Tempting

by CORINNA HONAN

T OM BAKER was bored. Too many takes, too much hanging about between scenes of Granada TV's new medical drama series.

They were filming in a sectioned-off part of a NHS hospital while the real human dramas were being played out beyond the ropes. Or so it seemed to Baker. Before anyone could yell 'arrest that imposter', he had hijacked his fictional role as an overbearing consultant in Jermyn Street pinstripes and taken him on a ward round.

"I thought I'd go and see the real sick people. And do you know, the real ones aren't nearly as convincing as the actors,' he says. 'People would bounce up in bed and look brave at my approach. It went straight to my head. I was tapping their knees, laying my hands on all sorts of innocent people, and saying: "How are you this morning?" They would all say: "Much, much better doctor." '

No television role, with the arguable exception of Dr Who, has ever tapped Baker's talents better. His commanding manner and relish for the macabre have proved well-suited to a larger-than-life consultant who flirts over post-mortems and cracks questionable jokes at the operating table.

The success of the second, totally revamped series of Medics, which starts on ITV this Tuesday and co-stars Sue Johnston, will largely depend on Baker. It returns with blacker humour and a furious cutting pace. More upmarket than the BBC's Casualty, it should nonetheless give its rival a decent rating run for its L2million cost.

Baker keenly anticipates that 'millions are going to believe I am a doctor. One consultant I met recently looked so amateur, obviously didn't spend any money on his suits. Lets hope his neurology was better than his dress sense.' This from a man who owned only one shabby overcoat and one suit the day he landed the role of the fourth Dr Who. During that phase, he

B AKER began his acting career in graveyards. 'They catapult me back to my childhood in Liverpool when I was an alter boy attending sometimes three or four funerals a day. I remember actually weeping from the cold at a funeral once. Afterwards, a man slid his arm down mine and pressed a two-shilling piece into my freezing hand. I was instantly corrupted. After that, while the other alter boys were getting miserable threepenny bits, I was full of snot and passion and copping up to half-a-crown for my tears.'

His mother, a Roman Catholic barmaid, swaddled his early years in religious ritual. He recalls watching by his grandmother's deathbed while she 'fearlessly sank, ablaze with ecstasy, as a priest intoned about Jesus and holy angels'.

Religion sharpened his taste for the theatrical; he spent most of his childhood longing for early death and a ticket to Heaven.

He vividly remembers one of his first confessions, at the age of six when he told the priest: 'Father, I have done murder.' The priest, whose breath smelled of communion wine, leaned forward and quizzed him patiently on the quantity and timespan of these dreadful deeds. ('Three, in a week'.) The punishment was only a few Hail Marys but Baker's slightly bulbous eyes still fizz with delight at the memory.

H E HAD, still has, a constant craving to be the centre of attention. When he was eight, his father - a poor, uneducated sailor - offered to give him to a childless couple he'd met in Fremantle, Australia. Tom was happy to go, but his mother cuffed him for saying so.

She was perfectly happy to lose him at the age of 15 to the brothers of the order of Ploermel in Jersey. For six years, he shaved his head and wore a drab soutane as a noviciate and then monk. It was an ascetic existence, bound by strict rules that forbade him to touch anyone, smile or look in their eyes. Conversation was rationed to what he calls 'meaningless rhetoric from the New Testament'.

'Those years were terribly exciting and demanding,' he says. 'I enjoyed the suffering and deprivation and silence, although I haven't stopped talking since. I enjoyed the hysterical self-indulgence of feeling unworthy.'

His sense of unworthiness began to crumble when a beautiful young man called Olivier-Jean joined the brotherhood. 'I am absolutely certain that when men are together and deprived of women, they become homosexual,' confesses Baker. 'I wanted to embrace Olivier-Jean so much that my bones used to crack.

'When you're that young, it's very difficult to think about anything but lust. By the end of the six years, I was absolutely worn out by my sexual urges, and a priest advised me to get out.

Once I was doing my National Service and encountering girls I discovered sex, started practising it in a frenzy and rejected the Church very swiftly. Which left me with a huge residue of guilt. Sometimes God knocks on the side of my head now and says: "Let's get back together." But I prefer guilt, lust, anxiety, lies, and confusion. I prefer the uncertainties of life.'

His life post-monastery encompassed a spell as a medical orderly stitching up corpses - useful experience for his new role - before he slipped into acting and mid-life fame as Dr Who.

His private life has been more problematical. A five-year first marriage produced two sons whom he did not see for seven years and then only out of 'curiosity and a vestigial sense of duty'.

His second marriage, to actres Lalla Ward, ended quickly in divorce.

Seven years ago, he married television director Sue Jerrard. Sometimes, he says, he 'deludes' himself he is happy.

This is clearly not intended as an insult to Sue. Nearly everything he says is laced with bombast and rhetoric, which challenges you not to take him at face value. It is perhaps enough to know his daily Bible readings have now been substituted with Dickens, whose more eccentric characters he savours with unalloyed delight. Interviews are treated as substitutes for the confessional; occasions to whip up a bit drama and talk about his favourite subject. In confessional mode, he tells you: 'I wouldn't say I'm close to my children. I wouldn't say I'm close to anyone, except my wife. I don't have much capacity for friendship because of my self-centredness. I'm not generous enough to give to individuals. These things are heightened in actors when you are thinking about yourself all the time and worrying about where the next round of applause is coming from.

I 'VE LOST my religion and sometimes I think I've lost everything in life because I'm a great betrayer. The title of my autobiography is going to be, "All Friends Betrayed." That's made me more anxious to hold onto my dear wife. I used to be very fragmented, and I do need to be adored. I feel this overriding security in her affection; she reassures me constantly. Now that I've located admiration, I'm hanging onto it for grim death.'

Dr Who, of course, provided a pretty bottomless well of admiration and he still relishes the 100 or so fan letters he receives a month. The past decade has been less kind, although he created a minor stir as a priest in The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil and in the BBC2 play Law Lord.

He has not succeeded in 'supporting' himself from acting - largely, he believes, because casting agents typecast him as the Doctor. There has been plenty of spare time to mow his graveyard, do corporate work and organise house-parties, for which he is renowned as a generous host.

What is he like at home, you wonder? 'I think I'm a difficult person to live with, rather domineering and bossy, like lots of people uncertain of their identity,' he says.

In conversation, he is an accomplished raconteur who performs all his stories as if the curtain had just lifted on a full house. You may suspect he's listening with only half an ear to what anyone else has to say, but he's delightful company all the same. He's a great point-scorer, too, capable of spending hours searching the Bible for an awkward quotation with which to confound persistent Jehovah's Witnesses.

E VEN his own funeral has already been carefully orchestrated; L2,000 in a special fund to pay for champagne, strict orders forbidding gloomy faces at the graveside, and that 150-year-old granite gravestone awaiting its second date.

'There is a kind of implacable logic in my life,' he muses. 'My early memories are of graveyards, I live by a graveyard and I want a good gravestone as a sign that I existed. I might be frightened to die. But if there were two cameras there, I might make an effort.'

Why two? 'One for close-ups and one for wide angles.' He laughs, but he may not be joking.

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Daily Mail - TV and Radio Week - Saturday, March 28, 1992 - page 33 & 35.

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