Sue: You remember how Neil only agreed to come back to my place that time so he could watch repeats of Doctor Who on UK Gold? Well the only reason he asked me to marry him in 1999 is because he thought the world was about to end. He says he became convinced civilisation was on the brink of collapse shortly after they showed that Doctor Who movie with Paul McGann. I thought he might be having a breakdown or something but he says he just really hated it. (I don’t know why, I thought it was OK.) Anyway, he says it was an article about the Millennium Bug in an in-flight magazine that did it. The one that said brilliant technologists from Silicon Valley were building shelters in the middle of the desert to prepare for the effects of a computer bug that would bring society to its knees.
Me: I completely fell for it. These were intelligent people, or at least that’s what I thought, so they had to know something we didn’t. And then the media got hold of it and everywhere you turned there were tales of impending doom, from documentaries outlining how to survive societal disintegration to scaremongering leaflets being posted through letterboxes. By the middle of December 1999 I had stockpiled enough tinned soup, bottled water and candles to survive just about anything except New Year’s Eve (see above).
Sue: And that’s why, in July, Neil decided to marry me. He thought it was only going to last six months.
Me: Which would still have been longer than your first marriage.
Sue: Fair enough.
Me: But we both know there was more to it than that. There was Nicol to consider.
*
Nicol has never called me Dad; I’ve always been Neil to her. And I’m OK with that, because she’s never once screamed, ‘You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my real dad!’ in my face either. For this and numerous other reasons, I’m a lucky man.
It’s never bothered me that Nicol isn’t my biological daughter. For example, in the unhappy event that she was diagnosed with a hereditary disease, Sue couldn’t blame me for it – result! And from my perspective, I arrived in Nic’s life at just the right time, having missed the sleepless nights, the dirty nappies and the ‘terrible twos’.
Did it take me longer to bond with Nicol because I wasn’t around to see her take her first steps or hear her first words? Probably. The truth is it took me ages to get to grips with being a responsible Neil. One minute I was an unattached, decidedly immature twenty-three-year-old, the next I was attending parent evenings, dressing up as Santa Claus and developing coping mechanisms for multiple episodes of Rugrats. But slowly we got there. In fact, I have only two regrets when I look back on Nicol’s childhood: (1) she never gave Doctor Who a fair chance, and (2) she never tested my uncertain skills as a parent.
Sue insisted that we give Nicol as much freedom as possible when she was growing up. I just kept waiting for something to go wrong. Maybe Nicol would fall in with the wrong crowd. Maybe she’d be bullied. Or maybe she actually would fall prey to a terrible illness. Nothing. Not so much as a broken bone or a bad school report. In fact, all I have are happy, carefree memories of Nicol’s childhood: our trip to Disneyland, cheering her on at sports days, taking her trick-or-treating, explaining terrorism to her (actually, that wasn’t so pleasant) and being there for her when the Spice Girls split up. And Rugrats is pretty good once you get into it.
So Nicol – and Sue – made parenthood ridiculously easy. I’d already decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with them long before I proposed. I couldn’t imagine the world without them in it – unless the world came to an abrupt end, of course. But I wasn’t crazy about the concept of marriage; I think anyone whose parents are divorced has a tendency to feel this way. Marriage was just a piece of paper, it didn’t mean anything. What finally changed my mind was Nicol.
In 1998 Sue lost her dad to cancer; her mum had passed away eighteen months earlier, doing what she loved – she was going for double top in a darts tournament and suffered a massive heart attack. For the first time, I started to worry about what might happen to Nicol if anything happened to Sue; Sue loved darts. And it dawned on me that a piece of paper can mean a lot.
So I asked Nicol if I could adopt her. And after I’d explained to her what adopt meant, she flung her arms around me and said yes. It would not be an exaggeration to describe this as the best moment of my life because it was the best moment of my life. And then I asked her if it was OK if I married her mam as well, and all she wanted to know was what colour her bridesmaid’s dress would be. When I told her she’d be changing her surname to Perryman, she wasn’t so thrilled.
Sue and I were married in a register office in Hartlepool on Friday 23 July 1999. The bride wore cream and the bridesmaid wore cream too. The registrar asked Sue to take me as her lawfully wedded wife and she agreed before he could correct himself. It’s still legally binding, I think.
Sue: I suggested Neil change his name to Perrywoman but he wasn’t having it.
*
In the summer of 2000 – the summer I feared would never come – I experienced an epiphany. I was reading a Doctor Who novel in bed one night when it suddenly occurred to me that I was thirty years old and I hadn’t read any Dostoevsky yet – seventy-one novels by Terrance Dicks, yes, but not one by Tolstoy, Hemingway or a woman.* I had to broaden my horizons before it was too late.
I never finished that Doctor Who book – which ends, I believe, with the Eighth Doctor destroying his home planet, Gallifrey (like that would ever happen in the TV series) – and when I placed it neatly on my bookshelf to gather dust I felt like the proverbial weight had lifted from my shoulders. No longer would I have to keep up with the BBC’s punishing release schedule, which left me both out of pocket and with little time to do anything else. At last, I was letting go.
One day, I sold half my Doctor Who tapes to a friend. I didn’t do this because I needed the money – in fact, I let them go cheaply. The rest of my Doctor Who VHS collection went in the attic; by the time they came back out again, the format, a bit like my passion for Doctor Who, was on the wane – or at least, at a manageable level. As Sue liked to say, I had more important things to worry about now.
Since 1993 I had been a part-time university lecturer.† My teaching career didn’t get off to an auspicious start. During my first seminar I was so nervous, I opened the camera case upside down and as a £3,000 camcorder bounced off the linoleum floor, I had to pretend that I’d done it on purpose so the students wouldn’t repeat the same mistake. Camcorder safely secured to a tripod, I thought I’d show them how to focus the camera and adjust its lens and, because it seemed to be going reasonably well, I decided to toss in a gag.
Me: And this is what we call a crash zoom. Or, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, a Dalek just turned up!
Silence.
When the students filed out of the room at the end of the lesson, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But then I noticed that one of them had stayed behind. Was he was going to complain about my teaching methods? In my nervousness, had I spoken too fast for him to keep up?
The student glanced furtively around the room, as if to make sure that we were alone.
Student: I was just wondering … Are you by any chance? You know … I just thought you might be … Well, erm …
I swallowed hard. I’d read about this sort of thing. He was going to ask me out.
Student: It’s just that … OK, I’m just going to come right out and say it. Are you a Doctor Who fan?
And that’s how I met John Paul Green. We were to become firm – though platonic – friends. We were a similar age, we both came from the West Midlands and his appreciation for 1970s Doctor Who was almost as limitless as mine. It seemed a bit weird that he was my student and I was his mentor, not least when I had to fail him for leaving his tripod’s base plate on a bus. It was even weirder when he slept with my sister. Nevertheless, six years later he was our best man; and we didn’t make him wear cream.
*
Between 1993 and 1999 I screened Jaws to my students so many times I wore the tape out and the university had to buy me a new one. I discovered I loved teaching, and not just because I got to watch Jaws a lot; it felt like I’d accidentally stumbled into a vocation.
By rights, I should have been a terrible teacher. I wasn’t really a ‘people person’ and I found students irritating even when I was one myself. But I worked hard to compensate for my lack of experience and, with lots of help from Sue, I got quite good at it. Teaching is part knowledge transfer, part performance art; what I lacked in the former, I made up for in the latter. In 1997, despite breaking down in tears during the interview because I so desperately wanted it to go well, I was made a full-time member of staff.
One of my responsibilities as a full-time university lecturer was that I had to be ‘research active’. This basically meant I was expected to commit to a PhD immediately. So the first thing I had to decide was what subject I was going to study in depth. I cast around for an alternative to Jaws, about which I knew an awful lot. Naturally, there was only one.
I can still remember Sue’s first words after I told her I planned to take a PhD in Doctor Who – her first words after she stopped laughing, anyway.
Sue: I tell you what, Neil, it’ll be worth five years of hard work just so you can tell people at dinner parties you’re a Doctor in Doctor Who.
For this reason alone, she still hasn’t forgiven me for jacking it in.
I first suspected that I might not complete my PhD during the training day I was forced to attend a few weeks into my studies. As part of an obligatory icebreaker session we were told to turn to the stranger sitting next to us and explain to them what our PhD was all about and what its impact on society at large would be. I was sitting next to a budding scientist and he went first. I couldn’t follow every detail of what he was saying but it definitely had something to do with enzymes and finding a cure for cancer.
When he was finished, he turned to me.
Him: So what’s yours about?
Me: Well, in a nutshell, and this is quite tricky to explain to a lay person, I am looking at the ways in which metatextual, erm, texts, impact on the parent text vis-à-vis the complex relationships between the, erm, semiotic thickness of the, erm, oh dear, text, and the burgeoning use of converging technologies, which have quantifiably altered the ways in which the audience interact with the, erm, text.
Though I had skilfully avoided two important words beginning with D and W, the scientist clearly wasn’t too impressed with my waffle and with good reason. I had made my PhD sound like a complete waste of time.
I tried to ignore the warning signs and ploughed on with my studies. I got as far as being published a couple of times. However, it could take anything up to two years between the completion of a paper and its eventual publication. In my field of study, the subject could regenerate in the amount of time it took for my research to see print – sometimes twice – so when my work did appear, it already felt woefully out of date. In the age of the internet, where information was instantaneous and accessible, academic research felt strangely archaic and limited. It was careful, methodical and deeply frustrating.
It was around this time that I started to branch out into teaching more theoretical subjects, and as luck would have it, most of the modules I taught on were run by my friend and former student John Paul. Just like me, John Paul didn’t know what do with the rest of his life after he graduated and, just like me, he enrolled on an MA. And then, after a short stint as a technician in the drama department, he started working as a visiting lecturer in the same faculty as me, and by the turn of the millennium he was responsible for running several modules on the history of broadcasting. And that’s when he came up to me one day with an exciting proposition: how would I like to be paid to teach Doctor Who?
Big mistake.
*
‘It’s very slow.’
‘Are all the old episodes as boring as this one?’
‘The actors didn’t know their lines.’
‘That was Doctor Poo.’
‘It looked like it was a rehearsal.’
‘Was the Doctor really wearing a wig?’
‘What a load of old shit.’
Enthusiasm is supposed to be infectious, or at least that’s what they told me when I was training to be a teacher. What nonsense. It didn’t matter how passionate I became when I talked to my students about early episodes of Doctor Who, their response was always the same: sheer indifference. In fact, the more passionate and animated I got about it, the more determined they seemed to wear me down. It’s as if they had sensed my weak spot and they instinctively knew how to exploit it.
Timetabling the screenings at 9 a.m. on a Monday probably didn’t help. Who wanted to watch a black-and-white episode of Doctor Who first thing in the morning? Even I didn’t want to do that. So I’d sneak off for a cup of tea after I’d hit the Play button in the lecture theatre, but when I returned a few minutes later, it was always the same story: students checking their email; students tweeting and texting; students updating their Facebook statuses (‘dr who … its SO BORING … LOLZ …’).
I wouldn’t have minded so much if their criticisms of early Doctor Who had been in any way constructive or perceptive, but more often than not they simply focused on the show’s less-than-special special effects. When I told them that criticising a television programme for not including any computer graphics when computer graphics hadn’t actually been invented yet was an untenable position, they shrugged their collective shoulders and asked me how long it would take before we got to Stargate SG-1.
And after a day of this, I would return home to the prospect of watching Doctor Who and writing about Doctor Who and thinking thoughts about Doctor Who that no one had thought before for a PhD that I knew in my heart would increase the sum of human knowledge not one iota.
Each man kills the thing he loves, wrote Oscar Wilde in one of the books I still haven’t read. But the combination of simultaneously both studying and teaching Doctor Who was proving almost fatal; I started to feel like the thing I loved was killing me.
Every time a student completes a module, they are invited to send anonymous feedback to their lecturer, just in case their apathetic silence in the seminars hasn’t sent a clear enough message. This is just a small selection of responses from the students who took my Science Fiction module:
It was that last one that did it. For the final time, it isn’t Dr Who – it’s Doctor Who!
I stopped teaching on this module the same day I packed in my PhD. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Then I wondered what the hell I was going to do next.
* Strictly speaking, this is untrue. I had read at least five novels penned by a woman, specifically the five New Adventures written by Kate Orman, the lone female contributor to the series.
† Happily, the institution became a university when Sunderland was awarded city status in 1992. A polytechnic lecturer doesn’t have quite the same cachet.