FAREWELL TO THE SCARF LORD
TOM BAKER THE ONCE AND FUTURE DOCTOR
It is now 40 years since Tom Baker bowed out of his career-defining role as Doctor Who, but many still regard him as the greatest Doctor of them all, as Richard Molesworth reminisces…
Tom Baker takes the air with Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Cyberman Pat Gorman
“It’s the end! But the moment has been prepared for…”
With those melodramatic final words, forty years ago this March, the fourth Doctor rolled his enormous eyes one last time, lay back on some rather unconvincing Astroturf, and regenerated into Peter Davison.
It was the end of an era. And for Tom Baker – the actor who had portrayed the fourth Doctor on BBC1 since 1974 – it was a bitter-sweet farewell to the role that would define his career - despite his efforts to the contrary. Baker never returned to play the Doctor again, not really. Yes, he popped up in a camp cameo in the best-forgotten Children in Need / Doctor Who skit of 1993, and he hobbled into the closing moments of the Fiftieth anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor’ in 2013 as ‘The Curator’ with ne’er a multicoloured scarf in sight, and has - in recent years – embraced the medium of sound to boost the coffers of Big Finish, the makers of Doctor Who audio dramas. But all of these are pale phantoms compared with his performance in *real* Doctor Who, between 28th December 1974 and 21st March 1981.
For many, many people, Tom Baker simply was the Doctor. His portrayal of the renegade Time Lord considered definitive, peerless, the pinnacle of the hierarchy of Doctors before or since. Baker was helped in no small way by his tenure coinciding with a period in which Doctor Who was treated as an unashamedly quality drama production by the BBC. And back in 1974, the BBC needed to find a replacement for Jon Pertwee.
In 1974, Tom Baker the jobbing actor, was down on his luck. He’d appeared in a few TV roles, and had a big part in the 1973 film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, but it had got him nowhere. Working as a hod-carrier on a building site, and overflowing with self-pity, Baker wrote a letter to Bill Slater at the BBC, asking if there were any parts coming up that he might be considered for. Slater had directed Baker in a Play of The Month in 1972, and had since become Head of Serials at the BBC. And just at that point, he was helping Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who, search for a replacement for Jon Pertwee, who was leaving the show. Slater spoke to Letts, Letts found a cinema in London that was still screening the Sinbad film, and as a result of an afternoon’s viewing over a tub of popcorn, contacted Baker and asked him to pop into the BBC for a chat. Within minutes of the subsequent meeting, Letts was sure that he had found his man.