The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Before the Tardis, the confessional
Helen Brown
Peee-ooowwww! Peee-oww! Pfffuuuugghhhh! Boof! PffooOOH!
Behind the padded foam airlocks of a tiny recording studio, on an industrial estate in the outer orbit of Royal Tunbridge Wells, two middle-aged audio engineers are simulating the sounds of an intergalactic civil war. “Excellent missiles, thank you!” chuckles Tom Baker, his deep and mischievous voice booming from the speakers and transporting me straight back to those childhood evenings when he’d be on the telly in Doctor Who and I’d be cowering behind the sofa. So terrified was I by the programme that I think I spent more time listening to it than actually watching it.
Decked out in a pink shirt with black braces, Baker, who played the fourth Doctor on screen from 1974 to 1981, is recording his 60th Doctor Who audiobook for Big Finish Productions. At nearly 86, his hair is white and his face ruddy. His voice is reassuring, yet as full of wild possibility as ever. It’s the sound of space to me: vast, mysterious, dangerous.
When he makes his way out of the recording booth, I ask Baker to tell me the plot of the Time Lord’s latest adventure and he laughs again. “Oh I don’t know. It’s the same plot every time isn’t it? Good conquering evil? The Doctor always does it in his own waggish way, with all these semi-magical, semi-scientific methods, waving his sonic screwdriver.”
Playing the Doctor rescued
Baker from a period of deep unhappiness (during which he was working on a building site) and rocketed him, aged 40, to a level of fame and wealth that continues to delight him. He resisted returning to the role for decades. Then, in 2012, after some cajoling, he did his first audiobook for Big Finish. Nicholas Briggs, the director of the story being recorded today, tells me: “I asked him why he changed his mind and agreed to come into the studio and he said: ‘Because I’m capricious. And because you laughed at my jokes. I’m very vulnerable when people laugh at my jokes.’ ”
Settling into a swivel chair, Baker is happy to confirm an “abject need to please people who admire me”. He traces it back to an impoverished, Liverpudlian childhood, during which his heroes were not sci-fi adventurers, but the priests of the Roman Catholic Church. His mother was a cleaner and his father was a seaman. He went to Cheswardine Boarding School where he was taught, he says, “that I was always being watched by God. The more I learned, the more the audience grew, to include my good angel and my bad angel. I felt crowded, self-conscious. There was no privacy, so life became a performance. I was learning to act.”
Baker soon learnt to develop a more dramatic script than real life offered. “My first ambition was to be an orphan, because they got so much attention,” he says. “But by the age of eight I was encouraged to confess my sins. I really wasn’t committing any, so I felt the need to invent them to keep the priest interested. He had no interest in my innocence; he wanted sinners and so I obliged him.
That’s how I got going as a liar. Other boys, being vicious little creatures, would tell me to say:
‘I’ve had an impure thought.’ I would offer this up and hear the priest lean closer, the hairs in his ears coming through the grille, as he asked: ‘Did you take pleasure in it?’ ‘I think so,’ I replied and he whispered: ‘Did pollution take place?’ I had no idea what that meant so I replied: ‘I think so’.” Baker sighs. “Looking back, I’m appalled. Dreadful! What a terrible thing to say to a child.”
Although he had planned to become a priest, Baker tells me he lost his faith during his National Service, from 1955 to 1957.
“Well, I lost more than faith in the Army,” he grins. “I discovered girls, too. I’d been a late starter, but I made up for lost time.”
He began acting in 1960, appearing at the National Theatre, then on TV in Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green. But it was Doctor Who that made him. He recalls the merry night he bought drinks for the other workmen on the building site, promising to stay in touch, although he never saw any of them again.
Today, Baker thinks his total, early commitment to “the improbabilities of religion made it easy for me to sell the improbability of this benign alien being, with all his miracles and apostles, rising from the dead to save the human race. I think there’s a streak of improbability in my own nature that suits the role.” He’s right. And we can add “unknowability” to that improbability. I hear from recording studio staff and other actors in the green room that Baker is a bit of a mystery. Although he is full of warmth and humour – engaging in serious philosophical conversations, suggesting generous new lines for other actors, bringing amusing gifts to work – there is a darker side. He was, for a long time, estranged from the children from his first marriage. He did his time in the “glamorous and squalid” drinking dens of Soho where, he tells me, he would tell his tall tales to pals including Francis Bacon, John Hurt and Jeffrey Bernard and “smoke two cigarettes at a time, in one hand. I didn’t even like smoking, but everybody else did it and I had to show off…”
Does his need to act all the time mean he lacks a core self, I ask. “A core? A soul? Hmm. Perhaps there’s a hollowness…”
Since his first stint on Doctor Who, Baker has played Sherlock Holmes for the BBC, and he reached a new generation as the narrator of David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s sketch show, Little Britain. He has also written a gloriously indiscreet memoir Who on Earth Is Tom Baker (1997), an excellent, although as he admits “very nasty” little novel called The Boy Who Kicked Pigs (1999) about a sadistic child who meets a grim fate, and, earlier this year, a
Doctor Who novel, Scratchman (co-written with James Goss).
Baker made shock headlines in 1980 when he said “there’s no reason the Doctor should always be a man”. When I ask him about Jodie Whittaker, the incumbent Doctor, Baker says he doesn’t watch TV any more. (He prefers “to read. I try to be kind to my wife and we talk about the garden”.) But, he adds: “I hear she has tremendous vitality and
‘The priest had no interest in innocence; he wanted sinners, and so I obliged him’
charm, and is a fine actress too. Nobody ever said that about me, and I did all right. What’s not to love about Jodie Whittaker? She’ll be fine.”
After his years of hard living, Baker says it’s “just luck” he’s in such good shape. “I’m a very happy fellow, now,” he smiles. “Although I’ve outlived my siblings and cousins, which is sad, I’ve got happier with age. I had a little tragedy when my dog – a lurcher – died, six months ago. I haven’t got over the awfulness of that loss. I miss the conversations outside shops with other dog owners.”
But he and his third wife (a former assistant editor on Doctor Who) still have “three or four cats” and “some alpacas”. (He was also married briefly to Lalla Ward, who played his on-screen companion Romana.)
“When I’m not out walking in the little wood we own I do like to iron. There’s something very soothing about the steam. I’ve always done my own ironing.” At this point the director summons Baker back to the studio and he rises with a wink. “I’ve got to get back to saving the universe!” he says. “I hope I’ve been interesting enough for you. If not, can you just make something up?”
e have come far from the locust years of the Seventies, when concert programmers seemed convulsed in such a cultural cringe that performances of British music were depressingly rare. Britten, almost entirely European in his influences, was something of an exception; but of our great composers Elgar would be represented only by the Enigma
Variations and the two symphonies (the third awaited reconstruction), Vaughan Williams by A London Symphony and Greensleeves, and Holst by The Planets.
Our other composers got barely a look in: the rest of the iceberg of British music lay, as icebergs do, entirely out of sight, and hearing.
The change since, pioneered not least by Roger Wright during his enlightened tenure of Radio 3 and the BBC Proms, is exemplified by two concerts in London this week. Tonight at the Royal Festival Hall the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Manze – the greatest living interpreter of Vaughan Williams – give a performance of the composer’s superlative Job: A Masque for Dancing, which I have never heard in a concert hall, and which (although not a symphony) is crucial in Vaughan Williams’s symphonic development, containing the germ of his fourth, fifth and sixth symphonies. Then on Wednesday the same ensemble, under Vladimir Jurowski, give only the second performance in London in 86 years of
John Foulds’s overwhelming piano concerto, the Dynamic Triptych, about which I wrote here several months ago. We are not enjoying a golden age of
British composers, but this is a golden age of performances of music by composers who were once household names.
Perhaps impresarios will now become even more radical in programming the largely unknown masterpieces of the British repertoire. I will offer some suggestions: some are by composers of whom even some regular concertgoers may not know. For example, I also wrote here earlier this year about Stanley Bate’s awesome Viola Concerto, which I am not sure has been performed in Britain outside a recording studio in almost 70 years. Almost as little known as Bate is Patrick Hadley, for years Professor of Music at Cambridge, whose symphonic poem The Trees so High (based on the English folk-song of the same name, but vastly more inventive) has twice been recorded, but not, so far as I am aware, given a professional public performance for decades. The work shows not only what a superb orchestrator was Hadley, but also how well he wrote for voice: the last of its four movements includes a baritone solo singing the folk song, and a chorus.
A larger-scale choral work is the cantata Sweet Thames Run Softly – a setting of Spenser’s poem “Prothalamion” – by another who gave most of his life to teaching, George Dyson. It had a performance in All Saint’s Church, Marlow, in October (which to my distress came to my attention only while I was preparing this column) but I am not sure it has been heard in a major concert hall for half a century – ridiculously, because it is beautiful and brilliant.
Then there are works by better-known composers in the rank below those of international repute. Perhaps in 2021 – his centenary year – an orchestra, or perhaps the Proms, will do all nine of Malcolm Arnold’s symphonies; but if no one can be that enlightened, someone at least must put on his fifth, which is one of the great symphonies of the 20th century. So too is Arthur Bliss’s A Colour Symphony, played at the Proms about 15 years ago and hardly heard since; it is in turns serene, riotous, dark, disturbing and, in its first movement, upliftingly sad; and Jack Moeran’s starkly original Symphony in G Minor, which, along with his equally underperformed sublime Violin Concerto, awaits its proper revelation to a new generation of listeners.
And even among our greatest composers there remain works of genius and power that one hardly ever hears performed. Parry is a household name thanks to Jerusalem and I Was Glad, but how many people know his electrifying Symphonic Variations? Holst, similarly, has become a one-hit wonder with The Planets, and how painfully lacking in curiosity we are that more of his works are not better known. There are so many that one hardly knows where to start, but I shall plunge in with his majestic Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo, which begins and ends with the orchestra depicting the sun rising and setting over the Thames. We could hear Elgar’s Falstaff more often; and another Vaughan Williams rarity, his rousing cantata Five Tudor Portraits, settings of Skelton.
Perhaps our impresarios think the music-loving public shares their lack of curiosity about the wider repertoire. If so, I think (to judge from my mailbag from readers of this column) they would be wrong. To continue such adventurous programming of British music can only expand our appetite for it, not shrink it.