by -- Daniel Farson

4 January 1981 -- Telegraph Sunday Magazine

Returning home many years later he found his parents dying in separate rooms, not having spoken for seven years. Knowing how hard his mother worked as a char to send him a few pounds when he was a drama student, he leaned over guiltily to ask her if there was anything she wanted: "yes", she whispered, "to outlive that old goat in the next room". But she did not. "When my brother told him the news, my father wept for all those wasted years, all that silence; wept and wept...I felt sorry for him"

In spite of such candor, Tom Baker remains elusive, almost an enigma. He arrives alone and leaves alone, vanishing like Dr. Who in his space-machine box. People hear a cry of "Taxi!" but seldom the address. Only recently has he possessed a home at all-a place in Chelsea-though home is hardly the word for it, as he tries to make it "non-specific" as if he were scared the walls might develop a personality of their own. What does he go back to?

"Nothing. Just books in boxes on the floor and, oh yes, a line of shoes all on trees, otherwise there is no evidence of the person who lives there-apart from the book titles".
No dog or cat evens?
"I like cats, but I don't want to be tied down".

Shortly after this declaration, with typical unpredictability he announced his intention to marry Lalla Ward, the 29-year-old actress who played Dr. Who's assistant for two years. So now he's ready to replace possessions he gave away on impulse during "bad mood-swings", like the time he played MacBeth, terribly in his view, at London's Shaw Theatre.

His disaster with MacBeth was relieved by a moment of magic. As so often with Baker, it was accidental. Waiting in the wings, someone offered him a peanut, which he took without thinking. As he rushed on, a particle of peanut stuck on his vocal chords and terrified that he was about to choke, he advanced to the front of the stage and hissed and whispered his soliloquy to the audience. Afterwards the actors crowded around to congratulate him on this masterstroke. "How did you think of it?" asked the director.
"It wasn't easy" he replied.
Did he ever do that again? "Oh yes, every night after that!"

He's a walking contradiction, a man who adores company, but needs to have solitude. He will iron his shirts immaculately and his shoes are hand-made, but he spoils the effect by wearing a dreadful old mackintosh, which a seedy flasher in Muswell Hill would be ashamed of. Why? "I think it amuses everybody, it has become a sort of prop". When asked why he does not wear a watch, he looks up with, "Because it's much more FUN asking people the time"!

Fun is the vital ingredient, the quality he brings to Dr. Who which makes him so popular with children...his rapport with children is fantastic in every sense...How does he put them at their ease? "I get in first. I say: 'Haven't I met you before? I know! 'I've seen you watching television!' or when they're very young, 'I've seen you hiding behind the sofa!'" and that slays them, and they gurgle".

He detests the interruption of parents who tell their children what to say - "Tell him your name George".

When meeting a child his punch line is unexpected: "George how nice to see you. Can I have your auto-graph?" and the boy produces a piece of paper and writes GEORGE laboriously, thrilled. In return he gives the child one of the postcards of Dr.Who he always carries with him, for there is no point in mock modesty or trying to avoid recognition.

"I'm rather a timid sort of person really, so I like small children before they've been spoiled or disappointed. I find it an ecstatic sensation to be with another human being like that."

He recites a savage poem by Philip Larkin, which ends:

"They gave you all the faults they had
It deepens like an ocean shelf.
Get out as quickly as you can!
And don't have any kids yourself."

Reading is a passion of his, which he has been able to share with children in his programme, 'The Book Tower."

He produces a copy of Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize acceptance speech from his case: "I always carry it with me. To me there's something Messianic in his bravery and mind-dissolving love of truth and honour"...

The copy of the speech is joined in the case on Saturday afternoons by slices of Parma ham and salami, bought in Soho, which he distributes in his favorite club, 'The Colony Room' in Dean Street, where he drinks Gin and Perrier Water. One reason he goes there, apart from the talk and laughter, is a particular admiration for painter Francis Bacon, another member. Bacon has a comparable feeling for Baker, but has never seen him on television. A nice irony considering he must have one of the best known faces in Britain.

"I think I'm a bit hyper-tense. Sometimes I'm happy, sometimes irrationally filled with dread: but an awful lot of people have the same anxieties."

He may savour melancholy, but it goes deeper. At night he dislikes the door being closed and finds it difficult to sleep in the dark. He is frightened of not sleeping at all, yet terrified of a recurring nightmare where he finds himself enclosed in a room with eight or nine people: "They're bandaged like war casualties, and they turn their faceless faces towards me as if they are reproaching ME for their wounds."

It is possible to theorize too turgidly, to interpret the "non-specific" room as a wistful returns to that monastic cell-the monk who plays Rasputin. Gently he puts it all in perspective. "You can't entirely erase all that, can you? Sometimes in the early morning, I go into St. Patrick's in Soho, or the Brompton Oratory, or occasionally to Mount Street, and pray to the same saints that I did as a child."

What are his plans now that he is separating from such a formidable identity?

The range is wide.

"I should like to do lovely, amusing, funny, starring things," he says. "I like fantastical characters, like Captain Hook or Long John Silver. Or Chekhov - Uncle Vanya's not a million miles from Dr.Who, but I know I could not stop being an actor.

That's all I am."