Book review: Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living with Doctor Who
Don’t be too put off if you’re not a Whovian, for Adventures with the Wife in Space is to sci-fi what Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure is to a geography textbook.
Neil Perryman, from County Durham, asked his wife, Sue, to join him in watching over 600 episodes of Doctor Who in chronological order, including some episodes which had been wiped by the BBC during a money-saving exercise, and recompiled by fans using illicit home audio recordings and photographs of the telly.
Following each screening, Neil wrote up Sue’s reactions for a blog, which didn’t always go down too well with the show’s most hardcore fans. When the blog got its own fanbase, it got its own inevitable share of followers with questionable sanity, propositioning Neil’s wife and stepdaughter through song.
Although extracts from the original blog are interspersed throughout the book, Adventures with the Wife in Space isn’t just one of those volumes which cynically reproduce internet content for the Christmas market, like those interminable volumes offering hilarious ‘genuine’ responses to exam questions.
About ninety per cent of the book is original content, detailing how Neil fell in and out of love with Doctor Who as a child, his ascent (or should that be ‘descent’?) into studying postmodernism at university, and his relationship with his own companion, Sue.
The book recounts their visits to fan conventions, during which they both manage to inadvertently anger some of the actors that they have admired on screen.
Perryman is consistently funny, taking the piss out of Doctor Who, fellow Whovians, his “apathetic” media students (he taught media theory and production until “the state of higher education” got the better of him), and, above all, himself.
Amongst a galaxy of complaints, though, shines his love for his wife, Sue, who entertains Neil’s obsession with the last of the time lords. It would be pretentious to call it “life-affirming”, but it has the feel-good air of classic Gorman and Wallace.
Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who was published by Faber and Faber on 7 November 2013. You can read the introduction here.
