Introduction

Watching Doctor Who from the beginning isn’t anything new. Unless, of course, you bring your wife along for the ride…

Introduction

I blame Toby Hadoke and Rob Shearman.

I was recently reading the wonderful Running Through Corridors when I was inevitably inspired to watch the series from the beginning again. I’ve tried to do this several times before but I’ve always tended to crumble in the middle of The Sensorities, and if I ever decide to cheat and jump straight to a Pertwee then it’s usually Colony in Space that finishes me off; I’ve never dallied with the recons or the audio recordings of the missing episodes, either. In summary, I’m fairly useless when it comes to this sort of thing.

It was probably my methodology that was at fault (that and the sheer awfulness of The Sensorities, of course): I would invariably stay up late, always alone, watching a handful of Hartnells in a series of sporadic bursts, so was it really any wonder that I lost the will to live, let alone stay awake? Then I remembered John Williams telling me that Andrew Pixley successfully embarked on this journey by rationing himself to a single episode a night. He would watch it while he was having his tea.

This notion appealed to me immediately. The thought of watching the classic adventures in bite-sized chunks, accompanied by the modern equivalent of beans on toast or a boiled egg and soldiers, sounded irresistible and fertile ground for a lovely Proustian rush or two. And since there’s bugger all on the television at 7pm – unless you count The One Show, and as a rational human being I don’t – it seemed like the ideal time slot to attempt such an experiment. All I had to do was convince my wife, Susan, to let me take over the living room every teatime.

And then, entirely on a whim, I decided to push my luck even further – why not ask my wife to join me on this journey through 40-odd years of televisual history?

Rob Shearman’s attempts at persuading his partner to go with him on his quest were met with a raised eyebrow and a pitiful laugh. Toby’s fiancé did manage to sit through the odd episode at the beginning, but it wasn’t long before she dropped out too. No one could blame her.

Incredibly, brilliantly, and rather worryingly, my wife has agreed to take part in this experiment with little to no arm-twisting. She has promised to make a concerted effort to stay with it to the bitter end and she hasn’t even asked for anything in return.

Yet.

I thought this strange journey would be worth chronicling for Tachyon TV and so I asked if I could record her thoughts as a non-fan as we went along. It would be a bit like DWM’s Time Team but instead of pretending that somebody didn’t know what the hell was going on or what was coming next (including the then-editor of said magazine), you’d get the real deal.

Plus, if people begin to read and comment on these mini-reviews then I’ll be able to guilt-trip her into continuing with the experiment when we inevitably reach our first bump in the road (probably next week when we get bogged down in Thals).

top

The Background

I have subjected Sue to classic Doctor Who before. When we met in 1993 she sussed that I was a fanboy pretty quickly. It was probably when I started frothing at the mouth after I discovered that she had UK Gold back at her place; I already knew that the channel was broadcasting late night Jon Pertwee repeats (most of which I hadn’t seen since childhood).

In fact, because I’m a fan, I can confidentially pinpoint the exact day that I went back to her place and met my step-daughter for the very first time: Tuesday 13th April, 1993. I bet she can’t do that.

The Curse of Peladon Episode Two, if you’re interested.

Not that Sue watched any of these episodes with me of course; not even during our honeymoon period. Thanks to a long and complicated series of events involving her parents and some lodgers who stayed longer than expected, I had to sleep downstairs with her two dogs for the first few weeks of our relationship. Their gastric problems (the dogs, not the lodgers) threatened to drive me away on more than one occasion, but Jon Pertwee kept coaxing me back for more.

Today, Sue and I still occasionally joke that Doctor Who was partly responsible for bringing us together during the very early days of our courtship. Let’s just say the programme didn’t do our relationship any harm. Which is more than you can say for most couples.

When I moved in with Sue and her daughter, Nicol, a few months later (Monday 5th July, 1993 to be precise; you don’t easily forget the black and white opening to Invasion of the Dinosaurs) my overflowing cardboard boxes of videos, Target novels and back issues of DWM that I lugged into the hallway with me made it fairly obvious that I was more than a bit interested in this show.

It wasn’t long before I instigated an all-too-familiar gamble and casually suggested that we watch a couple of stories together. You know, just in case.

Aside: I’d already failed with the show’s intended target audience. Nicol was almost five years old but the show didn’t take with her at all. I tried everything to change her mind, and while she would laugh for hours at Jon Pertwee’s lisp she really wasn’t biting. A couple of years later she had to complete a school project on the Aztecs and even that didn’t work out. In the end I simply had to accept the fact that Tom Baker couldn’t compete with Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Sue’s memories of the classic series were pretty hazy by this point. She certainly didn’t remember the programme informing her childhood to any palpable degree, and while she was clearly familiar with its premise and iconography, it wasn’t something she’d given that much thought to before she’d met me.

And so, after many hours of careful deliberation, I decided to kick-off proceedings (aka The Conversion Process) with The Caves of Androzani. It felt closer to modern television than the rest of my VHS collection, even the episodes that were still less that five years old at the time. There was also the added bonus of an unexpected regeneration that would hopefully prove to her that the show could be unpredictable, exciting and vaguely moving.

She thought it was “OK”.

A few days later, I wheeled out the big guns and we sat through Genesis of the Daleks in a single sitting.

She loved it. I had to rub her feet throughout Parts Three to Five but it was worth it.

Knowing me, I probably pushed my luck and followed the merest hint of appreciation with something edgy and bleak like Ghost Light or Kinda, but my memory gets a little fuzzy at this point. I do remember she would occasionally acquiesce to us watching the odd UK Gold repeat together (I have a vivid memory of her scoffing at the Vardans in The Invasion of Time: Wednesday March 2nd, 1994 at approx 11:50pm) but nine times out of ten she would head for bed or the kitchen to make some tea or watch paint dry.

It would be another two years before she’d make another appointment to watch an episode of Doctor Who again but to her credit she’s never missed an episode since. However, while she’s certainly a fan of the new series, when I buy a classic series DVD I will invariably find myself watching it alone or Sue will use the opportunity to play with the iPad, occasionally glancing up to tut at a Voord or frown at a Krynoid. Every now and again I might persuade her to watch a DVD extra that’s been directed by Ed Stradling, but on the whole I’ve tried to inoculate her against my passion for the show.

Not that she’s ever sneered at the programme. Sue has never told me to secrete my videos or books away in the attic; she’s bought plenty of Doctor Who themed tutt for me over the years; she would never chide me for wearing a T-shirt with Tom Baker beaming out from it, and she even rang him up on QVC once to baffle him with a question about Big Finish (that I was too scared to ask myself), even though she didn’t have the faintest idea who or what Big Finish was (or is).

In summary, she’s tolerant of the old series but she’s not a fan by a very long chalk. She definitely couldn’t tell a Patrick Troughton-era Cybermen from a Peter Davison one, as a recent trip to ASDA sadly proved.

She does like her science fiction, though, and unless she’s been lying through her teeth for the past 18 years, she’s enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation (she liked Data a bit), Babylon 5 (she fancied Bruce Boxleitner a lot) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (we have a dog named after the eponymous heroine). More recently, she’s been an avid viewer of Battlestar, Caprica, Fringe, The Walking Dead and Lost.

Oh, and she’s lovely. Did I mention that?