Confessions of
a
Shagged Out Time Lord
An interview with Tom
Baker by Mark Campbell
Tom Baker and DOCTOR WHO may be
synonymous to most Skonnos readers , but there's much more to
the man than just his seven-year stint as a Time Lord. From humble beginnings
in 30s Liverpool, he decided to join a monastery on the Channel Isles where he
spent much of the time looking at other people's shoes and trying not to think
about sex. After failing in that vocation, he became an actor, promptly
finding himself out of work for long periods of time. While auditioning for
various inappropriate parts and drinking copiously in London pubs and clubs,
he soon came to the attention of the BBC, leaving his job at a building site
to become the Fourth Doctor. When that was over, he sank back into relative
obscurity again and moved to a remote Kent village, where he now mows the
grass around his gravestone and irons prodigious amounts of shirts.
Baker's autobiography, Who on Earth is Tom
Baker?, lifts the lid on his hilarious, often sordid, and
spectacularly unlikely life story. Characterized by self-loathing, failure and
countless drunken soirees, it's an outspoken and revealing look at the man who
until now has remained something of an enigma.
I interviewed Tom Baker for Midweek
magazine in October 1997 - at the start of his mammoth publicity tour - and
the interview eventually saw print in the issue dated November 17. A
gregarious and laid-back speaker, Baker liberally sprinkled our conversation
with the sort of fruity language that earned it the subtitle "An effing good
interview with Doctor Who"! However, I think Skonnos
readers are a more sensitive bunch, and I have opted to censor the
offending parts of the text, substituting asterisks for the naughty buts - so
I'm afraid you'll have to use your imaginations.
My thanks to the HarperCollins publicity staff -
especially Robin Birch - and to the staff of Books Etc, Charing Cross
Road.
A note about the text: This is a longer and more
in-depth interview than that used in Midweek. Certain
parts of the dialogue were edited by the magazine itself, some portions were
pruned by me to streamline it in the original submission, and there are some
completely new passages that I excluded for reasons of irrelevancy, repetition
and space. All these deletions have now been reinstated, making this Tom Baker
interview pretty much uncut, providing a genuinely complete record of the
man's views on life, the universe, and, well...everything.
SKONNOS: Why did you decide now
was the right time to write your memoirs?
TOM BAKER: It sprang out of nothing to do. The countryside is
incredibly boring. There's lots of shagging, lots of murders, lots of sarcasm,
lots of treachery, and lots of bad cooking, but it's all hidden. You've got
all the space and the flowers, but it's f****** dull! Especially the pubs.
People say that country pubs are interesting, but that's as mischievous as
writing on a gravestone, 'Not Dead, Only Sleeping'. If you go into a country
pub, they really should have a sign saying, 'Not Sleeping, Only Dead'! If you
like space and flowers you could put up with the dullness, but if you just
walk round the back of the Cambridge Theatre suddenly there's lots of free
entertainment, lots of it very squalid, but most people are electrified by
squalor. Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid.
In your autobiography, you go
into great depth about your Catholic upbringing. Is the book a sort of
confessional for you?
Well yes, I suppose. I've had to hold back certain things
for legal reasons, or just out of common decency, but I think autobiography
has got to be selected confessions, hasn't it? I could have said jolly things
about some of the dreadful people I've spent my life with, but it would have
been a cheat. There is a kind of autobiography which tells all and reveals
nothing, and I didn't want to do that. Mine's a pretty f****** messy story,
really.
You talk a lot about your sense of failure, but don't you think
that seven years as a children's hero outweighs that?
I have never described the time I was in DOCTOR WHO
as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has
been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to DOCTOR
WHO, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring. If
you've played the leading part in the National Theatre, what's that compared
with being a big star in Abu Dhabi? What's that compared to being on 300
station in America? Nothing. So I am a one success man.
You don't mention MEDICS in the book, and yet I felt you were the
highlight of the programme.
Did you?
Well I didn't mention MEDICS because I wasn't particularly proud
of it. I thought they only allowed me to be a James Robertson Justice of the
90s and I would have liked it to have been more complex than
that.
Did you enjoy the experience of writing the
book?
Listen. Actors are like
Big Issue sellers - they enjoy any old sh*t. Today it might be
Hagan Daaz ice-cream and Pret a Manger sandwiches, but tomorrow it's going to
be whippet sh*t. The real secret of life is to have the optimism of a f******
mongrel dog - you get kicked in the mouth and you think the next fellow may
not kick you, or if he does kick you he's only wearing sneakers. If you get
kicked by a fellow wearing brogues, you get a swollen lip. Actors are able to
trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of
madness really.
Are you going to be writing another book?
Well, I don't know if I'm going to be writing any more
autobiography, but I have an idea to write a novel about a monstrous child, a
criminal child on a colossal scale...(Laughs) [This became
The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, published in November 1999 by
Faber and Faber.]
Fans - especially DOCTOR WHO fans - tend to be obsessive about
things. Are you obsessive about anything?
Well, I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the
days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my
feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness, and for a
reason I don't understand - I don't want to understand - suddenly people said,
"We thoroughly approve of what Tom is doing there..."
That's because you were great.
But the thing is, I never examined what I did in any great detail
because I thought it would spoil things. I never read the scripts at all
carefully, and never wanted to know what was going on, because I felt that
being a benevolent alien that's the way it should be. I didn't really know
what was going to happen when someone kicked open the door, and so I just
responded. It happened to work, and they really liked it and have stayed
faithful.
The latter part of your book reads like a tribute to the late,
great columnist Jeffrey Bernard...
Well yes. Jeffrey of course, with consummate bad timing, died during
the catastrophe of Princess Diana and before my book came out. Like lots of
glamorous inadequates, he would have adored reading about himself in a book
that was doing rather well.
Do you think there's such a thing as a fate worse than
death?
Yes I do. I think quite often
a fate worse than death is life - for lots of people. In the book I describe
an attempted suicide. Death is a wonderful release, and a wonderful escape -
it's a better escape than literature really. Sometimes when I watch very
famous people on television, they make me long for death! These utterly
pitiful little exhibitionists who don't nourish anyone but just talk very
loudly are now actually guiding us and telling us what to think. They make me
long for death, and if I don't die that night, at least I think, "Well, one
day I'll be dead and then I'll get away from you." The sight of David Frost or
Loyd Grossman or boring newscasters or the Daily Mail...!
Someone once asked me, "When you're dead, what do you think you'll be glad
of?" And I said, "That I don't have to ever look, even accidentally, at the
bloody Daily Mail." My idea of Hell would be going to
Daily Mail-land and listening to boring Paul Johnson telling us
what the meaning of the family is, or Simon Heffer, who really should've been
around before anaesthetic. When you read Simon Heffer, you could have your
f****** leg off and you wouldn't feel any pain. He's so boring.
One thing that comes out of your autobiography is that you don't
really know who you are...
Not only
don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they
are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five
people an hour! What we don't do is enact those impulses, but we feel them,
don't we? Do you remember Jimmy Carter, that fatuous little peanut man who ran
America for a while? He once confessed to feeling like shagging someone -
maybe he said adultery or something - and all America went "Ooooh!". My God,
is that all he felt? No wonder he cocked-up the United
States.
So can we be certain of anything then?
No, I think it would be fatuous to say we can. I've
forgotten the quotation from the Old Testament - which is my favourite science
fantasy reading - but we know not the minute or the hour. We think one thing
and a split second later we're lying sprawled in the gutter and saying, "What
happened?" I tell you what we can be certain of - we can be certain of
uncertainty. I think the best writing, and the best football matches and the
best cricket matches, are about uncertainty. Football's a very good analogy
actually, because when a big team goes to play a small team in the FA, they
can be certain of nothing. Why should the confessions of a shagged-out old
Time Lord be of interest to anyone? We don't quite know. It's an illusive
thing, isn't it? It's a bit like why people buy the Daily Mail -
it's a mystery!
Do you ever worry that all the Doctors seem to be dying in
succession?
No, it keeps me going!
The reason why people want to get into television is that the buggers don't
die! When did anyone die in television? I long for the sods to die in their
bloody hundreds. Not only won't they die, as they get older they get more and
more shameless. We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their
voices if it's a sad story, as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't
a single cool newsreader. Michael Burke reads the news as if it's his fault,
and f****** Peter Sissons reads it as if it's my fault!
Kenneth Kendall was good.
Yeah, but he finished up on Anneka's a**e, didn't he?
And the weathermen?
They're so bloody tacky, aren't they? They all talk alike - why do they
suddenly want to stress Wednesday? Why do they say, "Next
Wednesday..."? And the girls are doing these vile little hand movements
that kill your d**k, these awful little gestures as if we're handicapped
infants. Again, you don't have a cool weather forecaster. They're show-offs,
you see; they're not doing their jobs. You don't want a camp dentist who
dances round as if he's a frustrated ballerina - you want him to get on with
the dentistry.
What about politicians?
All utterly disgusting. Politicians are just Daily Mail
journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to
happen, and we know they don't know!
Did you see Portillo on Election night?
I did! The pleasure was absolutely wonderful! I love it when
the people actually get it right and suddenly just brush them into oblivion. I
just love it, absolutely adore it. Portillo must have gone absolutely
crackers, but what pleasure it gave us all to see him suffer. I stayed up to
see the result; I couldn't wait. My loins are stirring now with bliss! I'd
like to meet him one day and say, "Do you know that night you lost, I can't
tell you what a f****** pleasure it was - you looked so f****** sick, and we
felt so well!" Someone said to Cecil Parkinson, "There's going to be a row
about this." And he said, "The way things are going, there won't be enough of
us to have a row!" I actually fell about when he said that - fancy Cecil
Parkinson being funny? But when you think about William Hague bringing him
back into the front line, that's like bringing Stanley Bowles back - he's
passé, he's the past. It's like you're drunk in an hotel and you bump
into an old love, and you say, "Do you think we should have a shag for old
time's sake?" Both of you sigh and say, "It's dead - leave it dead." And they
should've left Cecil Parkinson dead, which he is.
And Mellor?
It was so
pathetic! What he was trying to do, in his vanity, was to blame his defeat on
Goldsmith. But Goldsmith was brilliant - he entertained us no end, we brushed
him aside, and then he died. He had bottle, didn't he, he stuck in there! It
takes some bottle to swallow rejection like that - that's why I can't imagine
ever being a Jehovah's Witness. You knock at the door, and the fellow opens it
and says, "F*** off!"