Free Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who by Neil Perryman Page B

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.
    Sue: I know you are going to kill me for saying this, but the speech at the end sounded like it was cobbled together at the last minute. Sorry.
    Me: I really like it. It’s optimistic.
    Sue: I can see why you were upset about
Doctor Who
finishing at this point. Just when it was good again. It also explains why you were still banging on about it when I met you. I’ll never be a fan, but they shouldn’t have stopped it there.
    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.

Part Two
    Fan love is not like real love. Fan love never dies.
    – TOM BAKER, THE FOURTH DOCTOR

Sue’s Chapter
    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 westepped 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.