Bohemian Rhapsody
Tom Baker, 1974-81
Prior to the series’ return to television in 2005, when the
classic years were overtaken by BBC Wales’ all-conquering juggernaut of a
franchise, there was one man who was more widely identified with Doctor Who than any other. For years,
from his debut series that culminated in 1975, through to the beginnings of the
twenty-first century, Tom Baker was Doctor Who for the vast majority of the
public. If you went up to an average passer-by in the street, and asked them
what they knew about Doctor Who, they
would tell you it was about a Time Lord who wore a long scarf, and travelled in
a TARDIS with his robot dog. If you asked them who played the Doctor, most
people would name Tom Baker, with a handful of stalwarts remembering Pertwee or
Davison. The man in the scarf played the role – no, inhabited it – for a record
seven-and-a-half years, give or take, giving a performance that overshadowed
his predecessors and successors for years afterwards.
So, yes, Tom Baker remains the quintessential Doctor for
millions who caught the show in the twentieth century. Looking back, then, it
is surprising just how bewildering his casting must have been for viewers at
the time. By now, people were becoming used to the idea that the Doctor changed
his face and dress sense every few years, but Jon Pertwee had already set a
record with his five year tenure and was closely identified with the role.
Anyone who followed him was going to have some pretty whopping shoes to fill.
Early casting attempts had centred on older actors, very much in the mold of
what had come before, only later stretching to include younger men. (A list of
actors approached for the role includes Fulton Mackay, Peter Sellers and Jim
Dale, showing that, while the production team were casting their net wide, they
were looking for a well-known face.) While forty is now roughly the average age
for an actor starting out as the Doctor, in 1974 it was very young; indeed, the
transition from Pertwee to Baker marks a drop of fourteen years in the age of
the lead actor.
Tom Baker, former monk turned stage actor, had begun to
carve out a career playing larger than life characters on film. However, by
1974, he was famously working on a construction site, even as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, in which
he played the main villain, was showing in cinemas across the UK. While not
quite an unknown, he could hardly be said to have been a star like Pertwee. In
the style of performance, the difference is even more marked. Watch Planet of the Spiders and Robot back-to-back. The change in the
character of the Doctor is sudden and vast, the dashing leading man being
replaced by a gangly, goggle-eye eccentric . The potential for audience
alienation is huge, and wisely it’s played for laughs, easing the audience in
with a recognisable UNIT adventure before the new lead actor and production
team take the series in a new direction.
Baker is hardly the most talented actor to have ever played
the central role in Doctor Who. “I
can’t even come through a door convincingly,” he once said, “but perhaps one
can come through a door interestingly, dare I say amusingly…” While Pertwee had
before brought much of himself to the character of the Doctor, never had an
actor been so perfectly suited to the role. Viewers must have been bewildered faced
by this grinning loon. It’s as if the BBC had managed to hire an actual alien
to play the role. Other actors played up their eccentricities to become the Doctor.
Tom Baker had to tone it down.
Immediately following his regeneration, the Doctor is
erratic and unpredictable. He babbles nonsense before regaining his wits long
enough to escape his sickbed, mugging his physician and making straight for the
TARDIS, his responsibilities and relationships on Earth seemingly forgotten.
Once he’s cornered, he makes his excuses and tries to escape, only to suddenly
register the presence of Sarah-Jane and the Brigadier, shaking their hands and
beaming at them like he hasn’t clapped eyes on them in years. Watching this
performance, the viewers – and the characters – are never sure just how much
the Doctor is being serious (in his own warped way) and how much he is taking
the mick. There’s a wonderful moment when he catches himself in a mirror for
the first time, leaving him aghast at his new face (no doubt how many of the
viewers were feeling too). He tries on numerous outfits, from Viking
battledress to a Pierrot costume, surely just to wind up the Brigadier, before
finally settling on his recognisable style.
It’s easy to call the fourth Doctor a Bohemian based solely
on his boho look, but the term has connotations that fit his character well. Bohemianism
is a late 19th and early 20th century term denoting those
social dropouts who occupied the fringes of polite society, living
unconventional lifestyles and dressing. Wikipedia suggests that bohemians “may
be wanderers, adventurers or vagabonds,” and it’s hard to think of a better
description of the Doctor than that. The bohemian movement was populated by a
number of wealthy individuals who had shunned their family ties and chosen to
live in relative poverty. The fourth Doctor, who has moved on from the
patrician lordliness of his former persona, fits this characteristic well, as
does the Doctor’s wider character, having left the mighty society of the Time
Lords for a life of exploration. Nonetheless, he’s still very much a lord who
has deigned to join the lesser people. While the bohemians were also
characterised by their, for the time, shocking sexual freedom, the Doctor’s
apparently sexless nature would have been equally unconventional in a society
that valued marriage and family life. The fact that the Doctor’s clothing fits
the bohemian style is no coincidence. The bohemian fin de siècle style, and the 21st century boho-chic recreation, combines all
manner of clothing styles in new and eccentric ways. The fourth Doctor’s clothing
varies considerably during his tenure, but always retains a particular style,
combining an attractive scruffiness with a dash of dandyism, plus that
ever-present scarf. The Doctor was, in his fourth life, still very much a
character type of the Victorian/Edwardian era, but one who was far more of a
dropout than ever before. Even his anarchist second self wasn’t this removed
from polite society. From cosmic hobo to caustic boho…
Walking in Eternity
The fourth Doctor calms down a bit after his debut appearance,
but remains erratic throughout his life. His style of character does vary
somewhat, along with the genre of the stories in which he appears. The Tom
Baker era can be divided into three distinct periods, by production team.
There’s the Hincliffe/Holmes period of the first three seasons, the Williams
period of the next three, and the Nathan-Turner/Bidmead period of the final
season. That earlier period, produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe, with Robert
Holmes as script editor, is for many fans the golden age of Doctor Who. The defining feature of the
era was a spooky gothic bent, often with lashings of violence, a dangerous
universe inspired by Hammer Horror tropes but filtered through a sci-fi lens.
Following an inaugural year in which he faced off against familiar foes such as
Cybermen, Daleks and Sontarans, the Doctor then went on to meet such entities
as robotic mummies, an Egyptian god, Frankenstenian stitched-up monsters and
the Loch Ness Monster (in actuality alien cyborg livestock).
While there is a general change in the fourth Doctor’s
demeanour across his tenure, from intense through silly to sombre, his mood
changes drastically and alarmingly from story to story, and often from scene to
scene. While he can easily be the most humorous and absurd of the original
series Doctors, he can also be the most serious and grim. There’s a sombreness
to him throughout his time in the TARDIS, and underlying resoluteness that he
masked with humour. I once, in a similar article along the lines of this one,
suggested that the fourth Doctor might be bipolar, and while I retract that as
being an idiotic oversimplification of a serious condition, there are elements
of it in his character. He flips from manic activity to sluggish doldrums and
back again. Often there are good reasons for him to become serious; Pyramids of Mars is a perfect example of
story in which he remains determined and detached throughout, with only a sort
of gallows humour getting him through a situation with potentially deadly
consequences for all of creation. Other times the reasoning behind his mood and
actions is not so clear; regard his cheeriness in the face of the vengeful Time
Lord emperor Morbius, or his fantastically odd humour when dealing with the
threat of the Rutan at Fang Rock. Yet he can quite viciously snap at someone
when they, for example, interrupt him reading a book. His reactions and
responses are wholly unpredictable.
The Doctor’s fourth incarnation perhaps sees him at his most
alien, at least since his Ian and Barbara’s humanising influence early in his
travels. While he is often charming and friendly to people he meets, his is
distant from those who he once considered his friends. After his debut, he
makes but one trip back to his colleagues at UNIT at the Brigadier’s behest,
treating both the Brig (the man who is still his employer) and Benton like
unwanted encumberances. He is a little friendlier with Harry Sullivan, the
naval MD assigned to look after him; having only just met the man, perhaps it’s
easier for him to forge a new relationship with him than with his predecessor’s
colleagues. Even so, he frequently berates and insults the poor man (“Harry
Sullivan is an imbecile!”), and is more gratuitously derogatory than his former
self ever was. The only person he seems
to genuinely like is Sarah-Jane, with whom his friendship grows deeper than
ever – and even she gets a good few insults thrown at her from time to time.
Even after three years of travelling together (screen time,
at least), the Doctor maintains a distant from Sarah-Jane. The Hand of Fear is an especially traumatic adventure for the young
woman, an alien intelligence taking over her body and using her for her own
ends – and it’s not the first time this has happened. While there are some
touching moments between the Doctor and his companion (“Well, I worry about you,”) by the end of it Sarah is ready
to give up and go home. She unleashes a tirade at the Doctor, but never expects
him to actually take it seriously. However, the Doctor has just received a
summons from Gallifrey, and that’s it. He bids Sarah-Jane goodbye and dumps her
back on Earth. Yes, he has a perfectly good reason to leave her behind, what
with Gallifrey barring aliens from its shores, but this isn’t the random
wanderer of the sixties. The Doctor is now able to pilot his TARDIS with
impressive accuracy, barring the occasional 30,000 year overshot. There’s no
reason at all that he can’t go back and pick Sarah up once his business on
Gallifrey is done. And yet he doesn’t, preferring to travel alone. Admittedly,
his solitude doesn’t last long, but it’s clearly the way he’d prefer things to
be. With the exception of Sarah (and arguably Harry, who he more or less
abducts), the fourth Doctor never chooses his humanoid companions – they are
all forced on him in one way or another. Only K-9, who is a rather different
kettle of circuitboards, is actually accepted on board the TARDIS, and he isn’t
actually invited. Indeed, some of this attitude may have bled through from Tom
Baker, who continually insisted that he didn’t need a companion to share his
limelight.
The Oldest Civilisation
The Doctor’s return to Gallifrey in The Deadly Assassinis a milestone for the series, the first time
that an adventure was set wholly on the Doctor’s homeworld and his civilisation
thoroughly explored. The version of the Time Lords presented there is rather
different from the godlike entities we saw in The War Games, or the space-time overseers we met in the third
Doctor’s period. The stuffy old men of this musty college, with their arcane
rituals and petty politicking, was a departure from the Time Lords we’d glimpsed
before, but came to become the enduring vision of the culture of Gallifrey. It
fits the fourth Doctor perfectly, or rather, clashes with him perfectly. The
fourth Doctor is the ultimate college dropout, and this stately collection of
cardinals and scholars is precisely the sort of society he can be imagined to
have dropped out from. There’s also the sense, with its cardinals and chapters,
that the Time Lords represent a form of galactic priesthood. The idea of the
Doctor as a fallen priest is an intriguing one, and matches Tom Baker’s
lifestyle rather well (and also that of Sylvester McCoy, another monk who
became an actor). Whether you view them as stuffy dons, conniving ministers or
austere priests, the Time Lords are not the sort of people who tend to live
exciting lives. No wonder the Doctor got so bored there.
The Doctor displays a rather contemptible attitude to the
Time Lords throughout his fourth incarnation. While he had become thoroughly
rehabilitated during his exile, upon his regeneration he abandons his link to
Gallifrey in much the same way he does his link to the Earth. He is alien to
both worlds. While he identifies as a Time Lord, usually, and often talks of
his responsibilities as one, he clearly stands apart from their number. This is
a Doctor who has had the opportunity to go home – to either his old home of
Gallifrey or his new home of Earth – and has discarded it. It is clear that he
resents, as he puts it, the Time Lords’ “continual interference in his
affairs,” but he inevitably undertakes the tasks they give to him. He has a
duty to the universe, and while he might rally against the Time Lords assigning
him missions, he won’t let that stop him when Morbius or the Daleks are threatening
peace.
In fact, the Doctor’s attitude to his enemies has also
become more serious since his regeneration. Yes, he openly mocks Morbius,
Davros and Greel, but this is the best way of showing them how much contempt he
has for their methods and goals. He might give the occasional moralising speech
as did his previous self, but nothing hurts a monomaniacs ego like someone
refusing to take them seriously. (If any Doctor was to meet Hitler, it should
have been Tom Baker, not Matt Smith. He would have ripped the piss out of him.)
Yet for all his mockery, he takes his enemies very seriously indeed. There’s a
distinct respect between him and Davros, behind the open loathing on both their
parts. He recognises exactly how dangerous Morbius or Sutekh will be if they
are allowed their freedom. It’s his attitude to the Master that illustrates is
best, however. On Gallifrey, they meet for the first time in subjective
decades, and in three years in screen time, both as changed men. The Doctor has
regenerate, but the Master has been totally reinvented, now a horrifically
disfigured ghoul on the verge of death. The affection and banter between them
is long gone, replaced by, particularly on the Master’s side, true hatred.
Be Childish Sometimes
The Deadly Assassin marks
a definite halfway point in the fourth Doctor’s era, for it was this story that
truly drew the ire of moralising busybody Mary Whitehouse after several years
of brickbatting the series. As well as the Tom Baker era divisions mentioned
above, Doctor Who can be divided into
two halves, before and after Assassin. So
incensed by the violence on offer in the Matrix of Gallifrey, and such was her
influence at the time, that Whitehouse was able to alter the parameters of the
series. Assassin represented the end
of a gradual shift towards the darker end of the fantasy spectrum; after this,
the series was forced to tone down the horror. Following the series’ fourteenth
season, the scary stories were rapidly phased out, with only the sublime Horror of Fang Rock and the creepy Inage of the Fendahl representing this
element of the series. A crippling blow had been struck that Doctor Who never quite recovered from.
Chancellor Goth wasn’t the deadly assassin; Mary Whitehouse was.
Under this new constraint, Graham Williams took over as
producer for the fifteenth season. With scares no longer an option, the series
had to find a new style and content. The obvious solution was to up the humour.
This seems to have suited Tom Baker perfectly well. While he can be remarkably
unnerving as a serious-minded alien, Baker revels in the comedic, and often
ad-libbed jokes on set. Indeed, it’s often hard to be sure which of the
Doctor’s lines were scripted and which were Baker’s own additions. Immediately
after The Deadly Assassin, the Doctor
found himself lumbered with Leela, a noble savage from the distant future,
played with charm and subtlety by Louise Jameson. Although not initially at
home to yet another travelling companion, the Doctor took Leela under his wing,
proceeding to show her humanity’s history. In his role as teacher, the Doctor
regained some of the patrician character of his previous self; the increased
humour softened this. There was a definite chemistry between Baker and Jameson
(even if Baker was, by all accounts, a bastard to her on set), but there was a
third element to be introduced.
May the Fourth Be
With You
While it’s a mistake to view the introduction of a robotic
companion to Doctor Who as a direct
reaction to Star Wars (the dates make
plain this error), K-9 certainly came to the series at the right time. The
Doctor’s mechanical hound, originally designed for just one serial, became his
faithful companion for several years, and has become an enduring icon of the
series. K-9 is one of the elements of the series that is simultaneously
embarrassing and lovable to its fans, and that the fact that he managed to
finally get his own series in 2010 is testament to his popularity. Indeed, the
two characters to have returned to Doctor
Who in its modern iteration and go on to receive their own series – Lis Sladen’s
Sarah-Jane and John Leeson’s K-9 – are iconic figures of the Tom Baker era,
further proof, if any were needed, that this is the period of Doctor Who that is best remembered.
With Holmes leaving his post as script editor and Anthony
Read taking over, season fifteen was a return to a kid-friendly format of the
show, with colourful science fiction adventures bolstered by humour. After
Leela was unceremoniously written out during a mediocre return trip to
Gallifrey (Jameson had wanted her to be killed defending the Doctor; instead
they married her off in the most unbelievable way), there was room for a new
companion to join the Doctor and K-9. With the Time Lords now firmly
established as a central part of the Doctor
Who universe, the logical next step was a Gallifreyan companion.
Romanadvoratrelundar – Romana for short, Fred for shorter – was a young Time
Lady, a high achieving academy graduate with little practical experience.
Played with cool detachment by Mary Tamm, Romana couldn’t have been more different
to Leela. The sixteenth season tweaked the series’ format once again, with the
Williams-Read masterplan of a season long arc providing a unifying element for
the disparate adventures. With the Doctor now in full control of his TARDIS, it
was becoming harder to get him into adventures at all. Having been sent on
several Time Lord missions, it was time for a new, overarching mission for the
Doctor. We already had the Time Lords – now it was time for a higher power to
step in.
The White Guardian, half of a diarchy of vastly powerful but
constrained beings, selects the Doctor as his agent to find the segments of the
Key to Time, and to reassemble them in order to restore balance to the
universe. of course, only the Doctor could be selected – it’s his show, after
all – but it shows just how much the Doctor’s status in his series has grown. He’s
gone from being a mysterious wanderer from an unknown world to the prodigal son
of Gallifrey, able to set himself up as Time Lord President and follow it up
with a mission from God. The Doctor, by now, is a legendary figure not just in
British television but throughout his fictional universe. He’s still a rebel
though; he might be cowed in the presence of the Guardian but initially refuses
to work for him, only accepting when he’s threatened with non-existence. Then,
when his mission is accomplished, he sticks it to both the White and Black
guardians and goes on the run, his TARDIS set to random.
Once more, the Doctor was adrift in the cosmos, knowing not
where or when he would wash up. For all of five stories. The Randomiser
deposits the Doctor and the newly regenerated Romana on Skaro and Earth, the
two most obvious places to look for him in the entire universe. Given a chance
for a return to the ‘lost in time’ adventure of the original run of episodes in
the sixties, the production team chose to reverse their own decision and have
the Doctor continually override his Randomiser. Once given control of his
destiny, he couldn’t let it go. The seventeenth season saw silliness take over
completely, perhaps not surprisingly with Douglas Adams as the new script
editor. Very clever, very witty silliness, but silliness nonetheless. The season
kicked off with a comedy scene which saw Romana flicking through new bodies to
regenerate into, and this level of humour was present throughout. However,
Williams and Adams did give us City of
Death, quite simply the funniest, most sublime Doctor Who serial ever.
Romana – the new Romana – is a case in point for our lonely
fourth Doctor. While the Time Lady might have been foisted on him, he developed
a strong bond with her. Perhaps he reminded him of his younger self, when he
had just left Gallifrey and was still green and naïve. Perhaps he liked having
a more equal partner aboard the TARDIS at last. Whatever the reason, there’s
undeniably a frisson between the Doctor and this new Romana. He does take her
on a romantic trip to Paris, after all. So much of this chemistry comes from
the off screen romance between Baker and his soon-to-be wife Lalla Ward, but
even during those episodes filmed when they were at each other’s throats there’s
an undeniable ardour between them. Perhaps the walker in eternity just needs
someone who could engage him at his own level.
However, the series needed reigning in. Baker was becoming
more over-the-top by the story. Watching the panto antics of the final story of
the seventies, The Horns of Nimon, it
was clear that Baker was no longer taking his show seriously. Indeed, it’s
Romana who does all the Doctorish stuff, while the Doctor prats about in the background.
(That said, I really enjoy The Horns of
Nimon. I never said I had any taste.) It was clear it was time for a change.
Entropy Sets In
Tom Baker’s final season heralded a new look for Doctor Who. A complete revamp of the
series had taken place, a new glossy sci-fi show for the eighties. New producer
John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christopher Bidmead took the series away
from the humour that had driven it lately and recrafted it around cutting edge
science and high concept ideas. In practice, the science was so obscure and outlandish
that is might as well have been Adamsian technobabble for all it emant to the
audience. At the end of the day, creating matter through the use of words is
magic, no matter if you call it block transfer mathematics.
Still, there was a definite change in the feel of this
series, as well as the aesthetics. It seemed as though the Doctor and Romana
had been away for a long time. The Doctor seemed distinctly older – Baker was
forty-seven by now, and had been suffering considerably ill health. The Doctor
was a quitter, more sombre figure than he had been for many years, seeming to
drift through his adventures. His costume had been redesigned, a rich burgundy
affair that kept the essence of his earlier outfits but made them richer and
more extravagant. It also swamped him, making the Time Lord who had once seemed
like an unstoppable force a good deal slighter. (It also included question
marks for the first time, a JNT branding exercise.) The overarching theme of
the eighteenth season was one of entropy – perhaps running on from the
universal imbalance of the Key to Time sequence – and it felt as if the Doctor’s
universe was powering down.
After a short excursion beyond the confines of the universe itself,
into the pocket dimension of E-Space, the Doctor was left alone but for an
awkward adolescent called Adric (the legendary Matthew Waterhouse). Romana and
K-9 had left to pursue their own adventures, the Time Lady having finally
graduated from companion to time-travelling adventurer. While he was still
capable of compassion and righteous anger, the Doctor seemed more detached than
ever, just going through the motions.
It’s the End, But…
Eventually, of course, time was going to run out. Even after
seven years, having become the face of Doctor Who for a nation, indeed the
world, Tom Baker moved on. The final story, Logopolis,
has all the pseudoscientific excesses the Bidmead scripts are known for, but it
works, underpinned by a powerfully funereal atmosphere. The Master was reborn,
in the stolen body of Anthony Ainley, and with him he brought both madness and
charm. But while the Master celebrated his ghoulish new life, the Doctor had to
face the end of his. Logopolis sees
the Doctor, for once in his fourth life, staggeringly out of his depth, making a
series of bad decisions that lead his situation from bad to worse. Lumbered
with three companions not of his choosing – two pyjama-clad aliens and a
stroppy Australian – he travels to Logopolis to get his TARDIS recalibrated,
knowing full well that the Master is on his tail. Yet Logopolis is,
fundamentally, the centre of the universe, for it is the Logopolitans work that
keeps the universe running. Not only has the endless, inevitable effect of
entropy doomed the universe to an eventual death, we learn that is actually
passed the point of no return aeons ago (a wonderful conceit). By introducing
the Master into this delicate world, the Doctor dooms vast swathes of the
universe.
If he was going through the motions earlier in this season,
the Doctor here is simply bowing to the inevitable. He follows the instructions
of the Watcher, a mysterious ghostlike being who prefigures the events that
will end the Doctor’s life. The Doctor knows full well who this wraithlike
figure is, and has little choice but to follow him. And because of this, he
must face the Master, to save the universe from his madness. In that final
battle, the Doctor goes on through a grim determination to see things through
to the end. Hanging from a transmission tower, the Doctor looks back over his
long, fourth life (our first pre-regeneration flashback sequence), and it’s
seems clear that he sees this as a death. There’s no humour on display now, no
ready quips, no bag of jellybabies. He finally slips (or does he let go?) He falls.
This is the end, but…
“The Watcher!”
“He was the Doctor all the time!”
In the most bizarre of the Doctor’s transformations, the Watcher,
seemingly a phantom of the Doctor’s former self, merges with him, and he slowly
changes, the Doctor’s face fading to ghostly visage of the Watcher, and his to
that of a younger man. Perhaps his whole life had been leading him here, to
endanger the universe and then to save it. Perhaps it is the Doctor who is the
centre of the universe, but is no longer Tom Baker.
The Moment Has Been Prepared For…
Of course, no Doctor is ever truly dead. Their adventures
live on, and sometimes, they are added to. Tom Baker held out for a long time,
refusing to film new footage for the twentieth anniversary get-together The Five Doctors, and eventually taking
part only in charity dregs like Dimensions
in Time or in-character presenting work. Eventually, however, he would
return to the role. While Big Finish, in 2012, finally signed Baker up to
appear in their range of audioplays, they seem content to produce faithful
nostalgia pieces for the most part. It’s the slightly earlier BBC productions,
written by Paul Magrs, that have taken this version of the Doctor somewhere
new. Since the Hornet’s Nest series
in 2009, a new era of the fourth Doctor’s life has begun, one that fits
somewhere in amongst his earlier adventures, like an unexpected gherkin in a
sandwich. These are strange adventures indeed, lyrical stories in which the
Doctor sits back and tells his own tales. He now counts Mike Yates among his
closest confidants – quite unlike the Doctor who shunned Benton and the Brig in
Scotland – and has a housemaid with her own strange story. This more avuncular
fourth Doctor might be intended to fit somewhere within the televised
adventures, but he comes across very much as an older, mellower version of the
character. He even lives in a cottage in Sussex, much like the man behind the
character. The fourth Doctor lives on, but now he really has become Tom Baker.
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