The wife went through a lot in those first six months. She dealt with giant insects (‘Did that ant really just run headlong into that camera?’); she visited Swinging London in the sixties (‘Are the Pink Floyd in this one?’); she watched the Daleks’ Master Plan fall apart (‘Twelve parts. Twelve. Bloody. Parts.’); and she couldn’t understand why nobody ever mentioned the Time War (‘The last time I was this lost, I was watching Lost.’).

The one constant through all this was the irascible presence of William Hartnell’s Doctor – or as Sue christened him, the Miserable Git.

Sue didn’t like the First Doctor very much and the truth is, neither did I. Seen in relatively quick succession, his behaviour in these early stories was often inexplicably appalling – he was startlingly rude and he kept trying to ditch his companions, or on one occasion kill them. He abandoned his own granddaughter on the Dalek-ravaged ruins of future Earth without even asking her if she minded. Matt Smith he wasn’t.

Sue: They should have called the lead actor William Heartless.

There was also another problem. Some of the Miserable Git’s so-called adventures were just so … dull. Take ‘The Sensorites’, for example. I had attempted to watch ‘The Sensorites’ several times over the years but without success; I had never even managed to crawl to the end of the first episode – and ‘The Sensorites’ is six episodes long.

Sue gave ‘The Sensorites’ 5 out of 10, so either she’s much more forgiving than I am or she’s completely insane. I would have scored it significantly lower and that was before she made me sit through the whole thing.

I think this is one of the reasons why Sue’s episode commentaries became so popular so quickly. If she’d hated everything, then the blog would have been a soulless and predictable chore, not only for us, but for our readers as well. But she didn’t hate everything. Far from it: she actively enjoyed ‘The Aztecs’; she liked ‘Planet of Giants’ and nobody likes that one; she even went so far as to call ‘The Time Meddler’ ‘superb’ and ‘The Myth Makers’ ‘excellent … very funny but still very bleak’. And that was a recon.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ was so appalling (and possibly racist) that she refused even to score it. The only reason the ant-based epic ‘The Web Planet’ achieved 1 out of a possible 10 was because the Spanish dub of episode 6 made her laugh. However, she kept coming back for more. And when my head went down or I questioned whether it was worth going on, she was always there with the same response.

That’s right, I had to keep reminding myself; I thought I did.

When the time came for us to watch the second Peter Cushing Dalek movie, I decided to do something a bit different. Instead of presenting Sue’s opinions to the world via the medium of transcribed prose, I would make her speak to our audience directly.

I’d wanted to record a podcast commentary for ages, if only to prove to everybody that my wife actually existed. No one had accused me directly of conjuring up an imaginary wife – I am a Doctor Who fan, after all – but even I thought this new Who-munching version of Sue seemed too good to be true. It was time to put her to the test.

Sue telephoned me forty-five minutes later.

Five minutes later, she rang again.

When I returned home, Sue was very merry indeed, which explains why in her commentary she believes that Neil Tennant played the Tenth Doctor. But it did prove one thing: not only did my wife exist, if something happened to me she should be able to complete the experiment without me.

And then, after eighty-six episodes, thirty-three recons and two films that don’t count, we reached the experiment’s first milestone. The Miserable Git was about to regenerate into Charlie Drake.

When we began our experiment, the Second Doctor’s first twelve episodes did not exist in the archives; Sue didn’t see Charlie – or Patrick Troughton, to give him his birth name – move properly for two whole weeks. Even then it took her a while to warm to him. She thought he was too silly and too dishevelled to take seriously.

It wasn’t until Troughton’s sixth story, ‘The Faceless Ones’, that everything seemed to click into place.

From that point on, even if the story wasn’t very good, Sue didn’t have a bad word to say about the Scruffy Drunk. It didn’t matter if he was fighting Daleks (‘You can’t take your eyes off him’), Cybermen (‘Troughton’s great’) or Yeti (‘He’s very good, which definitely goes without saying now’), his performance was always sublime. She even forgave him when he played a Mexican doppelgänger in ‘Enemy of the World’ with a disgracefully fruity accent (‘It’s Inspector Clouseau meets Speedy Gonzales’).

When we reached ‘The Krotons’ – the same lousy story I couldn’t finish when I was twelve – I decided the time had come to shake things up a bit. I invited Sue’s brother, Gary, to join us on the sofa.

Sue gave ‘The Krotons’ a generous 6 out of 10; her brother was less impressed and awarded it a 1. And even though Gary’s assessment was much fairer than Sue’s – ‘The Krotons’ only seems to get worse as the years go by – his opinions didn’t go down very well on the blog.

When I launched a website survey a few weeks later and asked our readers if there was anything they didn’t like about the blog, 32 per cent simply said: Gary.

This was one of those moments where writing the blog and its effect on our real lives intersected in quite an uncomfortable way. We shielded Gary from the ensuing backlash. He didn’t discover total strangers were calling him a massive c**t until three months later when it was casually mentioned on local BBC radio. Sue was appearing on the station to talk about the experiment so far when she admitted to the show’s host, Bob Fischer, that Gary was loathed and despised by the vast majority of our readers.

Later that night, I apologised to Gary and asked him if he felt OK about it.

We were celebrating Sue’s fiftieth birthday when a friend told me that a missing episode had been discovered in an old man’s shed. I should have jumped for joy, or at least smiled, but all I could think was: of all the episodes they had to find, why did it have to be an episode of ‘Galaxy 4’? Nobody stayed awake at night worrying about what had happened to ‘Galaxy 4’. Why couldn’t they have found one of the good missing episodes instead?

My friend swore me to secrecy. The recovery would be officially announced at a ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ event at the BFI in three months’ time, and he begged me to keep the news to myself until then, even though he clearly hadn’t been able to do that himself, which is why I didn’t feel too guilty when I betrayed his confidence a few hours later. Of course I had to tell somebody. Privileged information like that didn’t come along every day, even if it was vaguely disappointing. I just had to make sure that I told somebody who wouldn’t yell it from the rooftops (or worse, a Doctor Who forum). So, naturally, I chose Sue:

Apart from Sue, I never told another soul about ‘Galaxy 4’. And then, two months later, something even more remarkable happened …

I decided to feign ignorance so my friend could savour this moment. Who knows, I thought, I might even be able to fake some excitement this time, too.

Wait a minute. ‘Galaxy 4’ wasn’t a Troughton …

People continued to leave comments on the blog. Most of them were positive, some of them were troubling, and one of them was put to music. It arrived in an email, sent in the middle of the night, with the subject line: ‘A Song for Susan’. When I clicked the link contained inside it, and the song began to play, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or call the police.

If you’re not a Doctor Who expert, a CVE is a charged vacuum emboitment, which is just a fancy way of describing a large hole in space. Anyway, if you were to pass through a CVE, you’d end up in a completely different universe, and that’s where this budding singer/songwriter wanted me to go, so he could make a move on my wife.

The song was accompanied by a video* but I hesitated before I showed it to Sue.

I wasn’t sure how she’d react to a young man in his early twenties crooning his affection for her, especially when he had taken the trouble to source a photograph of her from the internet, which he was now stroking seductively during the song’s middle-eight. I was probably worried that she might like it.

If that wasn’t unsettling enough, a few weeks later, Sue received an email from somebody very high up in the university where we both worked. When she saw the email’s subject line – ‘The Wife in Space’ – she thought she was in trouble for being too sweary on a blog, but it was much, much worse than that. Sue’s fans were crawling out of the woodwork, and her biggest fan just happened to be related to someone who worked at the same campus as us. According to this email, our colleague’s son was obsessed with Sue and he wouldn’t stop talking about her. It was Sue this, Sue that, morning, noon and night. Sue thought the email was going to warn her to lock her office door for the foreseeable future, but what the father was proposing was even stranger: a meeting with him and his wife so Sue could help them arrange the perfect Christmas treat for their son.

We agreed to meet Sue’s biggest fan’s parents in her office one Friday afternoon in December. What else were we going to do? His dad was very high up in the university. However, as she shook their hands, Sue unexpectedly blurted out:

Happily, the parents didn’t seem to care. They were chatty and friendly. Would Sue mind autographing a selection of Christmas presents they had bought for their son? This bundle of delights included a T-shirt, a calendar, some DVD covers and, most bizarre of all, a handwritten invitation from Sue asking their son to join her for a coffee the next time he was in town. She signed them all.

Before the parents left, they took some photos as a memento of our meeting. Funnily enough, I don’t appear in any of them.

Unlike the Miserable Git, the Scruffy Drunk went out in a blaze of glory. His final ten-part story, ‘The War Games’, scored an impressive 9 out of 10, and if you’d have told me at the start of our quest that Sue would have sat through a ten-part black-and-white story and given it a score like that, I wouldn’t have believed you. Actually, I still don’t believe it.

It took Sue nine months and three weeks to watch Doctor Who’s black-and-white years. We could have had a baby together in the same amount of time – William Patrick Perryman, perhaps – and I’m sure it would have been less stressful. But it was at this point in the experiment that I knew for certain that my wife would definitely make it to the end, even if I didn’t. If she could sit through all the black-and-white episodes, including the ones that didn’t exist any more, then the next phase of the experiment should be easy – things were about to get exciting. U.N.I.T.! Sea Devils! Drashigs! And the real caped crusader himself – Jon Pertwee!

* www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM1-8LqFYzU (if he hasn’t taken it down in shame yet).