Doctor Who star’s vortex of doom – waiting 9½ hours in a hospital corridor

ONcE he was the Time Lord, an irrepressible force for good from the planet Gallifrey.

But colin Baker — the sixth actor to assume the role of the Doctor — has just survived an ordeal that left him feeling if not close to extermination, then undoubtedly an abandoned earthling in desperate need of help.

The distressing saga began when he visited his local doctor in Buckinghamshire, who dispatched him to the Accident & Emergency department of Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

‘My problem was not life-threatening, but I had a very high temperature and felt unwell,’ says Baker, 74.

Expecting to see orthopaedic specialists, he instead found himself trapped in time — and in an uncomfortably public space.

‘I spent nine-and-a-half hours in a corridor,’ adds Baker, who explains that it was not until ‘well into the second half’ of that time that he was finally seen by a doctor, who admitted him to the hospital and put him on an antibiotic drip.

Thirty- six hours later, he was discharged.

However, the recovery was illusory: within 48 hours, he was back in A&E with an even higher temperature.

Very soon, Baker could have been forgiven for yearning for the Tardis and some profoundly needed time travel.

‘Six hours in, I was left in a side room, where I dozed off,’ he continues. Awaking at 2am, he ‘ went in search of help’, encountering ‘an irate nurse’, though he admits that he may have mistaken her status, explaining that the uniforms of today’s hospital staff are ‘very confusing’.

The reason for the nurse’s anger soon became apparent. ‘They had a bed for me and couldn’t find me,’ says Baker. The doctor who had initially seen him had ‘apparently not told her where they had taken me’.

Eventually, after what Baker describes as ‘a short argument’ between doctor and nurse, he was admitted at 2.30am.

Five days later, Baker — who was briefly married to TV star Liza Goddard and has four daughters by his second wife, actress Marion — had fully recovered.

But the ‘inescapable conclusion’, he says, is that ‘ NHS staff are struggling to keep their collective heads above water because of understaffing, underfunding, long hours and impossible expectations.’

WE ARE used to Boris Johnson making a spectacle of himself.

But now the Foreign Secretary has done away with spectacles altogether after undergoing radical eye surgery. The 53-yearold, who wore glasses for longsightedness, had his eyes lasered by Professor Dan Reinstein at the London Vision Clinic.

Like a small percentage of laser eye surgery patients, he had to have the procedure repeated. He nicknamed the surgeon Professor ‘Blindstein’ as a result, though his eyes are fine now — as revealed today in the Mail’s Good Health section (pages 42-43).

‘I decided to have it done because I was totally fed up with losing my specs and breaking them,’ Boris tells me.

He recalled making a speech and ‘waving my specs around while making a point and they flew out of my hand and broke’.