Doctor Who (14 page)

The Actor Behind the Role

The Fourth Doctor's nature impressed Verity Lambert, who said that Tom Baker came closest to her vision of the character apart from William Hartnell. She acknowledged, though, that her criticism of other Doctors often reflected the stories they were given more than the actors.

Terrance Dicks and others have often joked that the strange and bizarre Fourth Doctor was really just a slightly exaggerated version of Tom Baker. In the documentary
Adventures in Time and Space,
Dicks said, “Tom impresses you as being completely mad. . . . If you say something to Tom like, ‘Good morning, nice day,' he says, ‘Is it? . . . Yes! Yes, it is, it's a wonderful day!' . . . It's quite natural and unforced.” In a 1982 interview with
Private Who,
Baker said, “I didn't know how I was going to do Doctor Who. I had no idea at all—not until the very first rehearsal, and even then I didn't know . . . I just did it. I just played the script, and something evolved, and the audience liked the way I did it, obviously, so we kept it like that.”

Philip Hinchcliffe was excited to have his first job as producer on a show as famous as
Doctor Who.
Baker had been cast before Hinchcliffe had been hired, so he understood that the actor would already have ideas about how to approach the role. The two had several conversations about how to portray the Doctor and his world and delighted in how much they agreed.

“He had an incredibly expressive face, those wide, intense eyes, and that grin,” said Hinchcliffe in an interview for this book at Gallifrey One 2013. “He was tall and gave a real physical presence to the Doctor. He had a voice that spoke with authority and earnestness. You believed him when he said the universe was in danger; he projected urgency, especially when he instantly changed from being friendly to having this righteous anger. I thought he gave such a marvelous performance, a person you believed had been alive for centuries, who was ancient and not human, and had seen things across space and time.”

“I wasn't the finest authority on all things Whovian,” Elisabeth Sladen wrote in her autobiography, “but the word on set was that he was the first Doctor who really ‘got' the fact that he was alien. I would read the script and try to predict how Tom would attack certain lines. Nine times out of ten, I was wrong. Whatever I predicted, he would find another way. And it would be perfect.
For a Time Lord.
”

Tom Baker spoke of the challenge of finding his Doctor during those first few adventures, when the scriptwriters fell into habits that complemented Pertwee's strengths, such as his irritability and sarcasm. He told
Doctor Who Magazine,
“Jon Pertwee was absolutely brilliant at putting people down and being sarcastic, whereas I'm not very good at that. Sarcasm doesn't much interest me, really. I much prefer a kind of benevolent lunacy . . . because I'm an alien.”

During the
Doctor Who @40 UK Gold
celebration, former editor of
Doctor Who Magazine
Clayton Hickman said, “Well, Tom Baker
is
Doctor Who, there's no denying it. Whether he's playing Doctor Who or whether he's
walking down the streets going to the shops, he's Doctor Who. . . . If you've met the guy, he's insane. In a good way.”

Baker himself often admitted that he was largely playing an idealized version of himself who was smarter and always knew what to do. In
Adventures in Time and Space,
he said, “My trade, such as it is, is to try and be convincing . . . but to play someone from outer space . . . how do you suggest he is alien? And so I felt the best way to suggest that I was an alien and came from somewhere else and had secrets—dark thoughts and wonderful thoughts—I thought the way to do that is just to be Tom Baker.”

There have been reports of Tom Baker being difficult to work with, mostly in his later years on the program (discussed in the next chapter). But according to Hinchcliffe, “I found Tom to be very professional. He cared about the role and spoke up when he thought a scene could be better or wanted to add a line, and sometimes we agreed and sometimes we didn't. During my time, he never tried to take over and was never impossible to direct. I never had a cross word with him at all. If he had an idea that I thought wasn't going to work, he conceded.”

Tom Baker had not been prepared for how much
Doctor Who
would change his life, despite warnings. When people stopped him on the street just weeks after his first episode, he decided it was his responsibility not to disrupt the fantasy for any children. Baker chose never to smoke or drink in an open, public area, lest a child see him. If young fans encountered him on the street, he responded in character, enthusiastically explaining that he was taking a stroll before his next adventure. During filming for “The Face of Evil,” Baker noticed a production staffer's child on set and introduced himself as the Doctor before offering to show her the TARDIS.

Once, by chance, production of the show left Tom Baker with a few free days in his schedule. Rather than take a holiday, he visited schools in Belfast, which had recently suffered IRA bombings. Baker showed up in full costume, greeting schoolchildren, playing with them during recess, and reassuring them that they didn't need to be afraid.

“Children were very important to Tom,” Hinchcliffe said. “He realized he was a hero to many of them, so he considered it a responsibility not to disappoint them. It led to a change in the first Leela adventure, where the script originally had him pretend to take a hostage by holding a knife to their
throat. Tom didn't wish children to see the Doctor with a knife to anyone's throat, even if they knew he wouldn't hurt that person, so he substituted the knife with a jelly baby and still made the threat with deadly seriousness. It made for a funny scene and a better scene. It's how the Doctor would think.”

Familiar Foes

Hinchcliffe wanted to get away from Earth-bound stories for a while. He and Holmes also wanted stories involving small casts of characters in danger rather than full-scale alien invasions and cosmic threats where the stakes might be quite abstract. The Fourth Doctor's first season also featured the return of not one but three familiar races of monsters.

After the first script by Terrance Dicks, the Doctor rushes off with Sarah Jane and UNIT physician Dr. Harry Sullivan, played by Ian Marter, who also wrote many
Doctor Who
novelizations for Target and had appeared in the Third Doctor story “Carnival of Monsters.” Harry is a posh Royal Navy surgeon who doesn't have a high enough UNIT security clearance to realize that the Brig's scientific advisor is actually an alien with a working time ship. Harry, Sarah Jane, and the Doctor find themselves thousands of years in the future on a space ark. Most of the ark's passengers are in hibernation, giving a great feeling of isolation as only the Doctor, his two friends, and a few humans realize that an intruder is stalking them. In fact, to magnify this, the first episode of the story featured no other speaking characters beyond the TARDIS crew.

At the conclusion of “The Ark in Space,” the Doctor decides to check on how Earth is doing in this future era rather than take off in the TARDIS again. His quick visit leads to another encounter with a small group of astronauts and a Sontaran scout eager for battle. Although invasion was a looming threat, the main stakes of this story involved the group being captured or experimented on by the Sontaran warrior.

The fourth story of the season, a six-part tale, became a landmark and influenced the modern-day program. “Genesis of the Daleks” begins when a Time Lord, possibly an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency, forcibly sends the Doctor and his friends to ancient Skaro, without the TARDIS. The Time Lords foresee a future in which the Daleks threaten Gallifrey's existence
and become the dominant life form in the universe. The Doctor has been sent to when the race first rose. The Doctor can use this opportunity to learn secret weaknesses of the monsters, slow down their evolution instead, or even avert the birth of the Daleks entirely. Either way, he is without his ship and can't leave until the Time Lords consider his mission complete.

“Genesis of the Daleks” returned Terry Nation's creatures to their fascist roots and reminded viewers just why the Doctor feared them. The Doctor and his friends find themselves in the middle of a war between the Thals and a society called the Kaleds.The dark-haired Kaleds speak of “total extermination of the Thal race” and their uniforms evoke Nazi Germany. The Doctor meets their chief scientist, Davros, who believes in biological purity and survival of the fittest despite being dependent on cybernetic implants and a life support unit that visually portends the Daleks. Davros has foreseen that his race will die and has created the Dalek race from the mutated ashes of the Kaleds, eliminating their psychological capacity for sympathy and pity while increasing their survival instinct.

Hinchcliffe and Holmes didn't care for the Daleks and had agreed to this story because Letts and Dicks had already commissioned it. They'd brought the Doctor to the origin of the genesis of the race because this could finally bring an end to the monsters. As Elisabeth Sladen tells it, the story originally was faster paced and ended with the Doctor averting the creation of the monsters by planting explosives in their incubator chamber and setting it off with two wires outside. But Tom Baker protested to director David Maloney, “I'm the Doctor—I can't go around wiping out entire civilizations. Have I the right?”

Baker's dilemma with the Doctor committing genocide led to rewrites that invited viewers to ponder the same moral conflict. In the new version, Sarah Jane tells the Doctor that he needs to set off the explosive, but the hero can't bring himself to destroy a race for crimes it has yet to commit. Furthermore, he knows many civilizations become allies due to mutual fear of the Daleks. Would he undo all the good that came of this evil?

The Doctor doesn't wipe the creatures from existence, though he does slow down their progress, and now understands them better. The story received praise for addressing such moral conflicts, along with other social and political arguments. Decades later, Russell T. Davies revealed in
Doctor
Who Annual 2006
that the Doctor's mission to alter Dalek history represented the first attack in what led to the Last Great Time War.

Following this, the year ended with the return of the Cybermen, who hadn't appeared on-screen since fighting the Second Doctor, nearly seven years earlier. The twelfth year was a success in the ratings and the best was yet to come.

The Scratchman

Before Tom Baker had been cast, the
Doctor Who
production team had considered that the next incarnation might be an older gentleman who wouldn't be as physical as Jon Pertwee. Troughton and Hartnell had been accompanied by young men of action, so Ian Marter was cast as Dr. Harry Sullivan to fill this role for the Fourth Doctor.

But after filming was in full swing, it became clear that Tom Baker could play the action hero well, and Sullivan was deemed unnecessary. In the thirteenth season, “Terror of the Zygons” features the Doctor helping out UNIT again, with Sullivan deciding to stay home at the end. After the thirteenth year of
Doctor Who,
UNIT vanished from the show until 1989. The Brigadier wasn't seen again until the Fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead,” seven years later.

Along with starring alongside each other on-screen, Ian Marter and Tom Baker worked together on a script for a proposed feature film,
Doctor Who Meets the Scratchman.
The story involved scarecrows coming to life and rampaging on Earth. Before the Doctor could properly handle the situation, an army of Cybermen would rise from the sea and attack Earth's shores. It would be revealed that all this chaos and more was caused by the Scratchman, a reference to an old name for the Devil, who created destruction for the sheer joy of it.

With a film budget, Baker wanted to take advantage of scenarios too costly for the TV stories. “I remember the ending,” he told
Doctor Who Magazine.
“We were going to turn the whole studio into a giant pinball table. The Doctor and his companions were stuck on this table, and Scratchman was firing these balls at us. The balls disappeared down holes that were sort of gateways into other Hells. It was a very violent film, but
very funny, too. The production office saw it and hated it, but I thought it was marvelous.”

A Touch of Horror

For the program's thirteenth season, Hinchcliffe and Holmes took influence from the atmosphere of the famous Hammer horror films. “Terror of the Zygons” involved whispering villains in the dark and the Loch Ness monster. Stories followed featuring a geological dig threatened by a hidden menace, an Egyptian god who commanded reanimated cadavers and robot mummies, a Time Lord version of Frankenstein's monster, an abandoned village where all the calendars are on the same date, and alien seed pods found in Antarctica.

Some argued that the program was becoming too violent for children. One major figure who rose against the show was Mary Whitehouse, first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now called Mediawatch-UK. She regularly protested that
Doctor Who
had become “teatime brutality for tots.” She argued that the Nazi overtones of “Genesis of the Daleks” and certain cliffhangers—such as one in “The Deadly Assassin” wherein a villain tries to drown the Doctor—were too frightening and potentially damaging to children. Concerning the story “The Seeds of Doom,” Whitehouse complained about one scene in which the Doctor holds a gun to his enemies in order to save Sarah Jane, and another that featured a strangulation. She suggested that
Doctor Who
might as well educate children on how to make a Molotov cocktail.

The BBC addressed these concerns from time to time, and the production team pointed out that for several years now the program had aimed toward children above the age of ten. Elisabeth Sladen occasionally addressed the matter as well, pointing out that if a parent found a child easily upset by violence or frightened by
Doctor Who,
then that parent had the power to change the channel. As far as the
Doctor Who
production office was concerned, though, Whitehouse did little beyond increasing the program's visibility and viewership.