Free Doctor Who Exclusive With SFX#188
There’s a very special free gift with SFX#188 – an exclusive, official BBC Audiobooks taster CD featuring over 56 minutes of Tom Baker goodness.
To celebrate Tom’s return to the role of the Doctor on BBC Audiobook’s specially-written Hornet’s Nest series of CDs, the Beeb has given SFX access to their archives to bring you this unique collectable, not available anywhere else. Tracks include:
* Extracts from the first two Hornet‘s Nest release
* Clips of archive interviews with Tom Baker from BBC Audio’s Doctor Who At The BBC
collection
* Extracts of Tom reading the audiobooks versions of “The Pyramids Of Mars”, “The Brain Of Morbius” and “Genesis Of The Daleks”
* An extract from “Doctor Who And The Pescatons”
* The classic Dead Ringers sketch with the Doctor ringing the Doctor
* And loads, loads more…
SFX#188 is on sale now for £3.99 from all good newsagents, or you can order it from My Favourite Magazines or by phoning 01858 438 794.
And as a bonus, for those of you who missed it, here’s SFX‘s interview with Tom Baker from SFX#187, conducted while the living legend was recording Hornet‘s Nest:
Tom Baker is holding court. In the cramped reception of a central London recording studio on a swelteringly hot summer's day he's regaling a rapt, if tiny, audience of fellow actors with an anecdote about socks. Yes, socks. Quite how this tale began will have to remain a mystery, as the SFX team turns up halfway through. (When he asks who we are, he looks incredulous: "Saint Francis Xavier magazine? You're Roman Catholics?"). But everyone else is laughing heartily, and genuinely. No luvvy-style politeness here. Tom Baker has them in the palm of his hands.
Some things never change. And though Baker has considerably, in a physical sense later, in the recording studio, it's like being transported back in time. You don't need a TARDIS. Just close your eyes. The man behind the soundproof glass may look more like one of the more eccentric denizens of the House of Lords than the dashing, candyfloss-haired Fourth Doctor, but the quirky, unpredictable, expansive performance is pure essence of Doctor #4, preserved in amber.
"Bollocks!" he suddenly booms, then laughs like a naughty schoolboy, giving the director a cheeky grin. The Doctor has just been told he's standing before the alien queen and Baker decides to throw in the ad-lib. You assume it won't make the final edit. He has more luck with another suggestion. After the line, "Is the Queen in residence?" he adds, "I saw no flags." The director laughs. That one stays in. He's not so lucky when it comes to referring to the Queen as Madge. "They'll think you mean Madonna," points out the director.
What's being recorded here is a five-part audio adventure, Hornet's Nest. It's the first time BBC Audio has produced a full-cast drama, and the first time Baker has played the Doctor (says the publicity) since he left the role in Logopolis in 1981. That's not strictly true. He provided a few in-character lines for PC game "Destiny Of The Doctors"(1998), appeared briefly on-screen, in-costume, as a kind of intergalactic commentator for the ghastly EastEnders/Doctor Who Children In Need crossover "Dimensions In Time" (1993), provided in-character links for the video release of "Shada" (1992) and materialised as host of BBC 2's Doctor Who theme night in 1999. But hey, this is the first time he's played the Doctor in a proper full adventure since 1981, so that's something to get excited about.**
And it was Baker who got the ball rolling, after providing the narration for two of the BBC's Doctor Who audio books, "The Giant Robot," and "Pyramids Of Mars"
"I'm asked all the time by an outside firm would I like to do an audio adventure?" he tells us during a break in recording. "And I've never managed that. But this one came about because we had a laugh at a recording session of an audio book last year. I mentioned over lunch I'd love to do something like this. And so it transpired. Having been, in effect, the origin of it by saying I'd be willing to do it, I had to do it."
And so, here he is today in a recording studio with Richard Franklin (back as Pertwee era regular Mike Yates), Rula Lenska (as the alien queen) and Susan Jameson (as the Doctor's housekeeper Mrs Wibbsey (don't ask), sporting lines about zebras, pigs' eyes and shrinking ("It's fascinating being drunk; I mean shrunk," he quips, true to form). And Baker seems to have slipped back into the role like a Sea Devil to water.
"Well, I've never really been away," he argues, "because the fans never let me go away. Because, you know, fan love is superior to human love. Because the fans don't worry about the fact that I'm old now, and decrepit and I can't run about. They don't care. Because when you look at what you're a fan of, and we're all a fan of something, you are catapulted back to a time, usually when you were younger and happier, or you think you were happier, but certainly younger. I've been stopped in the street quite often and told that."
"A young man stopped me in Oxford Street not all that long ago, and said, 'Tom Baker?' And I said, 'Yes.' And I often say to people in situations like that, 'Have we worked together?' And he says, 'No.' And I see him being catapulted back in time, and he says, 'Do you know, when I was a kid I was in a home in North Wales, and on Saturdays you made life better.' And I was about to say something, but he was so emotional, he just put up his hand as if to say, 'Let's not go there.' And then he made a little gesture of thanks and was gone. And it was all very moving."
One of the reasons why playing the Doctor again after all these years was, he argues, "so easy!" was because he never really felt that he was acting the part in the first place. He was the Fourth Doctor and the Fourth Doctor was Tom Baker, and he's been happy to project that role in public ever since. "You don't act Doctor Who. Like you don't act Sherlock Holmes. Because when you're playing heroes, the real difficulty is that it's all so predictable. The hero always wins. So the thing is, how do you surprise within the predictability? When Barry Letts cast me he asked me how I thought I would play it, and I said I have no idea. And that was true. I mean, for the first year and half they were still writing for Jon Pertwee, in that very sarcastic manner. Very superior. Which I didn't like at all. And so I was trying to make him more alien, but more friendly ... odd ... silly."
He does admit though, that he became a victim of his own public persona. "People like you to be a bit indiscreet, you know? A bit outrageous. One of the things now you have to be terribly careful of - makes you terribly self-conscious - is saying anything that can be taken out of context. But usually, when I'm at a Doctor Who convention, the other actors like me because I do the last hour on my own talking bollocks on stage. And this last one I did a few months ago, as soon as I came on stage, it was amazing, like a Nazi rally, because they were all holding their phone up, recording it. So suddenly it just chilled me slightly. I was suddenly rather more discreet than I normally would be. Because the audience knows I'm not being malicious. So if they say, 'What are your views on God?' I'll say, 'Well, I've forgiven him.' Then someone will ask, 'What have you forgiven him for?' To which I'll reply 'Well, not existing for one thing.' But imagine that out of context?"
Mention of phones reminds him of another service he's increasingly being asked to provide: "A lot of people, all sorts of people I work for, producers and writers on commercials, ask me to make up messages for their answer phones. That's suddenly become a bit of a fashion."
"When it comes to the new audio drama, Baker feels that the script feels authentically Doctor Who to him. "I mean, there are still bits in this that could easily be spoken by Jon Pertwee," he laughs. "This guy, this writer, is quite poetic in some ways, but it would be quite nice to influence him a little bit like I did in the old days, put in a few jokes. I'm obsessed with jokes. As I get older and nearer to death I become more and more obsessed with jokes."
"But I really like a section when I meet some kind of Dark Age nuns. I think it's the best section of all. There's also a big, long chase involving the TARDIS which is very well done. In fact, this sort of script is so mad it could easily be made into a manga. Very easily, and very successfully. I think we should suggest that to the BBC."
So,would he do another one?"Oh yes. But I do have another idea, The Diaries Of Doctor Who. They could start out with me, then if the formula was a success they could do it with the other Doctors. The Brigadier rings up Sarah Jane and says, "I've been sent a parcel, and it's dated 34 years ago." And when he opens this parcel it's like a CD inside, so he invites her over. And they listen to it, and it's me, and I tell them things I would never have told them in the series, about what I felt, or telling them about other adventures, or even things I regret. But there would be a mystery at the heart of it. Why am I impelled to tell them this?"
And what would the Doctor regret?
He grins. "I'd think that was rather obvious. While they allow a bit of affection now, it actually gets very affectionate, doesn't it? "But in those days, if I had to handle the girls, I would always handle them rather awkwardly as if I wouldn't know what to do. Although I did wonder sometimes whether it would be nice to get someone like Mary Tamm to kiss me passionately? And I would be astonished, but then suddenly, after a wonderful slow burner, I would say, "Romana, I wonder if you could do that again?"
Tom Baker quite happily admits that the Doctor was the role of a lifetime, but what does he reckon is the worst role he's ever had?
"The worst one was Macbeth. I played him in London at the Shaw Theatre, in Euston in 1973. We sold every ticket and I was terrible. The audience booed me on the first night at the curtain call. I thought they were booing the whole production, so imperiously I waved the rest of the cast away and the booing was redoubled."
"The biggest laugh I got was this magnificent double-take. The director said it was very funny, but it wasn't supposed to be. I told him, 'You don't find it funny, I don't find it funny, it's their bloody fault they found it funny'."
"At that time I was going through a broken heart, and I was rather heart-sore throughout the whole thing. I was living in a little bedsit in Pimlico, with quite a lot of books. And I was so depressed by Macbeth, knowing I had 60 performances to do, and the boys in the cast were so kind to me; they knew I was terrible. So every night I went in I would bring my first editions and old scripts and give them to the boys. After 60 days I had nothing left but the chaise lounge, which I was convinced I was going to die on before the 60 days were up. And the night it ended we all went to the pub and I was still alive. Unfortunately, I didn't own anything! What a cock up."
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**Also (in role and costume):
TV ads for PRIME Computers circa 1980
TV ads for New Zeland Life Insurance Company
TV ads for "Keep Australia Beautiful," circa 1970
an ad compaign for June Hudson's FRAMED Art Prints
guest host for Disney Time (1975)
early audio books, Genesis of the Daleks (1975) Pescatons (1976), State of Decay (1980),
Evil of the Daleks (1992), Fury from the Deep (1993), Power of the Daleks (1993)
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Midi file this page: "Doctor Who Theme #6."