Not for kids! When I told her that some of the most violent episodes were broadcast before 6 p.m., she opined that perhaps Mary Whitehouse had had a point. At twenty years’ distance, she also thought I had a cheek for trying to ban Nicol from watching The Breakfast Club when, if I’d have had my way, she would have been watching brains splattering on floors, faces melting off, and hands being squashed to a bloody pulp.
The Time War. Because Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant couldn’t stop emoting about some terrible war that wiped out both the Daleks and the Time Lords, and because those events must have taken place before the new series started, Sue expected to see the conflict played out in the classic series. Poor Sue.
However, what obsessed Sue the most about the Third Doctor (aside from the fact that he was the spitting double of her late mother) was his politics.
Sue: You know what, Neil? He’s such a pompous Tory. I bet this Doctor hangs around gentlemen’s clubs, drinking brandy and being a twat.
Me: Unless he’s acting, of course.
Sue: If this was Patrick Troughton, maybe. But look at Pertwee – he always dresses like he’s on his way to a Masonic Lodge. I’m going right off him.
Some readers were annoyed by what they perceived as political bias. A few commentators suggested that Sue had a chip on her shoulder:
She goes on so often about poshness that it would be easy to wonder if she’s someone in denial or for anyone to wonder if she’s flaunting her politics. I don’t think it’s political on Sue’s part but rather an outlet for her frustrated social ambitions at finding herself married to a man who spends his cash on Doctor Who DVDs instead of silk antimacassars and mother-of-pearl bathroom fittings.
She told me she didn’t care, although whenever I published one of her reviews, she’d always ask me the following question over breakfast:
Sue: Do the fans hate me yet?
I assured her that most of them didn’t and even when they did disagree with her – which happened quite a lot – most of them took it in good spirits.
Sue: That’s nice. Not that I’d care if they did hate me.
One morning, however, I had to give her a slightly different answer:
Sue: Do the fans hate me yet?
Me: Most of them don’t. Somebody did call you a sour-faced c**t last night though.
Sue: WHAT?
Shortly after this, Sue agreed to let me take her to the Doctor Who Experience in London, a high-tech exhibition of costumes, props and special effects from the programme. It was the closest I could get her to Longleat. While she studied the exhibits and tried to look interested in the vintage 1980s TARDIS console, I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.
Sue agreed to have her photo taken in the green-screen studio. I thought that a photo of her stuck in the Pandorica would result in an amusing image for the website – I could pretend that this was how I made her watch Doctor Who every night. So she sat in the prison and the photographer asked her to smile …
Sue: I can’t. I’m supposed to be bored and fed up.
Photographer: Because you’ve been trapped in a box for untold millennia?
Sue: No, because my husband is making me watch Jon Pertwee.
The only occasion on which Sue didn’t want to watch Doctor Who with me was when one of our cats, Captain Jack, came down with a serious urinary tract infection and she couldn’t give ‘Frontier in Space’ her undivided attention just in case he had a wee and killed himself. But we kept going. Sue rarely complained and never flagged. That said, all she had to do was sit in front of the television for twenty-five minutes, swearing and criticising the joinery, whereas for me the experiment was rapidly becoming a full-time job: taking notes, transcribing the notes, choosing the right images, moderating the comments, publicising the blog, getting into arguments on internet forums – it never seemed to end.
Gary agreed to return for more abuse by appearing in an audio commentary for the tenth anniversary story, ‘The Three Doctors’. Nicol also joined us for this commentary. We’d come a long way since that time I tried to make her watch Doctor Who with me all those years ago in Christopher Street. She was still bored senseless, of course, that much hadn’t changed, but because she was now a young woman with a first-class degree in mathematics, instead of sighing and yawning she took the programme to task for setting a story in an anti-matter universe, when anti-matter universes are, as everybody knows, a scientific impossibility. It was in this capacity that she became, somewhat against her will, the blog’s Scientific Advisor.
Me: They tried to send three Doctors but one of them got stuck in a time eddy.
Nicol: A time eddy? A turbulent eddy?
Sue: What’s a time eddy?
Nicol: It’s just a timey-wimey spinney thing, Mam.
Sue: You sound like Matt Smith.
Nicol: Do they actually refer to it as an anti-matter universe?
Me: Yes.
Nicol: I’m not happy with that term. That term is not correct. It doesn’t make any sense.
Me: What do you think, Gary?
Gary: Sorry, I was miles away.
It is official: Sue’s favourite classic series Doctor is the Third. After we completed our journey, and I told Sue that the Pompous Tory had averaged the highest score of all the Doctors, she accused me of fiddling the figures like George Osborne. But the statistics speak for themselves (see the Average Score by Doctor chart in Appendix 3), and even though the science in our experiment was never meant to be taken that seriously – who was going to peer review it? – it did prove one thing: you can still enjoy Doctor Who even if you hate the Doctor so much you’d like to replace him with his arch-enemy.
Sue: I think I’d prefer to see the Master working with U.N.I.T. He should swap roles with the Doctor. I’m always disappointed when we cut back to Pertwee gurning in a chair.
*
It never really upset me that Sue thought the Third Doctor was a Pompous Tory. However, as we approached the point where Jon Pertwee would regenerate into Tom Baker, I began to grow apprehensive. What would happen if Sue hated the Fourth Doctor? What if she didn’t like ‘The Seeds of Doom’? If I couldn’t be friends with someone who didn’t like Jaws, how could I possibly stay married to a woman who didn’t like Tom Baker?
When I watch Tom Baker’s Doctor, I partly watch him from my childhood. This is why there will always be a special place in my heart for ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’, even though Sue is technically correct to describe it as ‘a load of old rubbish’. Unlike me, Sue didn’t bring any nostalgia with her to this experiment. She took each Doctor as she found him. In the case of Tom:
Sue: Look at his eyes, Neil. He just looks mental. Is that what you all call him? The Mad One?
I knew my childhood hero wouldn’t let me down and he didn’t. Take the Mad One’s second adventure ‘The Ark in Space’. How could anyone not love ‘The Ark in Space’?
Sue: It’s bubble wrap painted green. There’s no getting round that.
Me: You have to remember that bubble wrap was quite exotic in 1975. Give them a break.
Sue: You never got this defensive when I criticised the monsters in Jon Pertwee’s stories.
Me: Yes, but this is an incredible performance from Kenton Moore. Look at the anguish etched into his face. It’s incredible!
Sue: He looks like Rod Hull practising with Emu in his bedroom. But full marks to the actor. He managed to bang his hand on that desk without popping it.
Me: What about Tom?
Sue: Does Tom Baker ever blink? I don’t think I’ve seen him blink. He’d be good against the Weeping Statues in the new series.
Me: Is that it?
Sue: OK, I admit it. He’s brilliant.
But everything kicked off when we reached ‘Terror of the Zygons’. Now Sue enjoyed ‘Terror of the Zygons’ and she awarded it a perfectly respectable 7, which I think is charitable for a story that features some thinly veiled racism towards the Scots and a creature which is more Loch Ness Mup
pet than Monster. Sadly, for some of our readers, this score wasn’t nearly high enough:
No No No. Enough with the less than funny insults etc. – you need to start appreciating WHEN this was made and WHO its intended audience was for (sic)! The monster does the job, the Zygons are bordering on the BEST that WHO has come up with … basically this story is bordering on the best the doctor offers … it’s a mighty 9/10 … aside from Pyramids, Talons, City … there’s little else to touch it. I’ve followed this site for a while but going by your recent lacklustre scores for some classic episodes I’m afraid my experiment stops here!
Comments were moderated on the blog, so if anyone posted something from an IP address that I didn’t trust or recognise, their message would sit in my inbox, awaiting my approval. This usually meant that I would spend my mornings wading through the reams of abuse that had been posted in the middle of the night (and it was always the middle of the night). The ‘sour-faced c-word’ comment wasn’t the worst insult by a long chalk, and there are one or two messages that I will never let Sue read as long as I live. I wanted – and still want – to protect her. Plus I felt guilty. I was the one who had convinced her to do this insane thing in public, and while I never set out to make everybody love my wife, I didn’t expect anyone to hate her either.
Sue said she didn’t care, but I did, and that’s why, in the wake of ‘Terror of the Zygons’, I put the experiment on hold for a few days. Other People were ruining it, like Other People tend to do; I was up to almost two packs of cigarettes a day. Sue told me to take the criticism on the chin. I told her that it wasn’t just her scores they were criticising – they were running her down for misidentifying Land Rovers as well.
There aren’t any Land Rover Defenders! The Defender title and badge was only introduced in 1991: a re-badging of the ‘Land Rover Ninety’ and the ‘Land Rover One Ten’. The ones seen here are probably Series III Land Rovers, as they are very similar to the Ninety One/One Ten/Defender!
For the first and only time, Sue apologised.
*
Nicol baked a cake for the 100th story, ‘The Stones of Blood’. Funnily enough, they were going to shoot a scene with a birthday cake back in 1978 when ‘The Stones of Blood’ was filmed, but the producer thought it was too self-indulgent and cut it (the scene, not the cake). I had no such qualms and encouraged Nicol to conjure up a sponge in the shape of a sacrificial stone circle, with lumps of grey icing for the stones, red icing for the blood and a crow made from marzipan. As far as themed cakes go it was a bit niche but still delicious with a cup of tea.
I photographed Nicol’s cake as it took shape and I posted a step-by-step pictorial on our blog’s Facebook page. I never thought for one moment that posting images of my stepdaughter icing a cake would cause such a uproar, but what I didn’t realise at the time was that for some of our readers, Nicol wasn’t just the blog’s Scientific Advisor, she was an attractive young woman who baked Doctor Who-themed cakes and could discuss the second law of thermodynamics and anti-matter universes with you, i.e. total nerdbait. As a consequence of this, these photographs attracted a great deal of comment, three marriage proposals, four recipe requests and another troubling song:
I just want a girl who likes Who
Who’s as pretty and as smart as you
And if I get bored I could always cheat on you with Nicol
She’s nearer my age
It takes courage for a man to tell someone that he wants to sleep with their wife and stepdaughter. But to do it in a song? That takes balls of steel. Sue received the risqué lyrics in good humour. Nicol, on the other hand, considered taking down her Facebook profile and changing her name.
Nicol: I should change it to John Smith or something. That would put them off.
Me: It might make it worse, Nic.
One of our most loyal followers was a man called Glen Allen. Glen used to be the continuity announcer on UK Gold, and when I first visited Sue’s home in Christopher Street in 1993, it was Glen’s voice that I heard coming out of her television set when she snogged my face off and I missed ‘The Curse of Peladon’. So when Glen began submitting wonderfully inventive audio trailers for the blog, it felt like kismet. Glen’s trailers were brilliant and they quickly became an integral part of the Wife in Space project.
For his final trailer, Glen convinced Daphne Ashbrook, who portrayed the Eighth Doctor’s companion, Grace Holloway, to join in. Obviously, this was a huge thrill for me. However, every so often, Glen’s habit of contacting celebrities so they could discover what my wife had to say about them would backfire. Like the time he tweeted Sue’s review of ‘The Horns of Nimon’ to one of its stars, ex-Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis. In that particular blog entry I admitted that I used to have a crush on both her and her daughter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor. I almost fainted on the spot when she tweeted back that she’d read it. But the experience taught me something: perhaps I wasn’t any better than that cad who had been wooing Sue and Nicol. At least he could play the guitar.
*
It took us seven months to watch all of the Mad One’s stories, and Sue’s opinion of the fourth incarnation of the Doctor varied wildly from week to week as, it must be said, did Tom Baker’s performance. By the time we reached the end of Tom’s tenure, all of us looked and felt like we needed a long lie down. When the Fourth Doctor fell from the top of a radio telescope in ‘Logopolis’, I asked Nicol to bake a cake in the shape of the Pharos Project. She told me it would be much too complicated to make a radio telescope out of gingerbread, and we had to settle for a bottle of champagne and a slice of multicoloured Battenberg instead.
Sue: I feel cheated.
Me: You’re not sad, then? Not even a little bit?
Sue: I’m sad that Tom went out like that. He deserved better. And he didn’t know any of those people who were by his side when he died. He only met one of them a couple of hours ago!
Me: But he died saving the universe …
Sue: Did he? I think he let go of the telescope on purpose. He’s been in tighter scrapes than that. I think Peter Davison’s Doctor told him that he had to kill himself or the ratings would never improve.
The Woman from Hartlepool and
the Dark Dimensions
I wanted Sue to experience everything that Doctor Who could throw at her; the sights, the sounds, even the smells. The only way she was going to get a whiff of the latter would be if I took her to a convention. And that’s how we ended up at a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Newcastle for Dimensions 2012. I even took a microphone with me so I could document her experiences for a special podcast. What could possibly go wrong?
When we arrived at the hotel, I headed straight to the bar. Was 11.00 a.m. too early for a gin and tonic, I wondered, as Sue glanced furtively around the lobby.
Me: First impressions?
Sue: There are people dressed as characters from Doctor Who. There are two Peter Davisons over there – one of them could be a woman, it’s hard to tell. There’s a Tom Baker over there, and I think that’s Jon Pertwee sitting next to him. It’s very strange. I feel like I’m under-dressed.
I said nothing. Any Whovian looking at her would think she was wearing a combination of Peter Davison’s plimsolls, David Tennant’s glasses, Patrick Troughton’s checked trousers, a jacket that Lalla Ward would have looked great in, and the inevitable scarf. I bought her a G and T.
Sue: So, when do I get to meet the real thing?
Sue was particularly looking forward to a panel discussion featuring Fifth Doctor Peter Davison – or, as she referred to him, the Fit One.
Me: Peter Davison’s panel begins in less than an hour.
Sue: So, what happens at one of these panels, then? They don’t re-enact scenes from the episodes on the stage, do they? That could be embarrassing.
Me: No. The guests talk about their time on the programme, and then the audience asks them questions. It’s a bit like Inside the Actor’s Studio, but with less flattering lighting.
&nb
sp; I wanted to subject Sue to the full convention experience, and that included her asking one of the guests a question (and if I could capture this on tape for our podcast, so much the better). I decided that Peter Davison was the safest bet. He always seemed to be a thoroughly decent chap, so even if Sue did muck it up, I didn’t think he would embarrass her too much. Plus, Sue had a soft spot for Peter (she loved All Creatures Great and Small) and I thought she might get a thrill out of it.
I had a few questions lined up for Sue to ask the actor, having solicited suggestions from the Wife in Space’s Facebook community in the days leading up to the event. I’d whittled the choice down to: ‘Does anyone ever ask you to sing the theme to Button Moon?’ and ‘Why do you spell your surname with only one D?’ Some of the suggestions were very rude – Sue asking Peter Davison for his room number was a popular choice – but I was worried that if I suggested that one to her, she might agree to give it a go.
When she reluctantly raised her hand into the air during the panel’s Q&A phase, she wasn’t chosen. Instead, the first question directed to Peter was about the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, which brought the mood in the room down a notch. As the audience silently contemplated some of the atrocities committed in the bowels of BBC Television Centre, my wife leapt to her feet with her hand in the air.
Sue: Hello, Peter. On a lighter note, could you tell me what your first words in the fiftieth-anniversary special are?
Adventures with the Wife in Space Page 16
