Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (17 page)

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.

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.

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 article 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.
  
• 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.

Some readers were annoyed by what they perceived as political bias. A few commentators suggested that Sue had a chip on her shoulder:

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:

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.

One morning, however, I had to give her a slightly
different
answer:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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’?

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 Muppet than Monster. Sadly, for some of our readers, this score wasn’t nearly high enough:

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.