Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who by Neil Perryman Read Free Book Online

to myself: if this is the beststory the BBC could find to show off the Second Doctor, how bad must the rest of his adventures be?
    What I didn’t realise then was that the BBC had thrown most of Patrick Troughton’s stories into a skip, and the only four-part Second Doctor story left on their shelves was this one.
    Sue’s brother and daughter joined us for ‘The Krotons’ …
    Gary: The robots have curling tongs and nutcrackers for hands. I just thought I should mention that.
    Sue: I thought they were hiding the Krotons so they could ramp up the suspense; it turns out they were hiding them because they look dreadful.
    Nicol: How do the Krotons get around?
    Gary: They have a skirt made of waffles and that hides their legs. How can you watch this rubbish? The effects are terrible!
Lost in Space
and
Star Trek
were around at the same time and they looked better than this.
    Sue: But
Doctor Who
didn’t have their budget, Gary. And besides, it’s part of
Doctor Who
’s charm.
    When the Krotons are no more, the Gonds are ecstatic. ‘We are free at last!’ they cry.
    Gary: Tell me about it.
    Sue: It wasn’t
that
bad.
    Gary: Are you serious?
    Sue: It was only four episodes long and it moved.
    Nicol: You should see some of the stuff Neil makes my mam watch.
    Sue: Some of the episodes don’t exist and we still watch them.
    Gary: You are both mad.
    Two stories into
The Five Faces of Doctor Who
, I had to face facts: old
Doctor Who – Doctor Who
made before I was born – seemed to be absolutely rubbish. In fact, ‘The Krotons ’ was so boring I didn’t even make it to the final episode.
    The truth is that many old episodes of
Doctor Who
were better served by novelisations, and my young imagination, than the shabby, black-and-white reality.
    Hitherto, my image of the Second Doctor was based on one of the many novelisations published by Target Books:
Doctor Who and the Web of Fear
by Terrance Dicks, which I remember reading in a caravan in Rhyl when I was eight years old.
    That book had one hell of a cover: a beautiful illustration by Chris Achilleos of Patrick Troughton set against a spider-web background. He’s looking down at a fat, furry teddy bear lassoing a soldier with a halo of bright yellow light, which was cool, but not as cool as the realisation that the Second Doctor’s hair had been cut into the shape of a pudding bowl. This made me feel a whole lot better about my own hairstyle, the only difference being that my bowl was blond.
    I tried to imagine what the Second Doctor was like – ‘a small man with untidy black hair and a gentle, humorous face’, according to Dicks – and as I read about his escapades in the London Underground and his battle against the villainous Yeti (who turned out to be alien robots and not homicidal teddy bears after all) I found it increasingly easy toreplace Tom Baker’s face with my ideal of Patrick Troughton.
    So when the time came for me to watch Patrick Troughton for real, I was expecting him to measure up to the Second Doctor of my imagination. And that’s why it is with a very heavy heart that I have to confess the only thing I can remember about the November 1981 screening of ‘The Krotons’ is that I thought it was terrible.
    *
    And yet love of
Doctor Who
, like the Doctor himself, can regenerate after the deadliest of blows. Of all the repeats chosen to celebrate the Doctor’s past in
The Five Faces of Doctor Who,
the one I was most looking forward to seeing was ‘The Three Doctors’.
    BBC Announcer: On BBC One in five minutes there’s the evening news and weather. In twenty-five minutes here on BBC Two, school uniforms become a controversial issue at
Grange Hill.
But now it’s time for ‘The Three Doctors’, all called Who.
    Of all the images I’d seen of earlier Doctors in books and magazines, there was one that stood out: a publicity photo of Pertwee, Troughton and Hartnell posing together to celebrate the programme’s tenth birthday. I’d stare at this