April Books 7) Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman

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 (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.