Neil Perryman

My wife and I were big fans of the blog Adventures with the Wife in Space, where Doctor Who fan Neil Perryman got his "not-we" wife Sue to watch every episode of classic Doctor Who, from 1963 to 1989. Sue wasn't a fan, but she does teach television production, so she can appreciate it and comment on it interestingly... plus she's quite funny. A book of the blog came out for Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary, which my wife got me for Christmas that year. In classic me fashion, I finally got show more around to reading it just after the sixtieth anniversary (though thankfully before the new edition of the book came out).

The first half of the book chronicles Neil's life as a fan from childhood and his adult life with Sue, up until the invention of the blog. I can see how if you were not previously invested in Neil and Sue, this might not be super-interesting, but I really enjoyed getting to hear their relationship history spelled out in detail—mostly it had been something you just had to infer from their blog posts before. Neil's name upon meeting Sue was hilarious, and it was great to get the whole living-in-a-caravan story explained. The second half details the blog, how it came about, and how it carried on. Both halves are filled with small excerpts from blog entries.

The whole thing is quite funny, of course, but also somewhat moving. The back cover spells out the book's premise somewhat flippantly: "Neil loves Sue. He also loves Doctor Who. But can he bring his two great loves together?" It's a part of the fan experience that will resonate with any fan, I suspect. One way a fan shows their love is by sharing something they love. But of course other people don't always love what their loved ones love. Longtime readers of my blog know that I introduced my older son to Oz, one of my childhood loves, and over two years later, we're still reading them together. Sometimes it works, and it's magical. But as I write this, I've been thinking about introducing him to Doctor Who... but will he love it? I am honestly a little trepidatious! Neil captures this quite well. He and Sue were married for years before he dared to share what he loved with her... but for them it paid off, and as he tells it, even made their relationship stronger!

Highly recommended if you're a certain type of Doctor Who fan, or even if you just know one. Though you may benefit from reading the blog first. As for me, I'm using the book as a launching-off point for a reread of the blog, in the form of the ebook collections of it I've bought over the years but have never gotten around to reading. show less

I met Neil Perryman once, hanging around with one of his former students at the big 40th anniversary Doctor Who bash in London. I knew his name from various online Who forums. I’d love to claim the experience was an earth-shattering meeting of minds but I’d be shocked if he even vaguely remembered it. Anyway, I knew him well enough to follow the Tachyon TV blog and was there towards the start of what seemed to be a majestically insane project, to force his not-we partner Sue to watch show more every episode of the original run of Doctor Who. I fully expected a decree nisi to be served by the end of the Hartnell era, let alone before the torturous longeurs that constitute The Monster Of Peladon.

Instead it ended up gradually becoming a minor wonder. Most long-term fans come ready conditioned with their own army of prejudices – we know the stories, where every gag and flaw is and what we think about every story. This wasn’t the case here, this was Who through fresh and revealing eyes, a reminder of the innocence our obsession cost us. And Sue wasn’t burdened by ridiculous notions like diplomacy but called it just as she saw it, with Neil playing the hapless comic fan foil set things up perfectly. It’s almost a classic sitcom set-up, but with added Who. Check the blog now and you’ll see an impressive roll call of the great and good of Doctor Who – the likes of Steven Moffat were known to pop up every now and again.

This book is the background to the blog – how Neil became a fan, how Neil and Sue met and their subsequent life. It’s a very modern tale of what it’s like as a fan living with a norm – the outsider perspective on ‘norms’ where you can see how fannish behaviour’s quite sane by fan logic. Maybe, given decades of fannish obsessiveness I should worry given how much I constantly empathised with Neil. I suspect Sue would certainly be entertainingly blunt in confirming that. In a lot of ways we fans simply don’t grow up, we retain a laserlike focus on our childhood favourites and our family, friends and partners simply indulge us, put up with our strange quirks. It’s good to know we’re not alone in that, and it’s good for our other halves to know that they’re not the only ones who have to put up with our obsession. show less

The Adventures with the Wife in Space is a blog which documents the experiment in which Neil Perryman (a diehard Doctor Who fan) gets his wife Sue (who is not) to watch and review every story of the classic Doctor Who from 1963 to 1989. It's brilliant because Sue challenges the fan community gospel of Doctor Who while also being wickedly funny. One would expect that this book would simply be a compilation of the blog reviews with some extra content, but instead it is something better. It show more turns out to be a memoir of Perryman's life and interests (he's obsessed with things other than Doctor Who, like Tangerine Dream and Jaws) and his marriage with Sue. Turns out that the Perrymans are interesting people with lots of good stories. The book also offers a behind-the-scenes view of the experiment watching Doctor Who which both strengthened their marriage while offering challenges of being an internet phenomenon.
Favorite Passages:

'If anything, the old series has made me a fan of the new series. I bloody love it. But at the same time, I don’t need to wallow in the past. Yes, it’s nice to have it there to refer to, but you have to keep moving forward. You know, like a shark.'

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http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2281787.html

One never knows, with a book based on a blog, if it's going to be just a recycling of the best pieces, perhaps augmented a little, or something a bit different. This is something a bit different. As many fans know, Perryman persuaded his wife Sue to watch every single episode of Old Who first shown from 1963 to 1996, and then blogged her distinctly non-fannish reactions. Watching Old Who from beginning to end is something that others have done show more (myself included) but it is of course fascinating to see what someone unburdened by fan lore makes of it. Her three 10/10 stories, incidentally, were Spearhead from Space, The Seeds of Doom and City of Death, and her lowest rating, -1/10, was for Time and the Rani.

But the book has surprisingly little of the blog in it; it's the story of Neil's life, and his life with Sue, and his life with Doctor Who, and it's a moving tale of growing up in the late twentieth century and living in the early twenty-first, and making sense of the world through a show that started the day after Kennedy was shot, ended just after the Berlin Wall fell and then started again in 2005. And what is nice is that the project, which started as his request of Sue, became for her a matter of pride - to get through the next story, and the next, and the next. (And there are a lot of them.) It's a lovely book, and anyone who knows a Doctor Who fan will enjoy it. show less