Adventures With the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who

by Neil Perryman

'One of the oddities of Doctor Who is that you hear so much about what the fans think, and so little from the other 100 percent of the audience (my stats are clinically accurate.) So thank God for a couple who put their love on the line to set the record straight. This is the story of a fan boy who inflicts every episode ever made of Doctor Who on his marriage. Or to put it another way, this is the story of someone with a proper love and understanding of Doctor Who, trying to explain it to her husband.' Steven Moffat

Neil loves Sue. He also loves Doctor Who. But can he bring his two great loves together? In January 2011, Neil Perryman set out on an insane quest to make his wife Sue watch every episode of the classic series of Doctor Who from the very beginning. Even the ones that didn't exist any more. And so, over the next two and half years, Sue gamely watched them all. From William Hartnell and Tom Baker to Peter Davison and Paul McGann, the result was a wildly successful and hilariously revealing blog called Adventures with the Wife in Space.

But the adventure continues. Here Neil Perryman tells the all too true story of Doctor Who fandom. Funny, honest and surprisingly brave, he also captures perfectly the joys - and fears - of sharing the thing you love with the people you love. Adventures With the Wife in Space is, at its heart, the story of Doctor Who, and its fans, seen through the eyes of two people - one who knows almost nothing about the programme and another who knows way too much.

'This is a very, very funny book; touching too.' Jenny Colgan

• ISBN10: 0571298109
• ISBN13: 9780571298105
• Publish Date: 7 November 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 12 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Faber & Faber
• Edition: Main
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[lovelybookshelf]

Originally posted on my blog, A Lovely Bookshelf on the Wall:

Adventures with the Wife in Space was born from Neil Perryman's blog of the same title. Neil convinced his wife Sue to watch all of the classic Doctor Who episodes with him, while blogging about the experience and her reactions to each episode. Along the way, Neil reminisces about growing up with Doctor Who being such a huge part of his childhood.

I appreciated Neil's candor. I expected brutally honest reactions from Sue, but Neil was already a huge Doctor Who fan. Never fear! Neil is no fanboy. He has no qualms about saying a particular episode was downright awful. Because let's face it: some of those old episodes were just that.

Spoiler alerts are all over the place, mostly pertaining to the original series, but a few current series spoilers, too. If you're wanting to watch all the episodes and don't want to know anything about the Doctor's adventures, wait until you're done watching before reading this book.

My husband and I have tried watching all of the old episodes, but didn't make it very far. We didn't even get through the First Doctor. We've already tried again by making use of the fantastic appendices at the end of the book: Sue's Scores and Sue's Best and Worst offer a handy way to find classic episodes that don't have us rolling our eyes and anxiously awaiting the credits.

Adventures with the Wife in Space is a fun, very entertaining read for any Doctor Who fan.