Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (18 page)

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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 was particularly looking forward to a panel discussion featuring Fifth Doctor Peter Davison – or, as she referred to him, the Fit One.

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.

Peter had been looking rather glum after the Jimmy Savile question but he laughed at Sue’s cheekiness. Then he denied knowing anything about the fiftieth-anniversary special and looked a little bit sad again. In the bar, Sue was triumphant.

But Peter Davison was just the
Whors d’oeuvres
(see Glossary on page 259). The main dish was John Levene.

John Levene is the actor who played Sergeant Benton in
Doctor Who
between 1969 and 1976. Sue adored Benton:

• I’m warming to Benton. He’s so much better than Captain Yates. (‘The Mind of Evil’)
  
• Benton isn’t just a pretty face. (‘The Time Monster’)
  
• Good old Benton. You can always rely on Benton. I bloody love Benton. (‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’)
  
• Benton and I would get on like a house on fire. Is the actor who played Benton still alive? (‘Planet of the Spiders’)
  

When I told her that the actor who played Benton was not merely alive but would be performing his cabaret act at the convention, it sealed the deal – more than the promise of a photo opportunity with Peter Davison or a pint with Terrance Dicks. She agreed to attend Dimensions 2012. That’s how much Sue loved Sergeant Benton.

Not only was John Levene MC-ing the charity auction, he was going to sing a few selections from his new album,
The Ballads of Sergeant Benton
– ‘If I Were A Carpenter’, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ and ‘Lady in Red’. Look out Bublé! As we took our seats in the hotel’s ballroom, I noticed that several women in the audience were wearing red cocktail dresses. When I pointed this out to Sue, she removed her jacket to show off the red T-shirt she was wearing and perhaps catch John’s eye.

John bounded onto the stage to muted applause.

After this zinger, John broke the sad news that he wouldn’t be singing anything from his new album after all. He told us that the engineer who had mixed his record in LA had altered the tempo without his permission and that’s why he couldn’t do it. Sue wasn’t convinced. She thought that John was too frightened to go through with it and she felt sorry
for him. Singing or not singing, even at this stage John
Levene
could do no wrong.

But then the charity auction showed Sue a side of
Doctor Who
fandom that horrified her. John was auctioning some signed merchandise when a small boy, who couldn’t have been more than ten, got into a vicious bidding war with a man in his late forties. When the boy reached the limits of his pocket money allowance, the man continued to steamroller him. Sue told me later that she considered out-bidding him so she could donate the item to the clearly distressed child, but there was no way she was going to pay £150 for a painting of Nicola Bryant in a bikini. Meanwhile, John Levene did nothing to prevent this injustice happening. The contrast between the actor and the heroic Sergeant Benton was stark.

When John broke for an interval, I noticed Robert Dick loitering next to the exit. Robert was working at the
convention
as an interviewer and a chaperone, and because he was an avid reader of our blog I stopped to say hello. Robert asked Sue what she thought of John Levene’s act.

This disembodied voice emanated from a face that loomed out of the shadows behind Robert’s shoulder.

Sue and Michael were still chatting as I edged my wife towards the exit. As we were leaving, she promised that she would attend his panel the next morning, and I believed her. In fact she was still buzzing when we reached the hotel car park for a much-needed cigarette a few minutes later.

I smoked a cigarette and waited. And then I smoked another cigarette and waited some more. I glanced at my watch. What was taking her so long? She was supposed to record a ten-second sting for a podcast, not Michael Troughton’s life story.

I was about to light a fourth cigarette when I noticed Sue through the glass doors of the hotel lobby. It was her scarf
that gave her away. And then my heart skipped a beat. She wasn’t alone. Sue was talking to John Levene. Worse than that, she was waving a microphone in John Levene’s face. I couldn’t bear to watch, so walked round the block. When I returned five minutes later, Sue was running out of the lobby. She looked like she had seen a ghost.

My first thought: John is a big fan of the blog and he asked Sue to come back to his room.

My second thought: John is a big fan of the blog and he asked Sue to come back to his room and she turned him down.

I listened to all this with a mixture of glee and growing dismay.

I gave our room to a friend and then I gathered our things together while Sue hid in the Little Chef next door. She was still fuming about it when we arrived home an hour later. She blamed the Jon Pertwee lookalike who had put John Levene off by repeatedly shouting the word ‘Wife!’ at him, like he was deaf or something.

When I uploaded the podcast to the blog (Michael Troughton’s introductory sting was perfect), there were listeners who believed that Sue must have been drunk that night because her voice sounded ‘a bit weird’. But Sue
always sounds like that
. Even I can’t understand her sometimes. No, she was sober; what you can hear in her voice is probably heartbreak. If you meet Sue at a convention after this book comes out, just a word of warning: don’t mention John Levene or Sergeant Benton. You’ll kill it. And then she’ll kill you.