When I told Sue that more than a hundred black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who no longer existed, she was delighted.

Sue: What a relief.

Suffice to say, this is not what fans think of the BBC’s policy of wiping much of its archive of classic television during the 1960s and 70s. Doctor Who fans consider it to be at best a short-sighted business decision and at worst an act of cultural vandalism and betrayal. But Sue was not a Doctor Who fan.

Sue: It means we can skip about a hundred episodes, doesn’t it? I don’t know what you were worrying about, Neil. This is going to be a piece of piss.

I told Sue that, unfortunately for her, we wouldn’t have to skip any missing episodes if we didn’t want to.

Sue: I’m not reading any of your books. You can forget about that for a start.

Me: Don’t worry. You won’t have to read anything, although you will have to concentrate quite hard.

Sue: I get it. You’re going to read the books to me one-by-one, I’m going to imagine them in my head, then I’ll tell you what I think about the imaginary acting, writing and carpentry, give it a mark out of ten and you’ll write it all down.

Me: To be honest, that sounds more fun.

Although these episodes no longer existed on videotape or film, fans had resourcefully combined black-and-white photos taken in front of the TV and domestic audio recordings made during the programmes’ original transmission in the 1960s – the family dog can occasionally be heard barking in the background – with modern computer technology to produce rough approximations of what the stories may have been like.

Rob Shearman was correct, though. It could be a step too far. The best recon could only ever be a shadow of its former self; and if the original story wasn’t up to much, any recon, no matter how skilfully or lovingly rendered, could only be worse – much worse. If I didn’t fancy wading through 106 black-and-white slide shows to the accompaniment of the muffled barking of a long-dead dog, I was pretty certain that Sue would feel the same way.

So I compromised. For a DVD release, the BBC had edited the missing seven-part story ‘Marco Polo’ into a single thirty-minute episode, which meant that Sue could both experience a reconstruction – referred to by hip Whovians as ‘recons’ – and a notoriously long historical saga – referred to by hip Whovians as ‘historicals’ – in one fell swoop.

‘Marco Polo’ proved to be an early turning point in the progress of the blog. When I told Sue that most of the fans I knew had never sat through a single recon, she took it as a challenge to watch more. When I told her that those fans included her own husband, she was incredulous.

In my life as a Doctor Who fan, recons had always felt like something I would get round to later. I didn’t have the patience to sit through episodes that no longer existed, especially when there were plenty that did. And in truth, reading the novelisations of missing stories was both easier and kinder; the acting, writing and carpentry of my imagination were likely to be of a far higher standard than the fuzzy, jerry-built reality.

Sue told me in no uncertain terms that I was a wimp. Skipping the recons would be cheating, she said; if something was worth doing, it was worth doing laboriously.

So in the end, it wasn’t me who made Sue watch more than a hundred black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who that no longer existed; typically, it was she who made me do it.