-eight. I was probably worried that she might like it.
If that wasn’t unsettling enough, a few weeks later, Sue received an email from somebody very high up in the university where we both worked. When she saw the email’s subject line – ‘The Wife in Space’ – she thought she was in trouble for being too sweary on a blog, but it was much, much worse than that. Sue’s fans were crawling out of the woodwork, and her biggest fan just happened to be related to someone who worked at the same campus as us. According to this email, our colleague’s son was obsessed with Sue and he wouldn’t stop talking about her. It was Sue this, Sue that, morning, noon and night. Sue thought the email was going to warn her to lock her office door for the foreseeable future, but what the father was proposing was even stranger: a meeting with him and his wife so Sue could help them arrange the perfect Christmas treat for their son.
We agreed to meet Sue’s biggest fan’s parents in her office one Friday afternoon in December. What else were we going to do? His dad was very high up in the university. However, as she shook their hands, Sue unexpectedly blurted out:
Sue: You can tell your son that they’ve found two missing episodes of Doctor Who. He’ll love that. Which ones are they again, Neil?
Me: I’ve forgotten.
Sue: No, you haven’t.
Me: They lost them again. It’s very tragic.
Happily, the parents didn’t seem to care. They were chatty and friendly. Would Sue mind autographing a selection of Christmas presents they had bought for their son? This bundle of delights included a T-shirt, a calendar, some DVD covers and, most bizarre of all, a handwritten invitation from Sue asking their son to join her for a coffee the next time he was in town. She signed them all.
Before the parents left, they took some photos as a memento of our meeting. Funnily enough, I don’t appear in any of them.
*
Unlike the Miserable Git, the Scruffy Drunk went out in a blaze of glory. His final ten-part story, ‘The War Games’, scored an impressive 9 out of 10, and if you’d have told me at the start of our quest that Sue would have sat through a ten-part black-and-white story and given it a score like that, I wouldn’t have believed you. Actually, I still don’t believe it.
It took Sue nine months and three weeks to watch Doctor Who’s black-and-white years. We could have had a baby together in the same amount of time – William Patrick Perryman, perhaps – and I’m sure it would have been less stressful. But it was at this point in the experiment that I knew for certain that my wife would definitely make it to the end, even if I didn’t. If she could sit through all the black-and-white episodes, including the ones that didn’t exist any more, then the next phase of the experiment should be easy – things were about to get exciting. U.N.I.T.! Sea Devils! Drashigs! And the real caped crusader himself – Jon Pertwee!
Me: Are you looking forward to Jon Pertwee?
Sue: No, I’m dreading it. I have very vivid memories of him driving around in a stupid yellow sports car and I hated him. It was difficult to take him seriously.
Me: Why?
Sue: Because he looked like my mam.
* www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM1-8LqFYzU (if he hasn’t taken it down in shame yet).
Colgate
I can count the number of famous people I’ve met on one hand, and by famous I mean my mum has heard of them. Two of these encounters were work-related: I had to show the film producer David Puttnam and the journalist Kate Adie around the university once, while the third occurred when the Green Cross Code man came to my school in 1983 to promote road safety and The Return of the Jedi (and not necessarily in that order). I asked David Prowse if he really was Luke Skywalker’s dad, and the barefaced liar told me that he wasn’t.*
However, if there’s famous, there’s also Doctor Who-famous. Now, my mother might not recognise them but if I had to talk to, say, Paul Cornell or Graeme Harper, then I’d experience exactly the same sense of tongue-tied awkwardness I’d feel if I had to talk to George Clooney or Steven Spielberg – well, maybe not as bad as that. The point is, I would probably be able to chat to them normally as long as nobody mentioned Doctor Who.
If you are a Doctor Who fan, it is comparatively easy to meet your idols and put the fear of God into them. I once accidentally spent half an hour in the company of Wendy Padbury, who played the Second Doctor’s companion, Zoe, over forty years ago and still has to suffer the attentions of over-excited middle-aged men. Wendy was smoking at the time, as was I. I recognised her immediately. However, I didn’t want Wendy to think that I was just another sad Whovian with only one thing on his mind so I made polite small talk about the weather and the rising costs of pet insurance instead. Wendy was delightful, and she gave me some very sage advice about fixed-rate mortgages, but by the time she finally got up to leave, I was exhausted. But I had done it. I had got through it without once mentioning the D-word.
Wendy: Goodbye. It was lovely to meet you.
Me: Bye, Zoe! Sorry, shit, I mean Wendy. Sorry!
This partly explains why I didn’t go to a Doctor Who convention until I was well into my thirties. Also, I couldn’t see the point of them. Why would I pay to listen to actors and directors telling the same stories that I’d already read in magazines and books a hundred times before? But in 2003, the year Doctor Who celebrated its fortieth anniversary, a convention called Panopticon announced that every surviving Doctor would be in attendance at the Metropole Hotel, London, in November to mark the special occasion. It sounded like an opportunity too good to miss.
The first thing that struck me when I walked into the lobby of the Metropole wasn’t the home-made Dalek bumping into the furniture, or even Mr Bronson from Grange Hill posing for a photograph with the concierge. No, it was the line of beautiful women standing at the check-in desk. I’d never seen so many gorgeous women assembled in one place before. Seriously, these women were stunning.
Sue: OK. I get it. Move on.
These women were supermodels.
Sue: Yes, OK, we get it.
No, a supermodel convention was taking place in the same hotel, in parallel with ours. So one half of the hotel was full of beautiful women while the other half, well, wasn’t. There wasn’t a great deal of crossover between these two events, although this didn’t stop several guests from my side of the divide from trying. If one of the supermodel panels that weekend had been a master class in how to avoid being chatted up by men who liked to punch well above their weight, then they certainly had ample opportunity to put what they learned into practice every time they went to the bar.
I can’t speak for the supermodels but the convention I attended was a disaster. Three out of five surviving Doctors failed to materialise, while the absence of an event timetable meant it was practically impossible for anyone there to locate any of the panels they wished to attend and/or avoid. Couple this to the fact that it cost more money to buy a pint of lager than it did to buy a Tom Baker action figure from the dealer’s room, and that the cashpoint in the lobby had been hacked so when you got home you discovered that your bank account had been emptied, and my overall impression of conventioneering was that it was an expensive, and frankly disappointing, hobby, one I had
been entirely justified in avoiding for the previous thirty-odd years.
But at least I got through that weekend without having to speak to anyone who might make me feel nauseous and inadequate, other than the supermodels. The closest I got was when I accidentally held a door open for Paul McGann. I couldn’t believe it. He was tiny.
*
Although I have never spoken to a Doctor, a Doctor has spoken to me. Well, I say, spoken. Attacked is more accurate.
I blame Issue 1 (of 1) of the Tachyon TV Fanzine. It was 2006 and the website of the same name was still soldiering on, mainly thanks to my friends John Williams and Damon Querry. We had decided that it might be fun if we transformed our digital fansite into an old-fashioned printed fanzine. It would be a one-off homage to a simpler time, when expressing your love for a television programme had more to do with Letraset and glue than HTML coding and CSS style sheets. The finished fanzine was a light-hearted and affectionate celebration of Doctor Who and its funny little ways. It included reviews, its very own Agony Aunt, a pin-up poster of Adric and even a couple of songs. We were so proud of it, we decided we would hand out free copies at a local Doctor Who convention in Stockton-on-Tees. John and Damon drove to the hotel on the Friday night with hundreds of copies bundled in the boot of their car. I planned to join them in the morning and help distribute them.
John texted me just as I was climbing into bed:
Just gave Colin Baker a copy of the fanzine.
This was unexpected. Colin Baker wasn’t supposed to be at the convention. I texted back:
You gave Colin the fanzine? Are you INSANE?
John may have been too drunk to remember what was in our fanzine, but I wasn’t. I knew its contents inside out, specifically the cheap joke on page 17 about Colin Baker’s weight. It was a barely legible 6-point headline on the cover of an imaginary back issue, but it was there all right:
COLIN BAKER: THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND A TRAY OF DOUGHNUTS
I don’t know who came up with this joke. It’s not remotely amusing, is it? All I know for sure is that it wasn’t me. I also remember thinking at the time that no possible harm could come of it because Colin wouldn’t be at the convention, and I doubted that he collected Doctor Who fanzines in his spare time, so the chances of him seeing the offending remark were slim.
The next morning, after a sleepless night, I arrived at the convention hotel to find John and Damon sitting in the ballroom, waiting for the first panel of the day. They looked a little the worse for wear, but that didn’t stop me from chastising them for their spectacular lapse of judgement the night before.
John: Calm down. Colin won’t read it. And even if he did, he’d need an electron microscope to find anything that might upset him. Relax. Anyway, it was Damon’s fault. He made me do it.
The first panel of the day wasn’t supposed to be anything special – a couple of guest actors with small parts in the new series according to the convention timetable – so when I saw Colin Baker striding purposefully towards the stage with something rolled up under his arm, I knew that something had gone terribly wrong. And I wasn’t just talking about the timetable. Colin didn’t look very happy when he took his seat, and the interviewer’s first question didn’t improve his mood.
Interviewer: Do you like your fans, Colin?
Colin Baker: It’s funny you should say that. I love the fans, and I have a great deal of time for them, as you well know. However, every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of an individual who says he’s a fan, when in actual fact he’s nothing more than a parasite.
When Colin spat out the word ‘parasite’, I could sense John’s back straightening in the chair next to mine.
Colin: Take last night, for example, when some blithering idiot came up to me at the bar …
I glanced at John. John didn’t glance back.
Colin: … and he gave me this.
Colin held up a copy of our fanzine for the crowd to inspect. It looked like it had been scrunched up and thrown across the room a few times.
Colin: This so-called fan-zine is a disgrace. Childish, undergraduate humour from cover to cover. Yes, ‘The Twin Dilemma’ isn’t the best Doctor Who story ever made. How original! I’ve put on some weight. Big deal! Is that the best you can do? Look, if you don’t like the programme, don’t watch it. Don’t spend so much time and energy slagging it off. Do something productive with your sad and pathetic lives instead.
The crowd applauded. John joined in.
John: Quite right too!
A woman sitting two rows in front of us stood up and cheered. I sank into my chair as the applause swelled. Two more fans stood up. Flaming torches were lit and smoke alarms starting going off.
I sat through the rest of Colin’s panel in stunned silence and when it was finally over, I sheepishly turned to my friends to confirm that I hadn’t imagined it and a bona fide Doctor had just slagged us all off. John shrugged his shoulders. Damon had obviously been crying.
*
This put me off conventions for a while, especially conventions that Colin might turn up to (and he turned up to a lot). We tried to make ourselves feel better by selling the last remaining copies of the fanzine online and we donated the proceeds to a charity that Colin was the patron of, but I don’t think Damon ever fully recovered from the haranguing he received that morning; he adored Colin. I still occasionally wake in the middle of the night with the ex-Doctor’s words ringing in my ears and John refuses to discuss the incident. I suspect – I hope – that Colin hasn’t given it a second thought.
However, back in the present, with the experiment well under way, I began to think that it might be fun to expose Sue to the special thrills of the convention circuit. So meet me back here after the next chapter and I’ll tell you about something even worse.
* I also went to the same school as Clive Owen, but he was three years older than me so we only ever shared assemblies and fire drills, and he wasn’t exactly famous back then either, except amongst the girls in the lower sixth.
The Pompous Tory and the Mad One
I feared Stockholm syndrome might be setting in when Sue gave Jon Pertwee’s debut story a perfect ten. Perhaps she was missing her mum.
Sue: It was four parts long and it was in colour. If all the Pertwee stories are like this, we’ll be fine.
The routine we had settled into went something like this:
After confiscating Sue’s mobile phone, I press the Play button on the PS3 with a cigarette in one hand and a notebook in the other. Nine times out of ten I have to pause the episode straight away to let the dog out – the theme music has an unsettling effect on Buffy – and then I’ll make notes in shorthand as Sue rattles off her increasingly outrageous theories about the Time War. Every so often, I will pause or rewind the DVD to make sure that Sue hasn’t missed anything important, which means, on average, that a twenty-five minute episode takes us forty-five minutes to watch. And then we do it all over again the next night. And the night after that. And the night after that …
I began to fantasise about watching episodes of any television programme other than Doctor Who: Babylon 5, I, Claudius, even Downton Abbey. And I was worried I was developing early onset RSI from constantly tapping out ‘Is it the Master?’ But Sue was indomitable.
Sue: I thought you said you liked Doctor Who.
Give it a rest, love, I thought.
*
‘Is it the Master?’
Because Sue was an avid viewer of the new series of Doctor Who, she knew that the Doctor’s arch-enemy was a rogue Time Lord called the Master. And because she knew that the Master had been the Doctor’s arch-enemy for many years, if anyone even remotely villainous or suspicious or bearded appeared in an episode, she became convinced it was him, and was always disappointed when it wasn’t. This reached its nadir during the ‘The Mind Robber’, because in that story the villain is called the Master – but he’s just a Master and not the Master.
The definitive articl
e finally showed up at the beginning of Jon Pertwee’s second season in ‘Terror of the Autons’, but because he then proceeded to appear in practically every Third Doctor story thereafter, usually in disguise, the refrain ‘Is it the Master?’ never really went away. It was endearing at first, in a naïve sort of way, but it drove me mad towards the end. I began to suspect that Sue was doing it on purpose. She alternated between ‘Is it the Master?’ and ‘Is it the Great Intelligence?’ for the last few stories, which was even more annoying because it took longer to type.
However, Master-spotting wasn’t the only thing that obsessed Sue. As the blog continued a series of recurring themes and motifs began to creep into her commentary:
Wood. One of my biggest challenges in this experiment was keeping Sue’s attention on the plot if a fine oak table or shabby-chic cabinet appeared in shot. No matter how lively the dialogue or convoluted the action, if Sue spotted some Shaker carpentry, everything else went out of the window. To Sue, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ will always be ‘The one with the lovely antique furniture’.
Terry fucking Nation. Terry Nation became famous for inventing the Daleks and infamous for re-writing their initial adventure ‘The Daleks’ over and over again in subsequent stories. Sue wasn’t a fan of Terry’s derivative scripts. Whenever she spotted his name in the opening credits, she would bellow ‘Terry fucking Nation!’ at the screen and threaten to watch the episode in complete silence. This might have saved me from an awful lot of typing but it would have resulted in some very uneventful blog updates.
An over-reliance on hypnotism to forward the plot. Mesmerism was used so frequently in the programme, Sue decided to blame it on me, and it wasn’t long before she was throwing cushions in my general direction whenever somebody fell under the bad guy’s spell. This only stopped after I hypnotised her into forgetting that hypnotism annoyed her so much.
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 15
