Welcome to Paul and Joanne Seymour's Dr Who-themed living room in Erith
00:01, 03 December 2015
Lifesize cutouts of every Doctor. An inflatable Dalek. A Cyberman helmet. Fezzes and sonic screwdrivers a-plenty.
It might not be bigger on the outside, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more impressive shrine to the Tardis than the living room of Paul and Joanne Seymour.
You may remember the couple, who both work on the maternity ward at Darent Valley Hospital, as staging a headline-grabbing Doctor Who-themed wedding last year.
The renewal of their vows at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Milton Road, Gravesend, marked 30 years of happy marriage and Who fandom, which now extends to their Erith home.
“We made quite a few friends through the wedding and the publicity. I had no idea there were so many Daleks on Facebook – there are millions of them!"
It started with some redecoration to get rid of damp.
Paul, 55, said: “We had water everywhere and Joanne said ‘Let’s redecorate the four main rooms’ – that’s two downstairs and the two bedrooms – so I said ‘I’ll have the living room’.
“We stripped everything back to the brickwork and it’s taken four months to get it all back up and running.”
Think of a piece of memorabilia from the world’s most famous sci-fi show and chances are you’ll find it here. Everything from the walls to the rubbish bin are a tribute to the Time Lord’s adventures.
The Seymours have certainly spared no expense.
“I’ve not been in good health and earlier this year I had a heart operation,” said Paul.
“I thought ‘I can’t leave my wife with damp in the house’, so I got my pension fund out and sunk it into all this. I just thought, to hell with it, I’m having something a bit different.”
Different is certainly an apt description. Among the props and merchandise is a collection of desirable signed postcards, amassed from various incarnations of the Doctor.
The Seymours’ renewal of vows was a national story and attracted the attention of Tom Baker, David Tennant and Peter Capaldi.
“I wrote to all the living Doctors and some of the companions,” said Paul.
“Tom Baker was the first to respond. He sent a whole batch of signed photos, which brought quite a bit of money in. David Tennant sent us a signed postcard.
“I just thought we could use some of it in the living room. It was meant to be just a few bits and pieces but when you spend £20,000 doing the house up you may as well go the full monty!"
“We didn’t expect Peter Capaldi to respond because he’d just started filming, but he did send us two photos. One we auctioned off and one we kept.”
While plenty of this Kent-borne Tardis is made of freshly acquired goods, much of it is leftover from the service at the Milton Road church.
Some was successfully sold for hundreds of pounds by singer Cheryl Baker, patron for the hospital’s Little Buds Fund for special care babies, at a sci-fi auction in Gravesend Town Hall, with the rest put to use at home.
“We collected so much stuff for the wedding reception and we thought ‘What are we going to do with all this?’” said Paul.
“I just thought we could use some of it in the living room. It was meant to be just a few bits and pieces but when you spend £20,000 doing the house up you may as well go the full monty!
“We went to a sci-fi do at Herne Bay and there was a guy flogging Tardis wallpaper. We bought a load of fezzes for the wedding. Some people took them but we must have ended up with about 50 of them left.”
Paul’s collection of Doctor Who garb is impressive, and wife Joanne, 52, is the proud owner of her own Tardis dress.
They insist they remain mere fans rather than ‘fanatics’, but their commitment to the show has certainly become a key component of their marriage. Paul said: “We made quite a few friends through the wedding and the publicity. I had no idea there were so many Daleks on Facebook – there are millions of them!
“We went to the Doctor Who Festival a couple of weeks ago and parked our Doctor Who themed car at the Excel in London, and people left notes on it, which was quite nice.
“We will invite friends and family round and have a few drinks. Everyone loves cos-play, as they call it, so people can pose in the Tardis.”
National fame. Recognition from several Doctors. Their own signed Cyberman helmet and now a living room that looks like a Tardis.
Unless Peter Capaldi regenerates into Paul Seymour and Joanne picks up the mantle of companion, it’s difficult to envisage life getting much better for two of Kent’s biggest ‘Whovians’.
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