After giving it some thought, the Tom Baker article is being broken up into three parts: the Sarah Jane years, the Leela years, and Romana years. There’s just too much good material to talk about during this long tenure.

It’s difficult not to think of Tom Baker as being the “definitive” Doctor. Not in the sense he’s the indisputably best one, so much as that it’s difficult to have a prolonged conversation about the classic series without discussing his tenure, or to talk about the various Doctors without comparing ultimately to TB.

There are several reasons for this:

• He had the longest televised tenure: 7 seasons. With the advent of Big Finish audioplays and the Virgin and later BBC Books novel series, he is not the Doctor who has had the most stories written about him, but in terms of on-screen time, he had both the longest tenure and I believe the most screen time. (Earlier seasons had more episodes per year, so I’m not positive about this).
• His Doctor was a wide-eyed enthusiast with a commanding presence that immediately dominated a scene or a situation. His mop of curls, huge eyes, manic smile, booming voice, and tall stature all guaranteed he would immediately be memorable. Add to that a few “trademark” touches, like the infamously long multicolored scarf and you create something that even non-fans will recognize instantly.
• The stories of his era, while not uniformly fantastic, are mostly pretty good, with several moments of true brilliance. While effects were still crude by any standard, the show had reached a level of maturity that meant that the production team knew how to make the most of what they had available to them.
• The Tom Baker era seemed to avoid some of the formula traps of the past. The Second Doctor is often thought of as the “monster” Doctor, while the Third Doctor is the UNIT Doctor. The Fourth Doctor, however, defies any such categorization. His stories are as likely to involve human(oid) villains as monsters, are only sometimes set on present day Earth, and fall into many genres, including occasionally bordering on outright horror.
• Tom Baker’s tenure coincided with the BBC getting the bright idea to syndicate the program overseas. Many fans of my generation had their first exposure to the program when first independent commercial stations (in my case, WOR-TV) and then a great many PBS stations began airing the first four years of Tom Baker’s tenure in endless loop. Eventually, the numbers justified expanding the syndication to include the rest of Baker’s tenure, then, more or less in real time, Peter Davison’s, and then finally begin releasing the back catalogue of older stories into the syndication universe. In the meantime, however, many of us had had a groove worn in our brains by repeated viewings of those first four years.

At any rate, just as David Tennant is, at least for the moment, the definitive Doctor of the New Series, Tom Baker is that for the old.

Right…on we go… Read the rest of this entry »

In 1966, it became clear that William Hartnell could not continue to star in the title role of Doctor Who. He loved the job, but he was in increasingly ill health, and and arteriosclerosis (and the resulting diminished blood flow to the brain) meant that his memory was failing. At a time when episodes were taped with as few re-takes as possible because of primitive editing technology (mostly involving scissors and tape!), fluffed lines frequently went out on the air as if it were a live program.

But the program was still popular enough that canceling it seemed like a bad idea. Producer Innis Lloyd hit upon the bold idea of basically recasting the main character. I mean, hell, he was already established as being an alien of some sort; who knows what he can do?!

Once that idea took hold, Lloyd was also determined not to cast a clone of Hartnell, but rather to take the opportunity to strike out in a new direction with the character: a younger actor, more physically active, but still quirky. William Hartnell himself suggested Patrick Troughton for the job, Head of Drama Sydney Newman suggested the “cosmic hobo” personality, and the rest was history.

Troughton also loved the role once he came to it, but he knew from the beginning he didn’t want to stay forever, lest he become typecast. He also found the work schedule grueling. At that time, they were doing 40-44 episodes a year! He chose to limit his involvement to three years, at which point the decision was made to do the same thing all over again: roll the dice, as it were, come up with yet another sort of quirkiness, recast the role, and let her rip.

By then it was 1969, and they also decided it was time to move to colour, which shifted the budget a bit. To cope with that, the came up with a reason to set the story entirely on contemporary Earth for a few seasons. The result radically altered the dynamic of the show, giving it a more mature feel (not least of which because of the shift to almost entirely adult companions and recurring characters, rather than the previous model of having at least one teen) without sacrificing the core of what made the show work. If you’ve seen the new series episode-pair “The Sontaran Strategem” and “The Poison Sky”, you actually have a fair idea of how the UNIT seasons worked.

Anyway, on with the episode recommendations… Read the rest of this entry »