A Baker's Half Dozen

Written by J.R. Southall Sunday, 14 August 2011

Doctor Who: A Fan’s Eye View - By J.R. Southall

I’ve always been considerably fonder of the actor who played the sixth Doctor than I have of the sixth Doctor’s tenure itself, and I was lucky enough one recent weekend (in attendance at the Doctor Who Day at Pecorama in Devon) to renew acquaintance (albeit briefly) with the man who played him after an interval of 22 years. I say lucky, because although he’s looking a little older and certainly more fragile these days (particularly for such a large man; he certainly towers over my 5’8”!), he’s still as entertaining, amusing and generous a talker as ever. I did have something else in mind for this month’s column (don’t worry, that’s been posted elsewhere as a Feature Article), but in the spirit of the Bucks Free Press column he’s been writing for the past decade and a half (the best bits of which have been collected into two volumes, Look Who’s Talking and Second Thoughts, published by Hirst Books), I thought it might make an interesting alternative to turn instead to thoughts on the subject of the sixth Doctor, on where it all went wrong and what could have been done to prevent that.

Colin Baker was the public face of Doctor Who during the period of the show’s greatest trauma and unrest, and undoubtedly a lot of fans still see the actor as being one of the reasons for those troubles. His was the most ignominious exit of any of the actors to have played the part, and his arrival wasn’t held in much greater esteem either. Publicly, Colin had the indignity of The Twin Dilemma as a debut story and, privately, the manner of his casting as the Doctor was a cause of great concern in some quarters too.

The story goes that Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner was attending the same wedding reception as Colin Baker, and noticed the actor’s ability to entertain what amounted to a captive audience. JNT realised this ability, this charisma, was exactly what he was looking for in a replacement for Peter Davison, and promptly cast Colin without recourse to auditioning other actors. Since that story was made public, those kind of fans who are, presumably, already predisposed to a dislike or suspicion towards either of its participants, have very publicly criticised the producer’s judgement in casting an actor merely for his ability to entertain a wedding party.

What these critics singularly fail to take into account is that JNT was already well-versed in Colin Baker’s talent and abilities as an actor, not just as a witness to his portrayal of the character Paul Merroney in BBC1’s The Brothers, but also because, famously, Colin had appeared in Doctor Who itself the previous year, as Commander Maxil in Arc of Infinity. There is no doubt at all in my mind that having witnessed at first hand Baker’s capability as an actor, the fact that he was also one of those lucky and charismatic people who possess the ability to ‘command a room’ was not so much to the detriment of the part as an essential element of it. The character of Doctor Who is less an acting role than it is an extension of the actor’s character (very few of the Doctors – particularly the more successful ones, like Tom Baker and David Tennant – have failed to bring an awful lot of themselves to the part), and it is imperative that they be not just talented in their profession but also made of the kind of stuff that JNT so patently noticed in Colin Baker. He could have been one of the great Doctors, in fact, had certain other decisions not gone against him.

Watching The Twin Dilemma now, it is difficult to believe that it was transmitted a mere week after The Caves of Androzani. As Doctor Who stories go, it is certainly not as bad as its reputation implies, and it is presumably its proximity to one of the all-time classics, coupled with its status as a new Doctor’s debut in the part, that have together led to its being viewed as such a disappointment. In fact, Anthony Steven’s original concept for the story was, contemporary script editor Eric Saward has revealed, a rather dated and outmoded pulpy ‘fifties sci-fi romp – and it’s easy to see these influences trying to make their presence felt. But Saward had other ideas, particularly in the aftermath of Androzani (the whole of the following series was a response to Robert Holmes’ first Doctor Who story in over half a decade), and The Twin Dilemma was heavily rewritten accordingly. The great shame is that, had it been left as it was, The Twin Dilemma might have been as charming and as entertaining as any one of dozens of other stories influenced by ‘fifties cinema; the irony is that it was Robert Holmes himself in the 1970s who wrote a great many of them.

But the biggest problem was that The Twin Dilemma was chosen to conclude Doctor Who’s twenty-first series, rather than – as had become the norm with new Doctors’ debuts – begin its twenty-second. And so the writers of Season 22, rather than having an actor and a script editor’s description of the character to work with, actually had 90-odd minutes of story from which to judge the new Doctor and his character; unlike in previous regenerations, whereby the Doctor might be a touch muddled for the first adventure and then appear properly as a character for the first time during the second story, the Doctor of Season 22 was written as if post-regeneration-traumatised almost throughout the whole year. Colin Baker’s job must have been considerably different to that which he had presumed to take.

Which is not to say that there wasn’t a greater, and more significant problem even closer to hand; script editor Eric Saward had taken against Colin Baker and the manner of his casting, and whether deliberately or subconsciously, was often working against the actor throughout his time in the part. It’s often been noticed that in Saward’s sole credited script of the sixth Doctor’s tenure, Revelation of the Daleks, it takes the Doctor and companion Peri a full half the story’s length to catch up with the action and begin interacting with the other characters. It’s an extremely unbalanced story, and while it might have a lot of fans, to me it might be very good telly indeed (although I beg to differ), but it’s very bad Doctor Who.

There then followed the famous 18-month hiatus, complete with fan protests and charity singles and eventually ill-judged promotional photographs – not to mention surprisingly cast new companions – before Doctor Who returned with The Trial of a Time Lord. A 14-episode long run, which required a Saturday teatime audience to keep track of characters and situations the like of which they wouldn’t be used to following in domestic soap operas, was perhaps the single most stupid decision in the history of television. It was doomed to fail, before it even began transmitting, no matter how good it might have been. And ultimately, fail it did.           

There’s another incredible irony here. After a series in which viewing figures had plummeted and the changes made had all seemed to be for the worse, Colin – whose deportment as the actor playing the character had always been exemplary, and whose performance in an often difficult part had been better yet – was seen as the scapegoat for change and unceremoniously sacked. The irony is not so much in the fact that Colin Baker was seen as the one to blame for the show’s underperformance, but in the fact that script editor Eric Saward – the man responsible for the very excesses that BBC management were seeking to curtail, and the man whose genius had devised and executed the Trial format – had already left the programme. Colin should have stayed.

I find it very easy to imagine another three years of Colin Baker as the Doctor, with a more discreet costume as befitted his replacement, and dominating the screen in stories such as Remembrance of the Daleks and The Curse of Fenric. No disrespect to Sylvester McCoy (another largely undervalued Doctor), but it wouldn’t have taken a great deal of alteration for these stories to have worked for the sixth Doctor, and in my opinion they would have been improved by it. One thing that worked well in Season 23 was Colin’s relationship with his companions; Nicola Bryant’s Peri is much-improved in the more relaxed atmosphere, and Bonnie Langford’s Mel Bush is actually – dare I say it – a very valuable foil for any Doctor, and certainly better value for the programme than the half-dozen or so whiners she was preceded by. A sixth Doctor and Mel, Paradise Towers or Delta and the Bannermen (or even Silver Nemesis or The Happiness Patrol, had things taken a different turn) would have been something to see.

And unlike Eric Saward, who ran to the press and bitched about his half-decade on the show (come on Eric, if it was that bad, why didn’t you quit sooner and save us earlier?), Baker’s exit, while undignified, was also conducted with dignity.

With the advent of Big Finish, Colin Baker and the sixth Doctor’s reappraisal is complete. For a generation of fans enjoying Doctor Who as an audio drama, the sixth Doctor we might (and ought to) have had on the television has now become a reality. It is to Colin’s immense credit that, while his departure from the show might have been both unwarranted and rudely executed, his return to the fold has been an unqualified success. The fact that he has embraced the part of the Doctor again so whole-heartedly (including related appearances on television and at events – such as the one at Pecorama – and even writing for the DWM comic strip), is a measure of not just how important the role was to the man, but of how big a fan Colin was of the series before he even appeared in it.

Since Doctor Who (and perhaps, in part, because of the manner of his departure) Colin’s career has had its ups and downs. He’s never struggled for work (insofar as I can make out), but he’s never managed to find another role as defining as those two (Paul Merroney and the Doctor) so early in his working life. Which is a shame, for Colin’s a wonderful and under-rated actor, and whenever he appears – however briefly – on screen (whether it be in Doctors or Jonathan Creek or wherever) he has the kind of presence that lights that screen up. John Nathan-Turner was right about the charisma (especially when taken in conjunction with the talent that goes with it), and he was right to cast Colin as the Doctor. It’s an incredible shame that Colin’s two short series on the programme were both overseen in part by that one malignant presence in the background, and thus that we never really had a chance to see the actor truly shine while he was there. (They might be unfashionable choices, but The Mark of the Rani and Terror of the Vervoids, both from the pens of Pip & Jane Baker, are perhaps the best examples – however flawed – of Colin’s sixth Doctor on television.)

A recent stage mounting of Inspector Morse, with all the following-in-the-footsteps-of-a-legend that that might entail, cast Colin as the eponymous policeman. That’s respect, both from your peers and from your audience too. And as we speak, Colin will also be treading the boards as Count Fosco in The Woman in White, one of the classics of English literature (and my favourite book, as it goes). You don’t get invited to play parts like that if you don’t have the talent to pull them off. Colin Baker might be the Doctor-who-failed, the one who was there when the threat of cancellation became a real and present danger to our beloved Doctor Who, and there might be those among us now who still see him in a different light to the first five actors who played the part.

But he’s an engaging, honest and likeable man, and an incredibly talented actor (and writer, as my recent trot through Look Who’s Talking will attest), and it’s beyond question that he did far more good for Doctor Who than it ever did for him. We’re lucky to still have him around. And we should cherish him whenever we get the chance.

And it was lovely to see him the other weekend (even if it was only briefly).

Comments  

 

0 #1 Nicholas Peat 2011-08-14 16:27

I sincerely doubt that there will EVER be any Doctor who tried so valiantly to lift such woeful material as Colin Baker did.
Had he been given a proper costume and scripts actually worth the paper on which they were printed, he'd have been as popular as Tom or David T.

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