Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (20 page)

‘I thought you said you liked
Doctor Who.
’

Sue had stopped asking me this some time ago. However, it was something I now thought about every day. Even though the end was in sight, I found the last few months of the experiment the hardest of all. I even contemplated including one final list of six things as a very brief chapter in this book: Six Things I Hate About
Doctor Who

1. The theme music
   
2. The scripts
   
3. The actors
   
4. The camera work
   
5. The fans
   
6. Myself
   

We were halfway through Sylvester McCoy’s first story when Al Jazeera invited me to appear on a programme called
The Stream
to talk about
Doctor Who
. All publicity is good publicity, said Sue. So I caved in and accepted the invitation. It was only when I logged on to Skype a few minutes ahead of my scheduled appearance that I was told that I hadn’t been booked to talk about the pros and cons of subjecting your partner to your favourite television programme, and I was there to take part in a debate about the ways in which online fandom can drive civic participation.

I’m sorry …
what
?

Put bluntly, Al Jazeera wasn’t interested in my wife’s battle with
Doctor Who
– they just wanted me to tell them how I was changing the world and promoting social harmony through my website. But I wasn’t promoting social harmony; if anything, Sue and I were winding people up. My fellow guests in the symposium were to be a
My Little Pony
aficionado (for some inexplicable reason, they like to call themselves Bronies), a cosplayer (which is a fancy word for someone obsessed with fancy dress), a hyperactive academic from the University of Pennsylvania and somebody high up in The Harry Potter Alliance. And, although I was not one, I was there to speak for the Whovians.

Should I have pretended that
Doctor Who
fans are trying to make the world a better place? I knew perfectly well that most of them were only interested in making
Doctor Who
a better television programme. The best I could hope to do was muddy the waters by suggesting that the
Doctor Who
franchise was currently run by the fans themselves – the writers, directors, producers, even the actors, many of whom had grown up with the programme. The presenter didn’t believe me. In fact she obviously thought I was an unsafe interviewee and so cut me off in mid-sentence to get a more sensible point of view from the Bronie. Millions of viewers must have been left with the overwhelming impression that Whovians are selfish, uncaring fantasists. Watching myself back, I was half-inclined to agree.

The Seventh Doctor didn’t get off to the best of starts and his debut story, ‘Time and the Rani’, was awarded the only
minus score of the whole experiment; Sue described it as the worst
Doctor Who
story she had ever seen. But when McCoy found his feet, and his companion, Ace, started to blow stuff up, Sue warmed to him. She didn’t even seem to mind that the Doctor was now a manipulative schemer who didn’t have any qualms about committing genocide on a regular basis.

Sue watched ‘Ghost Light’, didn’t understand it, but enjoyed it anyway. She thought ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ was
‘bloody brilliant’, and she felt sorry for the dead dog in ‘The Happiness Patrol’. And then, as we watched the Crafty Sod’s penultimate story, ‘The Curse of Fenric’, my wife stunned me with a confession:

When the Seventh Doctor and Ace walked off into the sunset at the end of ‘Survival’ we felt euphoric, although the two bottles of champagne we consumed during part 3
probably
helped. We had done it. Twenty-six consecutive years of
Doctor Who
. Over. Finished. Complete.

Except it wasn’t quite over yet. We watched ‘Shada’ (an official recon of an unfinished Tom Baker story), the 3D
EastEnders
charity crossover ‘Dimensions in Time’, the ‘Thirty Years in the TARDIS’ documentary,
*
and the fan film ‘Downtime’ (6 out of 10 – higher than ‘The Robots of Death’). I kidded myself that I was prolonging Sue’s torment so I could replicate the feelings of despair I’d had during those years when
Doctor Who
was off the air. The truth was, now the experiment was almost finished, I didn’t want it to end.

I always assumed that I’d be overcome with feelings of
relief and joy when we finally crossed the finishing line but, over time, the journey for me became less about
Doctor Who
and more about my relationship with Sue. It was the fact that we were doing something
together
that was the important thing. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro without her; Sue built five houses with next to no help from me; I wasn’t there when Nicol was born. When we did do anything together it was always to do with work: in-joke in the middle of a departmental meeting or a rant about a new module in the car on our way home. But this had been different. We had been on the mission
together
. We were a team.

I’m not suggesting that watching
Doctor Who
all the way through saved our marriage, or anything like that, but I had, accidentally, been correct when I predicted that it might bring us closer together, because it did. The adventure we had embarked upon not only provided a fresh insight into
Doctor Who
, for me and thousands of people like me, it also reminded me that if I had to choose between the programme I love and the woman I love, I would choose Sue. Every time. The really brilliant thing was, I didn’t have to choose.

I thought about revisiting ‘Marco Polo’. A handful of readers hadn’t forgiven us for watching the condensed thirty-minute recon of this Miserable Git’s historical; and they were clamouring for us to remedy our oversight before we finished the blog. However, in the end I couldn’t go through with it. The thought of going backwards for the sake of completism seemed absurd to me. Besides, subjecting Sue to seven more black-and-white recons at this late stage would arguably have crossed the line into spousal abuse.

In a bout of cutting-edge ‘cosplay’ – thank you, Al Jazeera – we dressed up as the actors from ‘Marco Polo’ and restaged a selection of telesnaps in our living room instead. Sue’s impression of Tutte Lemkow, complete with eyepatch and stuffed monkey on her shoulder, was uncanny. Gary and Nicol joined in too, although Nicol was much too busy baking a celebratory Dalek cake to give our re-enactment her undivided attention. In the end, it would have taken us less time to watch the recon.

I also had an ace up my sleeve: ‘The Underwater Menace’, part 2. The recovered episode hadn’t been released on DVD yet, but, thanks to an anonymous benefactor, we had been sent an advance copy. ‘The Underwater Menace’ part 2 would have been the
coup de grâce
. My wife could have finished the blog knowing that she’d seen more episodes than
most of the people who read it. That would have driven a small fraction of our readership insane (the 9s and 10s who were up in the middle of the night) but, once again, I couldn’t go through with it.

I always intended to end the experiment with the first new episode of
Doctor Who
that Sue and I ever watched together, all those years ago in Christopher Street, when we were young and foolish and only weird people did things together on the internet.

Unfortunately, thanks to Russell Toughnut Davies, Sue was convinced that Paul McGann’s Doctor didn’t count. It wasn’t that the Time War had erased all traces of the Eighth Doctor from the timeline. No, a conversation between two characters in his Channel 4 drama series
Queer as Folk
had lodged itself in her brain and wouldn’t budge. It’s understandable, I suppose. There are plenty of fans, just like the one portrayed in
Queer as Folk
, who like to believe that
The TV Movie
never happened, mainly because they don’t like it when the Doctor admits
that he’s half-human on his mother’s side. And by ‘they’ I mean ‘me’.

Sue’s final commentary for
The TV Movie
is probably my favourite. For me, it’s a wonderful amalgamation of everything that made the experiment work. Sue misidentifies the Master, she becomes fixated on Grace Holloway’s wooden chairs, she doesn’t care if the Doctor is half-human, or even if he snogs a human lady. She even explained to me what a temporal orbit is, something I have been struggling to get my head around since 1996. For that, and everything else, I will always be grateful.

Sue gave the one-night stand a 9 out of 10 and lots of people cheered, including some people who hated
The TV Movie
. Yes, even me.

Over the two and a half years it took the experiment to run, Sue viewed over 350 hours of classic
Doctor Who
. Her
highest
rated Doctor was the Third; her lowest rated Doctor was the First. She loved season 24 (Sylvester McCoy) and she didn’t care very much for season 15 (Tom Baker). She didn’t cry when Adric died; she fell in love with Sergeant Benton and out of love with John Levene; she felt sorry for Colin Baker; she grew fed up of the Daleks; and her soft spot for Peter Davison remained soft. Her average score for the classic series is 5.77 out of 10.

I am satisfied with this result. A slightly above average 5.77 sounds pretty good to me. If anything, it’s a relief. If Sue’s score had been any higher, I would have been concerned. I don’t want to be married to me; I want to be married to her.

Yes, it’s sad that she’ll never experience the joy one gets from knowing that the production code for ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is ZZZ, and it’s a shame that she’ll never bid for any Weetabix cards on eBay (I’m still missing Davros), let alone a painting of Nicola Bryant in a bikini. But I’m fine with that. I never set out to turn my wife into a fan, which is just as well really, because if I had, the last two and half years would have been a complete waste of time.

Having said that, Sue’s sustained exposure to classic episodes of
Doctor Who
has had an unexpected side effect:

And what about me? What did the experiment reveal about me?

If I’m honest, there were times when I hated it; I often wished we’d never started. Sometimes I would blame the programme; sometimes it was the anonymous insults on the blog in the middle of the night; sometimes real life got in the way – we came close to throwing in the towel halfway through ‘The Moonbase’ because we had had a row over some washing-up liquid but, five minutes later, still had to
go through with the blog; and sometimes it was my ego that got the better of me. Never mind Sue, never mind someone calling themselves CloisterBalls, why wasn’t anyone interested in what
I
thought about
Doctor Who
? I’d studied for a PhD in the subject; no one cared about that. Whereas my wife couldn’t tell the difference between a Quark and a Chumbley and she had her own fanbase.
How the hell did that happen
? If only there was somewhere I could leave an anonymous insult in the middle of the night. But that outlet was not available to me.

There were even times when I imagined the blog finishing with a YouTube video which would feature me throwing my collection of
Doctor Who
DVDs onto a huge bonfire (in strict chronological order, of course) because that’s what happens when you turn something you love into an endurance test – it’s what happens to some marriages. But a week after I published Sue’s review of
The TV Movie
, I woke in the middle of the night and felt compelled to sneak downstairs to watch ‘Horror of Fang Rock’. On my own. And for the first time in almost two and a half years, I enjoyed a
Doctor Who
story for what it was: a thrilling, slightly scary, slightly ridiculous adventure in time and space – well, a lighthouse, but you get the idea. Only this time, when I watched ‘Horror of Fang Rock’, I wasn’t only reminded of what it felt like to be a frightened seven-year-old boy in Lavender Avenue, I was also reminded of what it felt like to watch it with Sue. She’s quite right, you know: the Rutan does look like a giant zit and the Doctor definitely should have stepped on it.

I would never have held it against Sue if she had given up before the end; but I also knew that would never happen.
She is special and funny and ever so slightly mad, you see, and I also knew that it didn’t matter to her if we did this thing in public or not – that was a trap I set for myself. Sue just wanted to make me happy. She must be indomitable; after all, we are still married.

And for me, this is the only result that matters. The experiment is over.