Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who (7 page)

Doctor Who
walked back into my life – or I walked back into
Doctor Who
– in October 1988.

Despite a pronounced lack of study and a self-imposed bout of homelessness, I had still managed to pass all my exams and had been accepted into the prestigious grove of academe that was Sunderland Polytechnic.

It was Wednesday night at 7.30 p.m. In the communal television room of my hall of residence, a handful of
freshers
had gathered to watch
Coronation Street
. Having already spent all my money for that week on subsidised beer, I took a seat, watching
Coronation Street
being marginally better than sitting alone in my room feeling homesick.

But a few minutes later, a denim-clad student in the front row stood up to change the channel. Immediately, another student, this one dressed in a bloodstained rugby shirt, stood up and changed it back. After a brief pause, Denim Man got up and changed it back again, only this time he stayed on his feet and shielded the television’s
controls
with the palm of his hand.

‘This’ was
Doctor Who
. Rugby Man looked furious but sat down, crossed his arms and waited for ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ to impress him.

I hadn’t seen an episode of
Doctor Who
since the Myrka fiasco four years earlier.

First impressions weren’t great. Did this new Doctor – Sylvester McCoy – really have to roll his ‘Rs’ quite so much? Why was his pullover covered in question marks? You can’t be much of an enigma if you have to advertise the fact, surely? Was this impish incarnation of the Time Lord brilliantly unorthodox or a complete prat? To this day I’m still not sure. And then there was the incidental music, which sounded like it had been composed by me on a ZX Spectrum.

When the programme had finished, Rugby Man stood up.

But Rugby Man was wrong. It was a little bit shit but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot.

The thing about ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ is that it had obviously been made by fans of the show. So not only did the story feature the Doctor’s deadliest enemies, it also took place in November 1963, the month
Doctor Who
was born. It even featured the same Shoreditch School from that first episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’. The show was treating its own history with a slightly stalkerish kind of affection. I was impressed. The Doctor’s new companion, Ace, wasn’t bad looking either.

I bought the latest issue of
Doctor Who Magazine
the very next day, my first since 1984. I found the issue in the
children
’s comic rack, sandwiched between
Jackie
and
Bunty
. Kneeling down to rummage through the children’s section of WHSmith felt reassuring somehow. It harked back to a
much less complicated time. I should add that I bought the
Guardian
as well.

The following week in the TV room, I faced down a
challenge
from Rugby Man, who had brought along a few burly mates to back him up. However, the majority managed to watch episode 2 of ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ in a tightly anxious silence, certain that at any minute the opposing group would rush to the front and form a scrum around the TV. As a result, as soon as the episode had finished, I was so relieved I could hardly remember anything about it. But once again, I felt like I had enjoyed it.

I may have fallen under the Doctor’s spell again because I was feeling vulnerable and homesick. Maybe I was grasping for a connection to my childhood, something reassuring that I could fall back on because my new student life was stressful and unfamiliar. And it wasn’t like I could go home – with Mum and Dad divorcing, home wasn’t really there to go to.

She’s right, of course – some things are better with the Daleks. As soon as my student grant cheque turned up the following week, I bought a second-hand portable colour
television
, and as a result I saw the Doctor blow up the Daleks’ home planet, Skaro, I grappled with the left-wing allegory of ‘The Happiness Patrol’, I thrilled to the celebratory pomp of ‘Silver Nemesis’, and tried to forget the surreal
postmodernism
of ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’, without having to worry about a challenge from the First XV. And in between all that, I even found time to lose my virginity.

When I moved into rented accommodation the following year, my flatmates couldn’t have cared less about
Doctor Who.
Not that they ever mocked it – that would have required them giving it a second thought. They didn’t even comment when I hung a poster of Tom Baker and some Sontarans on the door to my room (a free gift with
Doctor Who
Magazine
). They probably thought I was being ironic.

So, alone in my room, I watched
Doctor Who
on my trusty portable and, without irony, I was happy.

I was happy until I saw ‘Ghost Light’.

Broadcast over three weeks in October 1989, ‘Ghost Light’ seriously messed with my head. It didn’t make any sense. Not even remotely. Not in a ‘this doesn’t make any sense and is therefore complete rubbish’ sort of way, but in a ‘this doesn’t make any sense in the same way that a David Lynch film doesn’t make sense, so it must be amazing’ sort of way.

‘Ghost Light’ was made for the video generation. It was so complex, it had to be watched again, so it could be
analysed
, dissected and, well, made sense of, I suppose. And this would have been great if I’d owned a video recorder, because analysing
Doctor Who
came naturally to me. I’d just spent a year being trained in the basics of semiotics and postmodernism, so ‘Ghost Light’ came along at
exactly
the right time. I’d even read
The Unfolding
Text and not
found it particularly silly. I knew it was possible to treat the programme as a serious subject, and if there was ever a story ripe for serious discussion, ‘Ghost Light’ was it.

But I had no one to share my theories with. Nobody wanted to discuss the mysterious life cycle of Josiah Smith and how the story’s over-arching theme of change was a metaphor for the series as a whole.
Not a single person
. Even when I was in a room filled with people who were funded by the taxpayer to talk about nothing but television morning,
noon and night, no one wanted to talk about
Doctor Who,
and that included my first serious girlfriend, Candice.

I tell a lie. There was this one time when I tried to convince Candice that the Doctor’s companion, Ace, was a feminist role model:

I do have one abiding memory of watching
Doctor Who
with Candice, though. Well, perhaps not
with
; she was in the same room as me when the final episode of the classic series was broadcast in December 1989. It was in her flat and she was packing for our Christmas break. In fact, I’m sure I missed large chunks of that episode because Candice kept asking me for my advice about which clothes to take with her. And because I was a good boyfriend, I tried to give her my
undivided
attention, even when the Doctor and the Master were engaged in a fight to the death just a few inches away from her.

This memory is tinged with sadness, though. Not just because I lost touch with Candice and the last time I heard
from her she was well on her way to becoming a
multimil-lionaire
. No, it was because when ‘Survival’, part 3 finished, and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor walked off into the sunset with Ace, I knew they weren’t coming back.

The BBC had really gone and done it. They had cancelled
Doctor Who.

And yet twenty-six years was a remarkable achievement. The show had left its mark on millions of young viewers and on the wider popular culture: the Daleks, the
Cybermen
, the TARDIS, long scarves and paper bags full of jelly babies, women running up and down corridors screaming, giant maggots, floppy green waddlefucks … and Drashigs. Who could possibly forget the Drashigs?

Doctor Who
was over. However, my life was just
beginning
. It was time to move on. I was twenty years old; perhaps the moment had at last come for me to put away childish things. So I did.

But I put them somewhere I could find them.

The first time I met Neil Perry was when he accosted me in a corridor in 1993. He was looking for someone to interview for the university’s student radio station, and because
someone
had let him down at the last minute, he was desperate. ‘Do you know anything about road movies?’ he pleaded as I passed him on my way to a semiotics seminar. The panicked look on his face made me feel sorry for him – plus I didn’t really want to go to the semiotics seminar – so I pretended I was an expert, which is when he first told me that he wanted to kiss me.

I accompanied him to a deserted classroom where he pointed a microphone at me and I told him everything I could about
Thelma & Louise
. He laughed in all the right places and he was overjoyed that he wouldn’t need to edit my interview that much. I don’t know why this made me feel special but it did. I was getting up to leave when he began bumping his gums about something else, but I wasn’t listening to what he was saying. I was much more struck by the
tone
of his voice, the way he laughed, and the passion he had for whatever it was he was banging on about; knowing Neil it was probably something pretentious. I tried to locate his accent. He didn’t seem to have an accent. That made him even more interesting.

We got to know each other better over the next few weeks, mainly because we were both heavy smokers. Whenever we
stepped out of the edit suites on the first floor of the media department for a cigarette, we seemed to bump into each other. I was finishing my final-year video project, while Neil, who had just been offered the position as a part-time lecturer in video production, was training himself to use the equipment in the room next door. He was very
nervous
about his new job; understandable really, because he didn’t know what he was doing. One day he couldn’t get his equipment to work and I had to tell him it was because he’d removed the tab from the VHS tape, which meant he couldn’t record over it any more. Seriously, who offered this numpty a job?

We were puffing away one day when Neil proudly told me that he was a ‘new man’. That’s OK, I thought, I was starting a new life and a new man was just what I was
looking
for. He was a little younger than me, and a bit of a flirt, but we really hit it off, which is surprising because we had practically nothing in common. I told him that I wanted to make furniture for a living. He told me that he was the only boy at his school who studied Home Economics because the tools in the woodwork block intimidated him. I liked football and tennis; Neil liked to read and talk. I was good with my hands; Neil was good with his head. I was divorced; Neil swore to me that he would never get married. But we made each other laugh and we both knew how to use an edit suite. Well, I did.

He didn’t even back off when I told him that I had a four-year-old daughter. I was one of the 1 per cent of single parents studying at a university, and Neil seemed genuinely interested in some of the challenges this posed – he could
be a bit patronising with it but he meant well. Most people clammed up or didn’t know what to say.

When he told me that his name was actually Neil
Perry
man
, I just laughed. He explained to me that his ex-girlfriend had been a radical feminist and it had been her idea to ditch the patriarchal part of his surname. He also told me that he was a feminist sympathiser; I thought this meant that he felt sorry for feminists. But on the plus side, if a girl could convince him to change his surname, then asking him to leave the toilet seat down shouldn’t be a problem.

The thing is, right, Neil was different from every man I’d met up to then. Most of the men in my life had been, let’s say,
butcher
than Neil, and that includes my gay
brother
, Gary. Neil was very earnest when it came to discussing gender politics, which he did a lot, but his heart seemed to be in the right place. Having said that, his hair was a mess. He had a tuft of fuzz poking out of his forehead that was one of the stupidest things I’d ever seen. He looked like a cross between a sex pest and a unicorn. I’d trained to be a professional hairdresser, so every time I spoke to him I wanted to rush at him with a pair of scissors. When I pressed him about it, he told me that he’d woken one day with some chewing gum stuck to his head. But rather than wash it out like any sane, rational, normal person, Neil had cut it out with a razor blade. Every time the hair grew back, he had to hack at it again, but sometimes he’d forget, and when he did forget I couldn’t look at him without staring at the ridiculous
thing
sprouting from the top of his head. It was especially noticeable when Neil tied his hair back in a ponytail – it was like he had one ponytail at the back and
a second, rival one at the front. I know it sounds silly but I wanted to fix it for him.

That Easter, we went to Whitby together. I was one of a number of students on a university field trip while Neil was there to look after us. This was ridiculous because Neil could barely look after himself. We had supposedly come to the seaside resort to visit some of the locations that featured in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, which we were studying in one of our classes, but everybody knew that these trips were just an excuse for a very competitive pool tournament in a pub on the quayside. Neil didn’t have a partner for the pool
tournament
, so I teamed up with him before he could find one. Sadly, he couldn’t play pool to save his life, but thanks to my misspent youth we still got to the final. I did everything I could to keep Neil away from the table as much as
possible
, but when it came to the deciding game it was his turn to pot the black. He was snookered behind the opponent’s yellow and he had given up the shot as a lost cause before he’d finished chalking his cue. I told him not to be so hasty as I pointed to the cushion at the far end of the table, which set him up for a spectacular trick shot. Not only did Neil hit the black ball, he potted it. Neil has subsequently told me that this was when he fell in love with me; I don’t blame him, that shot was sweet. Or maybe it was when I told him I’d been a contestant on
Bullseye
? I’ve asked him about it for this chapter and he says he can’t remember the precise moment because he was so drunk – but he does recall that we accidentally left two of his students behind in Whitby at the end of the night.

So, a raving feminist who looked like Jesus, who couldn’t
hold his drink, who was hopeless at pool, and who couldn’t count people back onto a bus. Yes, Neil was quite a catch. Even so, I still invited him back to my home in Hartlepool for a meal. I probably would have done it sooner but my parents had been living with me while they rented out their house to some lodgers. But this was the day they were finally moving out, and because my parents were also looking after Nicol that night, we would have the place to ourselves. I definitely wasn’t going to introduce Neil to my family until I was sure about him. You know what they say. The gentle, funny, unicorn ones are always the worst.