BOOK REVIEW: Adventures With the Wife In Space: Living With Doctor Who by Neil Perryman

Shane | 7 February 2014 | Reply

Adventures With the Wife In Space: Living With Doctor Who by Neil Perryman
Faber, $24.99 rrp
1 December 2013
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
7/10

Regular readers will already be well acquainted with this reviewer’s rock obsession, but it’s time to come out of the closet and admit that I have another – I am besotted by Doctor Who and have been since a very young age.

Because of this I can completely relate to Neil Perryman’s obsessive mission to watch every single episode of the Classic Series of Doctor Who consecutively – I did the exact same thing myself over the course of a year, finishing almost 2 years ago.

What I did NOT do, however, was try and make my wife sit down and watch it with me. For one thing, we have many other interests together, and for another, I suspect she would be more dismissive of the Classic Series and would have lost patience with the mission early on in the piece.

Not that I would blame her, had that happened – wobbly walls, ridiculously cheap monster costumes (often involving a person wrapped in cellophane or a walking box, in the early black & white days) are easy to laugh at, and I confess, I was doing other stuff while a lot of the episodes were on (especially the ones reconstructed with just the audio and some photos because the BBC lost or destroyed the original footage – but I wasn’t blogging about them…).

So Perryman spills his guts about his blog, his relationship, his work, his obsession for Doctor Who – all the good bits and the bad bits. It’s like, a superblog in print, in a way. And despite all that, he manages to keep it pretty interesting and amusing, though there’s no denying that wife Sue, always ready with a wise aside, a clever quip or a scathing cut down, is his secret weapon.

But then, isn’t that the same for most of us – and for the Doctor himself? Without our companions we are incrementally less interesting.