Done? Let’s go!

It wasn’t my intention to watch Doctor Who from the very beginning with Sue, or with anyone else for that matter. I planned to go it alone for a new blog.

I had been thinking about re-watching the classic series ever since I read the first volume of Toby Hadoke and Rob Shearman’s Running Through Corridors, where the pair watch and review every episode of Doctor Who in chronological order. Because Hadoke and Shearman are funny, engaging writers, reading this book was a thoroughly entertaining experience. But it also reminded me that, although I called myself a Doctor Who fan, and other people called me a Whovian, there were quite a few episodes of Doctor Who I had never actually seen.

John Williams: The first rule of watching Doctor Who from the beginning is you don’t watch Doctor Who from the beginning. You start with ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’. Everybody gives up in the middle of ‘The Sensorites’.

Me: But if I start with the tenth story, won’t that be cheating?

John: Look, do you want to do this or not? You can watch the first nine stories at the end if it bothers you. If you get that far. How are you going to watch them?

Me: When Sue’s gone to bed, I suppose.

John: That will never work. If you watch them late at night, you’ll fall asleep before you reach the first cliffhanger. If I were you, I would follow Andrew Pixley’s* advice. He watched them while he was having his tea.

Me: If I do embark on this marathon, I might write it up for Tachyon TV. I could make it a regular feature.

John: Really? What could you possibly say about Doctor Who that hasn’t been said a million times before?

John was right, of course – the last thing the world needed was another Doctor Who blog. But I couldn’t get the idea of blogging a television series from the very beginning out of my head, though I baulked at John’s suggestion of ‘Emmerdale Farm’. And, perhaps arrogantly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Doctor Who had some mileage left in it. There had to be an angle that nobody had considered before, I just had to find it.

And then …

Sue: Haven’t you got a DVD we could watch instead? This is terrible.

She had a point, Downton Abbey was awful.

Me: We could watch Doctor Who.

The rest, as Neil Perry would have said, is herstory.

*

I made sure that the viewing conditions were just right the night we started our experiment: the curtains were drawn, the cats and dog had been fed, our phones were switched off, our ashtrays were empty and our lighters were full. Sue was cradling a mug of tea and I was nursing a stiff drink.

I reached for the remote control and pressed Play …

Sue awarded an ‘An Unearthly Child’ 7 out of 10.

The idea of awarding scores for episodes or stories was meant to be a joke – the sort of thing one might expect from a stat-obsessed Whovian. But I was rather irritated by this 7. Many fans – myself included – would argue that ‘An Unearthly Child’ is as good as 1960s Doctor Who ever gets. A 7 out of 10 didn’t inspire confidence because the scores would only get lower from here.

Sure enough, the next three episodes, which featured hirsute cavemen questing for fire, only scored 4 out of 10 apiece. But that was all right because those episodes aren’t very good. But then it was the turn of ‘The Daleks’. This is the story that introduced an unsuspecting public to the eponymous villains for the first time, and, practically overnight, the bungalow-loving bastards transformed Doctor Who from an offbeat curiosity on the brink of cancellation into a bona fide phenomenon.

Sue gave ‘The Daleks’ 3 out of 10.

The scores were low and the commentary was withering. However, Sue was clearly enjoying herself. My favourite part of the experiment so far was not watching the episodes but writing them up for the blog afterwards. I knew it was working – not only was it funny, Sue was genuinely saying things no one had said about Doctor Who before – at least not outside of a 1960s living room.

However, I was still a little worried. It wasn’t the thought of seven hundred episodes of Doctor Who that bothered me (that would come later), it was how Sue might be treated by the Doctor Who fan community. Years had passed since rec.arts.drwho but they were no less grumpy and cynical – in fact they were worse. I hesitated before publishing Sue’s lukewarm assessment of ‘An Unearthly Child’ because I knew when I did I would be offering up my wife to ridicule, scorn and possibly the odd death threat. And I still went ahead and published it anyway.

And then the feedback started:

There was a warning, too:

Really? I thought it would be a lot higher than that.

Sue pretended not to care about the comments until I caught her reading some of them one night. She told me that the positive reactions had surprised her – she thought the fans would be appalled by her lack of respect. I told her to take nothing for granted and that she should wait until I published her review of ‘The Daleks’, which was even more contentious.

But I needn’t have worried:

Sue liked that last comment a lot.

Thirteen episodes down, only another six-hundred and eighty-four to go! But we were about to head into uncharted territory.

* Esteemed television historian, renowned Doctor Who archivist and thoroughly nice man.