Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (10 page)

The result was a series of amateur fan videos like
Wartime
, which saw U.N.I.T.’s Sergeant Benton confront his haunted past;
Shakedown
, which featured Sontarans battling the cast of
Blake’s 7
; and
Downtime
, where the Brigadier took on the Yeti for the third and final time. And these videos didn’t have to include the words ‘Time’ or ‘Down’ in the title, either. For example, in
The Airzone Solution
, four actors who have played the Doctor team up for an edgy eco-thriller, although it’s probably best remembered – or forgotten – for the bit
where Colin Baker climbs into bed with Nicola Bryant for a quick fumble, something that definitely never happened in ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, though no less frightening.

These videos were not very good – some of them were barely legal – but none of them were as shameful as ‘
Dimensions
in Time’. The books, comics and videos were produced by the fans for the fans.
Doctor Who
was the thing that nobody liked, least of all the BBC; nevertheless we cherished it, we nurtured it, and we ultimately spent a fortune on it. But it was worth every penny because, for better or worse,
Doctor Who
belonged to us now.

Which is when the BBC decided to take it back.

Of course I hate the things that most people hate – injustice, world hunger, the Liberal Democrats – but there is a special place in hell reserved for mayonnaise. ‘Mayo’ is the bane of my existence. In fact, I have thought about forming a lobby group called ‘Hold the Mayo’ to get it outlawed. It’s not just that I don’t like it; the horrible gunk is
everywhere
. Imagine that you fancy a sandwich but you don’t want it smothered in liquefied egg. Now look at the choices you have left. If you’re lucky, you might find a packet of Simply Ham at the back of the chiller. The sandwich company is basically
saying
, if you don’t like mayonnaise, you can’t be trusted with anything else – tomatoes, say, or a little bit of salad. It’s an outrage.

I appreciate this may seem rather trivial to those of you who are fighting homophobia or racism – or who don’t buy your sandwiches from the all-night garage – but as far as I’m concerned, this blatant pro-mayo discrimination is, to quote Bender from Matt Groening’s
Futurama
, the worst kind of discrimination: the kind against me.

I hate New Year’s Eve. I feel like it’s my duty as a human being to at least try to have a good time. But it’s freezing cold outside; you can’t book a taxi; all the decent parties sold
out months ago; post-Christmas ennui is in full effect; and on the stroke of midnight, drunks will attempt forcibly to kiss you on the lips. If I want that, I can get it at home. And all that palaver to usher in the gloomiest month of the year.

The worst New Year’s Eve of all was Millennium Eve. We hadn’t planned on going out that night – I thought I’d be too busy avoiding planes dropping out of the sky to party like it was 1999 – but when I realised that a computer bug wasn’t going to bring civilisation to its knees after all, I felt we ought to at least make an effort to mark the big occasion. We had plenty of bottled water and tinned fruit under the stairs but no alcohol. So we got into Sue’s car and headed for Newcastle, thinking we might see some fireworks. No such luck. Tickets for the Quayside had sold out weeks ago so we stood shivering on the outskirts of the city with the rest of the cheapskates, staring up at an empty sky. It was cold, overcrowded and anti-climactic, but cold, overcrowded and anti-climactic in a special, once-in-a-millennium sort of way.

The most memorable moment was when, on the stroke of midnight, someone in the crowd proposed to their
girlfriend
. I’ll never forget his words to her after she’d slapped him across the face: ‘It’ll be another thousand years before I ask you again, you bitch.’

Sue loves Michael Bublé. She won’t stop playing his
sanitised
, soulless pop at me, no matter how much I plead with her to turn it off. Everywhere I turn, he’s there: in the car, in the kitchen, the garden, the bathroom and, if Sue had her way, our bedroom too. The chubby-cheeked crooner has
been compared to Frank Sinatra by people who don’t know what they are talking about. Bublé is to Sinatra what a Care Bear is to a grizzly, only even more irresistibly punchable. Given half a chance, I would cheerfully smack him in the face myself. I just haven’t met him yet.

The tagline for the third sequel to the best film ever made is: ‘This time it’s personal’. When I saw it – alone – in
Coventry
’s ABC cinema in 1987, that’s exactly how it felt to me: personal. In much the same way that finding out someone had eaten your cat with mayonnaise would feel personal.

Jaws 4
is so bad it makes
Jaws 3
look like
Jaws 2
. The sequels prior to this one had been exponentially dire; surely the bottom of the yellow barrel had been scraped with the previous film, which had been made in 3D. But no. The movie begins when Chief Brody dies – off-screen – from a cardiac arrest, a clogged artery succeeding where two giant sharks had failed. Nonetheless, his widow Ellen blames the Great White for her husband’s demise, convinced that it is pursuing a bloody vendetta against her and her grieving family. (NB This is the actual plot. It grows less credible from there.)

The film is set in the Bahamas and stars Michael Caine as a cheeky, Michael Caine-ish airline pilot. Caine is fond of
saying
that although he knew
Jaws 4
was going to be a terrible film, he very much enjoyed the house it built. Of course, as a
Jaws
completist – and notwithstanding the fact that I hate it – I own three copies of
Jaws 4
, as part of various VHS and DVD box sets, which means every time I buy another
copy, I am probably helping redecorate the bathroom of that house. I am literally a hostage to Michael Caine’s fortune.

I smoke a pack of Marlboro Lights every single day. If I’m stressed, which is most of the time, I’ll break open a second pack. I
hate
the fact that I’m writing this paragraph with a cigarette dangling from my lips. What I hate even more is that if you took this fag away from me, I’d curl up in the corner of the room and cry. I’m going to stop smoking just as soon as I finish this book. No, that is a lie. Who am I kidding? I’m going to smoke until I die and then be
cremated
so someone else can inhale me. You know, to give something back.

The problem is I desperately need the cigarettes to help me cope with …

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Ninety minutes later …

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.