Tom Baker

The universe according to Tom Baker! DWM confronts the iconic Doctor Who and notorious fibber in an attempt to uncover the person behind the performance…

This article originally appeared in DWM 429, published in December 2010.

Has anyone seen the real Tom Baker? Tall, white man; mid-70s. Hair: ashen, and less abundant than it was when he played Doctor Who on television. Eyes: the brightest, boldest, most mesmerizing blue. Do let me know if you see him, because I want to sit him down and find out what makes him tick.

“Tom Baker is probably the most definitive Doctor,” the current incumbent, Matt Smith, tells me when I corner him during filming of the 2010 Christmas Special. “I go to America, and that’s who everyone dresses up as. It’s Baker. It’s the scarf, and the hat, and that long personality that matches his coat. It reminds you of what a wonderful history you’re part of. Once you’re in this show, it really latches on to you. It’s incredible. His Doctor is absolutely the same man as mine.”

When I read Tom his successor’s kind words, the elder statesman of Who chuckles, leans in and explains, “The difference between Matt Smith and me is that he’s an actor and I’m… well, I’m just Tom Baker. When I realised they liked Tom Baker, that’s what they got. It was entirely me. Tom Baker in space. Shovelfuls of Tom Baker, like you’re getting now – this performance that I’m doing for you.”

The real Tom Baker is – to paraphrase Winston Churchill – a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma under a brown tweed jacket. He’s a self-styled eccentric, and his own spin-doctor, which makes him a compelling interviewee, but also tricky to decipher. Some incongruity between a former Time Lord’s professional persona and private self is to be expected, but it often seems like Tom is only interested in perpetuating his own mystification, his own fiction. What if this “performance” is all we get today?

I’ve met this character called Tom Baker in Soho early one Wednesday morning. He’s clutching a Sainsbury’s carrier bag, inside of which is a challah bun. It’s a gift. He’s autographed it. I don’t know what to say. (No. Really. I don’t.) We head to a Pret A Manger. If you read my interview with Tom and costume designer June Hudson in DWM 427, you’ll know that Tom is unwavering in his adoration of Pret. It’s his Mecca. And that’s fine. He orders an espresso. I opt for hot chocolate.

“Strong?” the man behind the counter asks Tom.

“STRONG?!” repeats Tom, as though he’s just been asked to guzzle his own viscera out of a bucket, through a curly straw. “I’d f***ing hope it’s strong!” Moments later, Tom is dropping coins into the charity box on the counter. “Is this for tips?” he enquires.

“No, sir, for charity.”

“CHARITY?!” shoots back Tom. “F***ing hell, hand me a screwdriver.” So far so the performance. But what a performance!

Settled at a window seat, steaming hot beverages in front of us, I read Tom the quote from Matt, the one that opened this article, and then I broach the issue of Tom’s other successors. He doesn’t often talk about them in interviews. We’ve mentioned Matt already, but what does Tom make of the others? Any favourites?

“Well, I didn’t watch David Tennant,” he replies, blowing gently on his especially strong espresso, “but I bought his Hamlet to watch on film. He was absolutely excellent. Wonderfully modern. To see a fresh Hamlet is a very thrilling thing. To have pulled that off, and Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost [Tennant played both parts in the same RSC season, in 2008], was a prodigious achievement.

“When I was at the National [in the late 60s/early 70s],  I understudied about five parts in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Berowne wasn’t one of them. Jeremy Brett was Berowne. He was amazing. Mind you, he was a more amazing Sherlock Holmes [Brett played the detective in a series of Granada TV films, 1984-94]. You really believed that this man was mad, that he shot up. Now, of course, Sherlock Holmes uses f***ing nicotine patches. That’s a joke.” This is, I presume, a sly dig at the BBC’s Sherlock, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. “Hardly anyone I know smokes now,” Tom persists. “When I was young, you couldn’t be an actor and not smoke. Someone I know won the gold medal for smoking at RADA.”

Tom has played Sherlock Holmes twice himself – in a BBC mini-series in 1982, and in the theatre. “I cocked it up both times,” he admits. In fact, Tom claims to have messed up pretty much every role in his 42-year career, except, of course, the one that made him a household name. Is he really – as Matt Smith suggests – the most definitive Doctor? Is Tom comfortable bearing that accolade?

“Well, I can afford to be gracious,” he considers, “and say generous things about the people who took over from me. It’s terribly important not to hurt people, isn’t it? Especially people who are following on. Especially Sylvester [McCoy], who’s a wonderful comedian – oh, marvellous! It’s easy to be generous about this little gnomish fellow with a Scots accent.

“I didn’t know Colin [Baker], but I remember upsetting Peter [Davison] when he took over from me, because I said, ‘He’s a marvellous all-round actor, but’ – that chilling ‘but’ – ‘he already has a fictional identity, so children have to make two imaginative leaps. That’s fatal.’” Davison was, at the time, best known for playing veterinary surgeon Tristan Farnon in BBC series All Creatures Great and Small. “I thought that was a risk,” says Tom, “but it was up to them. It wasn’t easy picking up after all the work I’d done. They wanted to do something different.”

Is that how Tom felt taking over from Jon Pertwee in 1974?

“When I started, one of the difficulties was that Jon, who I didn’t know – I only met him briefly for the regeneration… but I used to meet him afterwards at certain dos or in voice-over studios…” The sentence is left hanging, for the moment, as Tom changes direction: “Jon was an insufferable know-all. He was very knowledgeable, very clever, but he didn’t wear it lightly. He always knew better than you did. I can’t bear people who are certain about everything. But he was terribly easy to tease. When I discovered this chink in his armour, I would tease him mercilessly, especially if there were a lot of people there.

“He liked the idea of big sums of money for voiceovers, so I would say to somebody, but in Jon’s earshot, ‘Somebody offered me £15,000 for a voiceover the other day. But I turned it down, because it was going to take a whole hour!’ This wasn’t true, but I could hear Jon’s heart pounding. In fact, he died from a heart attack shortly after that. I think that’s why.

“Jon actually found it physically impossible to buy a drink, and so did Douglas Camfield [who directed Tom in 1975’s Terror of the Zygons and 1976’s The Seeds of Doom]. I was in a lift once, and I heard Jon say to Douglas, ‘Did you get away without buying one?’ He said, ‘Yes!’ Jon said, ‘Me too!’ Isn’t that amazing? They actually could not buy drinks. It’s a strange anxiety.

“One of the difficulties,” says Tom, returning to my question, “was that Jon had jumped on the part so hard that all the writers were still writing for him [when Tom took over]. My first scripts arrived, and they were whippets**t. There was something terribly substandard about them, and insufferably middle class. Men putting women down, that kind of s**te. It still goes on a lot, doesn’t it? It’s okay if it’s the Brigadier behaving like that, because no-one could do pompous like Nick Courtney. He was the most pompous man that’s ever appeared on television. That was his genius. His very pomposity made him adorable. But I couldn’t be pompous. I was only experienced in preposterous science-fantasy.

“I was reading these scripts – hearing, such as it was, the rhythms of the speech – and it didn’t please me at all. But I had to swallow it. I was just glad to have a job. Gradually, I began to change bits, and I realised that they liked what I was doing – my big eyes, my double takes, my silly hair – as long as I was sincerely silly. I was utterly convinced by my own silliness and my own sincerity. Yeah. Like Tony Blair.

“You see, Ian [Marter, who played Harry Sullivan] shouldn’t have been in it. Ian was only in it because the BBC had originally offered the part – or were considering offering it – to Richard Hearne [famous for his stage and TV character Mr Pastry – Ed], who was an old man then. If they’d given it to him, he wouldn’t have been able to run about like I could, so they got in powerful Ian. When I was cast, Ian was already under contract.”

When Tom started on Doctor Who, he was, he says, “terribly flattered” by the attentions of Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith. “She adored me. She found me funny. I loved her. She used to say, ‘Listen to Tom. Tom will know how to do this,’ which filled me with confidence – because, underneath that sweetness, Lis is deadly precise. But she didn’t stay long. She got out while the going was good.”

Of his other companions: “I got on terrifically well with Mary Tamm [the first Romana]. In reality, the TARDIS is smaller on the inside, and it was always pleasurable when I was stuck in there with Mary. I didn’t get on so well with Louise [Jameson, who played Leela], especially to begin with. She said I was cold, which is an amazing word, and aloof. I don’t know what it was, really. She didn’t stay all that long either. But now I’m very friendly with Louise.

“At the time, I thought we could have done more with Leela. We could have developed it. I’m not talking about sex, but I wanted, sometimes, the girls to kiss me. Imagine the publicity! Leela kisses the Doctor! Moments like that would have amused the children. I used to suggest these things, but they’d say, ‘No thanks, Tom.’ They’d fob me off. The BBC is good at that. I was used to rejection.”

By the end of his tenure, Tom had grown even less impressed with the TARDIS crew. “As I recall, we had at least three companions, which was too many. One of the girls [Tegan, played by Janet Fielding] was an airhostess. I’m not interested in airhostesses! It was dull. Sweet children, they were – what could be sweeter than Sarah Sutton [Nyssa]? ­­­­– but they were standing around with nothing to do or say. I don’t mean that John [Nathan-Turner, who produced Tom’s final season] did that deliberately, but he must have known it wasn’t interesting to me.

“John and I,” continues Tom, “simply did not get on. When I said that I wanted to leave, he accepted with alacrity. He must have been very relieved, and I was glad to be gone. I wasn’t getting on at all well with John, or with his boyfriend Gary [Downie, production manager on various 80s episodes] – because obviously Gary was sympathetic to John. John had waited a long time to be producer, and suddenly he had the power, and he wanted to make his mark on it. We had some ferocious disagreements about scripts and scenes. Management would say, ‘But Tom is the star of the show, and we’ve got ten million viewers,’ and John would say, ‘Yeah, but I’m the f***ing producer!’

“One time, I actually resigned,” remembers Tom. This was in the late 70s, after a falling out with then-producer Graham Williams. “It caused absolute murder. Bill Cotton, the Controller of BBC One, rang Graham in a panic: ‘What do you mean Tom’s resigned? He can’t! This is our big Saturday-night show!’ In the end, they talked me round, and told Graham to stand back. He was the dearest chap who ever drew breath, but he was used to dealing with people who were saner than I was.”

I imagine Tom to be quite a formidable opponent in a quarrel.

“Why? You mean that I’m irrational?”

Well, you’re tall, and very loud, and erudite, and… let’s face it, a bit scary. You can intimidate.

“I don’t know, I might be intimidating. I can’t bear loud, overbearing people, and yet I suppose I am loud and overbearing. I always try to excuse myself in that I mean well, and I always wanted the other actors to score. I was never jealous of their jokes or good lines.”

However, many of Tom’s co-stars have admitted they found him difficult to work with. For every instance – and there are plenty – of someone raving about Tom’s professionalism, his imagination, his vitality, and his commitment to the show, you can find another, contradictory remark along the lines of: “It was very hard to establish a rapport with Tom” (Louise Jameson); “I liked him, but I don’t think a lot people were that keen on him” (Mary Tamm); “I just felt that I was walking on eggshells the whole time” (Sarah Sutton); ‘He was in a bad mood permanently” (Janet Fielding). The late Douglas Adams (script editor, 1979-80) might have summed up Tom best when he said, “Tom is one of those people who oscillated between being one of the most wonderful, awesome, engaging people you have ever met, to someone you would gladly shove off a cliff.”

“Ahh, Douglas used to encourage me and my excesses,” smiles Tom. “I’m interested to hear how people found me. Somebody read me a snippet from an interview recently where some actor was talking about how difficult I was to work with. Matthew someone…?”

I’d wager that Tom knows full well that this is Matthew Waterhouse, who played Adric for the majority of Tom’s final season. In DWM 424, Matthew said: “You want to work with actors who are fun to be around and generous, and Tom was not by nature a generous actor… He could be pretty unpleasant at times.”

Tom responds: “He says, in this interview, how coarse I am, and how drunk I often was. Now, I don’t want to make a big thing out of it, or suggest that Matthew is exaggerating just to sell a few books, but there are plenty of other people who say that I was amusing to work with. Look, I don’t want to be unkind about Matthew, because he was a tiny little fragment, really. I don’t know how he arrived on the scene, but he wasn’t a trained actor. John found him in the post room, I think. Because of his amazing appearance, Matthew should have played Adric like Sabu – a little wild boy who couldn’t speak. I would talk to him rather like Basil Fawlty talks to Manuel, and he’d just nod or shake his head. But John didn’t like that idea.”

Apparently, on Matthew’s first day of rehearsals, Tom only spoke to him once, to tell him to “Piss off!” Might Tom have behaved a little harshly towards his inexperienced, adolescent co-star? After all, Matthew was only 18 when he started on Doctor Who.

“I’m bound to have appeared unfair to some people,” reasons Tom, “but I was the one who was always out front with the children. I was in schools and on the road. I was insatiable in my desire to be near the audience. I signed thousands of birthday cards. I was a hero. That was a wonderful thing – so agreeable to one’s ego. I had never felt so real at a time of my life when I was so utterly fictional.”

In which case, it must have been hard not to be consumed by the part.

“Well, I don’t know. What happened was, other people were changing – directors would retire or go to other jobs, and so would producers – and I was still there, so the incoming people had ideas about how the programme should be, but it was hard to get past me. I was extremely demanding. I was an obstacle.”

Did anyone on Doctor Who intimidate Tom? Lalla Ward, who played the second Romana, once told DWM: “I think Tom actually admits that he feels intimidated by me, in the nicest possible way.”

“I wasn’t intimidated by Lalla,” counters Tom, “although I have such a regard for her. I don’t think I was intimidated by anyone, but I was very impressed by the standard of visiting actors. I remember the bliss of working with Graham Crowden [Soldeed in The Horns of Nimon, 1979-80]. He got the laughs. He was wonderful. There was no-one quite like him. Wonderful man. He was considered for Doctor Who at one time.”

This was when Jon Pertwee left. Crowden was offered the role, but he wasn’t prepared to commit to a long-running series, so it was offered to Tom instead. Eleven years ago, I interviewed Crowden – who passed away this October – and he explained: “I seriously considered accepting [the part]. In the end, I decided not to do it, because I didn’t want to be typecast… Perhaps it sounds rather pompous, but I really didn’t want to be on television purely as a commercial product.”

I tell Tom this, and he says: “It never occurred to me that I’d be typecast, although I was. And I never thought of the role as a commercial product, because I was… well, I was playing this slightly messianic alien. He isn’t violent, he doesn’t get his leg over the girl, he doesn’t steal, and he’s rather wry, and adorable, and mysterious. He’s lived for 900 years or something. He lives the life of the old patriarchs of the Old Testament. That’s not commercial. He’s special.”

Even so, Tom recognises that Doctor Who was hugely profitable for the BBC’s commercial arm. He cites the Doctor’s robot dog, K9, as an example: “technically terribly difficult to work with, because it wasn’t very powerful – it would topple if it ran over a cigarette end – but an enormous amount of money was made out of marketing K9, so we couldn’t get rid of it. That’s why I’ve got bad knees now, what with being a monk in my youth, praying to God, and then on my knees in front of bloody K9. Every two-shot, I was on my knees, or you couldn’t do two-shots. My idea was that John [Leeson, who voiced K9] should play him on his hind legs, in a dog suit. They didn’t like that idea either.”

This seems to be a running theme. Were any of Tom’s ideas ever taken up?

“The thing is, they didn’t actually like ideas in Series and Serials. It drove me bloody crazy. You had a lot of egos in that department. If they suddenly had Tom Baker trying to interfere, or trying to have a parrot as well as a dog…” Over the years, Tom’s suggestions for the companion role included “a frog”, “a parrot”, “foxes”, “badgers”, “a much older actress” and “somebody very fat”. “They never saw it like I saw it,” he says of the show’s bosses. “They just found me barmy, and I found them pedestrian.” He looks sad. “If the dog can talk,” he mumbles, “why can’t the parrot?” Well, quite.

Tom returns to the commerciality question: “It was rather like, in the earlier days, I had that wonderful line [in Genesis of the Daleks, 1975], ‘Have I the right?’ I was about to connect those wires and destroy all the Daleks. David Maloney [the director] joked, ‘Don’t connect those wires, Tom, or Terry Nation [the writer who created the Daleks] will sue us!’ Because Terry made a fortune out of the Daleks. He was a nice man, Terry, but the moment he became immensely rich – it’s weird how money spoils people – he became the biggest bore in Europe. He couldn’t stop complaining about taxes.

“They used to deliver his money in a f***ing great lorry. I used to say to him – to wind him up – ‘I love paying tax.’ He’d say, ‘Well, you’re off your head.’ The thing is, it wasn’t really him, the Daleks, was it? A BBC staff designer created the Daleks.”

Raymond Cusick designed the Doctor’s deadliest foes based on the description in Nation’s original script. The designer got paid next to nothing.

“Oh no, be fair to Terry,” exclaims Tom, “he made millions, but he did give 50 pounds to Ray Cusick. And asked for a receipt! Imagine what Ray felt after that. Yes, I remember, because he used to beg outside the BBC. I used to give him half a crown,” adds Tom, with charming insouciance. As we established in DWM 427, Tom is a serial exaggerator.

After ordering more drinks (two espressos this time – now I need something stronger than hot chocolate), I ask Tom how much of what he says is, basically, bollocks.

“Really, I… actually, it depends on who I’m talking to. Some people call it entertainment. In our imaginations, we want tumult, and duplicity, and adultery, and treachery, and murder, and tsunamis all over the place. In some ways, it’s a reaction to my miserable, buttoned-up origins in Liverpool – very Roman Catholic, and very strict. I remember Father Deacon saying, ‘Just remember, Baker – you’re nothing.’ I’d say to my mother, ‘Father Deacon told me this morning that I’m nothing.’ ‘Too right you’re nothing,’ she’d say, ‘and I’m nothing either.’

“The thing about being a Christian is, you’re never alone, because God is everywhere, so you have no privacy. Insane Christians, like the Roman Catholics, believe in angels as well. They walk in a special way – I won’t do it now, it might embarrass you – because they’re dying to go to the lavatory. They’re plucking up the courage, because not only is God in there, but also they’ve got a f***ing angel on their shoulder. It’s difficult to have a spontaneous, Rabelaisian bowel movement with God and an angel watching.”

I’m not sure quite how we got onto this, but I stick with it, and ask Tom how he looks upon his younger, religious self?

“It’s a different person,” he answers. “We are different people. How old are you? In your 20s? If, when you’re my age, you re-read a book that you’ve read in your 20s, it’s a different book, in a sense, and you’re a different Ben. As a professional actor and self-deluder, I can be eight or nine different people in a day, or have amazing impulses. In real life, we want to have a nice house or flat, with a garden and a dog, and a nice partner of some sort, and nice neighbours, and a clean street, and for the trains to run on time. That’s in real life. But in our imaginative life, that would bore us all to death.

“I sometimes glance around on a train or a bus, and wonder what the person next to me is actually thinking. I’m talking now about the impulse to murder people.”

Right. Okay.

“I saw a woman on the train the other day actually flossing her teeth. You could see last night’s fragments on her wire. I thought to myself, I wonder what Bruce Willis would do. ‘Excuse me, ma’am –’” Tom mimes shooting the woman with some sort of rifle. “And everyone would applaud and say, ‘Quite right,’ and kick the trollop into the bloody aisle. But in reality no-one had the courage to do that. You know, quite a lot of women do their make-up on the train from Tunbridge Wells. They’re absolutely shameless. Some of them arrive naked, and get dressed on the train… at least in the southern region.”

Playing the Doctor got Tom plenty of attention from the opposite sex – from women who, I presume, prefer their men somewhat unhinged and with murderous impulses. “I’ve had amazing offers. Ooh, the temptations! The girls were lining up. On programmes like Top of the Pops, where there would be, sometimes, 300 girls in the BBC bar, it would have been very easy to risk catastrophe, because you didn’t know how old they were.”

If the girls were of a legal age, though…?

“Well, it was entirely up to me. If there was crumpet, I’d go with her. In those days, being on the telly… it’s not quite the same now. Well, I don’t know, because I’m not on television anymore. I’m an old man, and old people horrify so-called modern people. But I never allowed myself to be alone with them, and therefore open to compromise or blackmail, because that was very, very dangerous. You used to hear stories of people who’d get a fast leg over, and arrive home from filming a week later to find the casual crumpet waiting on the doorstep. You might actually be getting your leg over a complete raving lunatic.

“I remember one girl… where did she live now? California, I think. She was going to pay my airfare to come over and impregnate her. She said it would take two-and-a-half days – not the impregnation, the flight there and back – if she picked me up at the airport, and took me to a motel where I could, er, ejaculate. ‘It may not be a great pleasure for you,’ she wrote, ‘because I am 57, and a drug addict, but I’m desperate. Be a father again.’ That’s a line! All because I was playing Doctor Who.

“I was just doing something that appealed to the imagination – the benevolent stranger, who has secrets. We always want that. You look at a girl sitting there, her face still, and you think, dear God, isn’t that fantastic? Then you hear her speak, and you think, oh no, on your bike! She’s drained of all mystery. She needs someone to say to her, ‘Listen, love, if you want to get on in life, don’t ever speak, until you’re about 30 and your bottom starts to sag. Don’t even smile.’”

That’s not very nice.

“But it’s true. I was telling a beautiful girl the other day – she said, ‘Don’t you think…?’ I said, ‘Don’t I think what?’ She said, ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? I’m not listening to you, I’m looking at you.’”

Tom, that’s terrible.

“It’s not terrible, really.”

No, it is quite.

“Look,” he says, trying a different tack, “if there are two girls weeping on Charing Cross Station, and one is beautiful and the other is plain, the plain girl can sit there and grow old, but it takes about 15 minutes before Tom Baker comes along and says to the pretty one, ‘Where are you going?’ She says, ‘Folkstone, but I’ve got no money,’ and I say, ‘Listen,’ and give her a 20-pound note. Physical beauty transcends everything. It is the ultimate currency.” He leans forward to catch my eye, and asks rhetorically, but rather menacingly: “If you, Ben, were alone on a station platform late at night, something would happen to you, wouldn’t it? It may not be nice, but something would happen to you. Someone would want to steal you, steal what you’ve got, because to be young and beautiful is to be touched with the divine.”

I suddenly wonder, an hour into our interview, whether Tom Baker is flirting with me.

“These little insights, or pretend insights, aren’t Tom Baker,” he reasons, when I ask him if he is. (But he doesn’t deny it.) “That one part I played has given me a licence to be absurd. I can say pretty well anything, because people know it’s not Tom Baker talking.”

But do we? How can we know that it’s not the real Tom Baker talking if we never get to know the real Tom Baker?

There’s a silence. For a moment, Tom seems stumped. “Obviously, I wouldn’t say anything brutally offensive to someone publicly,” he says. Another silence. “All I meant is, to be touched with the divine is deeply moving, because everybody knows it won’t last. Of course, you can’t conceive of that, even though you know it. You can’t conceive of being old. You weren’t even born when I finished Doctor Who, were you? That’s incredible.”

Tom is 76 now. His steps – if not his tongue – are a bit tentative, but otherwise he seems in rude health. He’s unstoppable. “I walk every day, three or four times, deliberately,” he says, “although this morning I was limping slightly. I’ve arthritis in my knees.”

Is he afraid of growing old?

“I am old. It’s happened.”

Is he afraid of dying, then?

“I’m a bit nervous,” he confesses. “I don’t mean to say that I’ve got any insights into dying, because who has? We should be comforted by the glorious democracy that no-one escapes it – even Johnny Depp will die, a terrible thought, but he will – but I don’t think that does make it any less frightening. I’ll be 77 soon,” he adds.

“When I was Doctor Who, I visited my fair share of hospitals. They’d ask me to go down to some ward where a child was in a coma, dying. When people are in comas, they often have troupes of people going in, trying to rouse them. I’d go through my terrible routine of saying, ‘Hiya, Jacob, it’s the Doctor here. I’ve been told by K9 that you’re not very well.’ I’d like to tell you that one day a boy opened his eyes and said, ‘Doctor…?’ But he never did.” Tom bows his head. “That’s how pathetic I was at raising the dead.

“The fans used to say, ‘Tell me something to live by, Doctor.’ They’re always saying that. I used to say really dumb things like, ‘Remember, the living are just the dead on holiday,’ and they’d go, ‘Ohh man, did you hear that? The living are just the dead on holiday!’ They used to quote things like ‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for.’ They like that. I was a big icon for the gay boys, in Chicago particularly, and I remember some gay boys surrounding me, and I held the hand of one of them, and suddenly he said to his friend, ‘Roy, I can walk! It’s a miracle!’ His friend Roy said, ‘What? Of course you can walk, you’re a f***ing athlete!’ He thought he was a pilgrim. It was terribly funny. He said, ‘It must be nerves.’”

When in Tom’s life has he been happiest?

“I don’t know quite what it means to be happy. I know that it’s difficult to be happy when you’re poor. When you’re very poor, it’s difficult to even get a hard-on. You’re stuck looking at pictures of old hard-ons. Happiness, sometimes, is having power over people – for example, in a relationship. Those are happy moments. Or when people offer me parts. I’m constantly offered work. Not big movies, but I’m offered panto – the Demon King. Well, it isn’t the Demon King nowadays; I don’t have the power in my knees. When I was younger, the Demon King always got the girl with the biggest tits. They were happy days.

“They were reckless and feckless days, too, in the clubs and pubs around Soho with some very talented people. I remember Jeffrey Bernard, the great piss artist of his time. He was dying when I knew him. Sally Smirnoff, his Cockney slang for vodka, had killed his dick stone dead. He was dying of Sally Smirnoff, but he couldn’t stop loving her.”

In such bacchanalian company, how close did Tom come to alcohol addiction, I ask?

“Well, apparently I didn’t. Jeff said once, ‘Tom, you’ve got a head of steel.’ Of course, a good many of them were older than me: Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher [proprietress of private drinking club the Colony Room], Ian Board [Belcher’s successor], all those people. Francis wasn’t ill – Francis lived into his 70s, and then died of a heart attack – but all the others died of cancer, or liver failure, or falls. I was lucky. Yeah, lucky. I’ve had stupendous luck in my physical health. My mental health might be up for discussion… but I haven’t been sectioned yet.

“Since the late 80s, I’ve been happier and steadier. I set up home, married [TV producer] Sue Jerrard, we had cats, and a lovely house, and I renewed my interest in gardening. I was able to walk past these places, glance in, and see the smoke, the anxiety that drinking a lot brings. But I don’t mean it was easy.”

The bright lights and dark shadows of Soho were, at one time, a refuge for Tom – for instance, during his second marriage, to Lalla Ward. Tom and Lalla wed in December 1980, three months before Tom’s final episode of Doctor Who was broadcast. The marriage lasted only 16 months. In his autobiography, Who on Earth is Tom Baker?, he devotes less than four lines to the break-up. Would he prefer to forget they’d ever been husband and wife?

“No,” he says, “because we were happy for a few months. We got married after a tremendous romance, thinking that it was a good idea, and then it wasn’t a good idea, and we separated and divorced. It was all quite amicable, at a distance.”

At a distance?

“Well, we didn’t see much of each other. Lalla is highly intelligent, wonderfully witty, and stimulating to be with, and fabulously generous, but it was one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time, and wasn’t, and lasted hardly any time at all. I hadn’t been married for a long, long time [Tom’s first marriage, to Anna Wheatcroft, ended in 1966], and I was used to… well, I was a very social animal. I don’t know if you’ve got a partner, Ben, but frequently what happens is you look at your watch and think, ‘God, the pub’s still open,’ or ‘I wonder if they’d mind if I watched the football…?’

“Lalla led a very cultured existence – she loved the opera, the theatre – and I was restless. And, after a while, unhappy. She spotted it, you see – she’s fantastically intuitive – and said, ‘It’s not working, is it?’ I said, ‘No, it’s not.’ She said, ‘I think we’d better call it off.’ When I came back from work that day, she’d gone. We never, ever met again. Not once.”

Espresso cups drained, our interview is almost over, but I have one final question for Tom – and it concerns Lalla. I wonder whether, after seven years in the role, the only way that Tom could bear to give up the key to the TARDIS was to take a crucial piece of the show with him: that is, by marrying his companion.

He smiles. “I also wanted to take John Nathan-Turner with me, but his boyfriend was furious. It’s okay,” he adds, “I can say that now, they’re both dead.” He laughs, I suspect at his own nerve. “Even Matthew Waterhouse wasn’t free that day.” This time he erupts in laughter, looking strangely triumphant. “But I heard one very funny thing ­– because Lalla often says blisteringly funny things… Apparently, somebody at a convention in Canada, I think, asked her, ‘What was your favourite monster?’ – an annihilatingly dull question – and Lalla went, quick as a flash, ‘Tom Baker!’ I remember thinking, ahh, good old Lalla.”

Somewhere in there, I think, was an answer – although possibly not to the question I asked. And contained within this interview are, I hope, flashes of the real Tom Baker. Just don’t ask me where. Maybe, in the end, we aren’t supposed to know for certain which is which – the man, the myth, or the “monster”.

Benjamin Cook