Review: Adventures with the Wife in Space – Living with Doctor Who / Author: Neil Perryman / Publisher: Faber / Release Date: Out Now
Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the online blog Adventures with the Wife in Space (in which uber-fan Neil Perryman subjects his wife Sue to every episode of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the TV movie), so how does the book of the same name fare in comparison? Well, rather than just being some sort of printed blog compilation, this book is a life story marked by Doctor Who milestones (for example, he can remember when he met his future stepdaughter by knowing what episode was on UK Gold at the time) and occasionally interrupted by the titular wife.
There are of course extracts from the successful blog but this only adds to a narrative that zips along faster than a Weeping Angel. And the book does a good job of being educational to fans who might not know every term or production code (for instance, not every fan will know what CSO means).
More than anything else, the book is funny. The snippet that had us laughing the most was the bit about his brother-in-law Gary and how awful the fans thought he was. But let’s not forget the creepy and yet somehow hilarious song that one fan wrote about his attraction to Sue.
However, the book is also a love story and when reading Sue’s chapter and The Experiment Ends: Assessing The Results, one really gets a sense of just how much these two love each other. It’s so ridiculously heart-warming, it’s almost as if the two core aspects of the book have no business being near each other; a book this touching shouldn’t be this funny. But it works. This is one of the best Doctor Who books on shelves for the 50th and is absolutely essential reading for even the Not-We.
