In an extraordinary interview, Dr Who actor Tom Baker tells ANDREW WILSON of the day he tried to kill his mother-in-law and the breakdown that led him to a suicide attempt.
When Tom Baker was starring as Dr Who he would stop young children in the street and ask them where he had seen them before. Then, flicking back his 25-foot multi-coloured scarf, he would bend down and whisper, 'I know, I've seen you watching television.'
The world at large the amiable actor with his mass of brown curls, aquiline face and handy box of tricks was the ultimate children's hero. Parents would ask him to visit their terminally ill children in hospital, and Tom would be there, telling them the Doctor was standing by them. Yet, when it came to being a good father to his own two sons, the role seems to have been one he found too challenging.
In his autobiography, Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? which The Daily Mail starts serialising on Monday, he reveals how, at 31, he abandoned his children daniel and Piers from his first marraige and didn't see them again for nine years. Even then, contact remained so rare that last January he failed to recognise his youngest son, Piers, now 36, when they met, by chance, in New Zealand.
Tom, in Auckland filming a commercial, was sitting in a restuarant with his third wife, Sue, when the waiter informed them that a young man at the bar wanted to pay their bill. Assuming it was a fan, Tom sauntered over to make small talk. What happened next simply beggars belief.
'The tall young man introduced himself as Piers Baker and said he was my son,' recalls the actor, his eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. 'I didn't recognise him - but I hadn't seen him for 16 years. He was working in New Zealand as a horticulturalist, but the coincidence seemed just too bizarre.
'When the truth sank in I was astonished, completely astonished. The first emotion I felt was pride. Maybe it is a sign of emotional shallowness, but i kept thinking how nice-looking he was and what a marvellous voice he had.'
Then the regrets began. 'I realised how much I'd missed him when he was little, after my first marriage broke up. I felt saddened that I had not seen him for such a long time, and realised that I was partly responsible.'
In his autobiography, Tom reveals how the bitter disintergration of his first marriage drove him to attempt suicide; how he tried to murder his mother-in-law and how he abandoned his children to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He also goes on to explain why his second marriage to actress Lalla Ward - who played his assistant Romana in Dr Who - lasted only 16 months and how his Catholic upbringing scarred him for life.
'The most painful part to write about was the loss of my religious faith. I remember a time when I was so certain of things, but that's gone now. And as the faith ebbed away from me, it began to turn to rage. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare.'
Tom was born in 1934, in Liverpool. His mother, Mary Jane, a cleaner and barmaid, and his father, Stewart, a sailor always seemed to be fighting a losing battle against poverty. During the war, the family house sheltered as many as 14 people and his earliest memories are of overcrowding and filth and the cockroaches that infested the house.
He confesses how he would fantasise about becoming an orphan; he even imagined his mother being killed by a bomb. That way he would be taken away from the Liverpool slums and be given the love he thought he lacked. To compensate, Tom turned to the Catholic Church for comfort, but it wasn't long before he became disillusioned. He was forced to repeat the words, 'I am nothing' in Latin and English over and over until he truly believed that he was unworthy of human love or compassion. 'I think it's been very difficult to get away from the fact that as a child I was brought up to loathe myself,' he says. At 17 he entered a monastery on Jersey. Woken at 4.30am, he would spend the day praying silently - the apprentice monks were not allowed to speak or even look at one another. 'The whole point was to learn humility and practice obdience,' says Tom. 'Yet the real point was the annihilation of self and I suppose that's where I lost myself for ever.'
After five years, he dared to question certain aspects of the monastery and was expelled.
Adjusting to life outside proved difficult; one wonders whether he ever managed to make that transition successfully. He remembers on his release how, because he had been forbiden to look at his fellow monks for five years, he felt compelled to stare intensely at strangers. His view of women had been warped by his experience, leaving him unable to form lasting relationships.
After a spell in the Royal Army Medical Corps, he decided he wanted to be an actor, and went to the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, in Sidcup, Kent, where he met and fell in love with the woman who would be his first wife - Anna Wheatcroft. One of the characteristics he found attractive in her was the air of self-assurance that came from being comfortably off - her family belonged to the famous rose-growing dynasty. Despite their differences in background and personal wealth, the couple married, in Stratford, in 1960. It was, by all accounts a disasterous relationship - the Wheatcrofts made him feel deeply inadequate and his self-esteem hit an all-time low.
'Sometimes they would give me nice gifts, a lovely shirt or a new suit,' he says. 'But they would always remind me that they had done this. I believe they wanted to control me.'
Occasionally Anna did try to defend her husband by standing up to her parents, Alfred and Constance. Once, when Anna gently pointed out that Daniel was Tom's baby, not Alfred's, her father flew into an apocalyptic rage, reeling off what he had payed for - the Nottingham nursing home, the best gynaecologist in the country and the baby's clothes. As the tirade ended, Alfred pointed at his son-in-law and said, 'He's got nothing. I paid it all, so the baby's mine.'
Although Tom and Anna had another son, Piers their relationship was beginning to fall apart. Alfred then suffered a stroke and the family decided that Tom, with his nursing experience, should look after him. Caring for the man who had made his life miserable pushed him further into a deep depression. 'This monster who hated me suddenly became dependent on me,' says Tom. 'I found the whole experience draining and I felt completely isolated and alone. I couldn't bear to look at my wife because she looked like her mother. And finally I couldn't look at my own children because they reminded me of their mother.'
In his bleakest moments, there seemed only one escape. 'I began to think about suicide and one-day I swallowed 24 of Alfred's anti-depressents. Half an hour after taking them I woke up to the sound of Alfred banging his stick on the floor. When I realised that I wasn't dead, it felt like I was trapped inside some black farce.'
Confused and desperately unhappy, he even envied Alfred when he eventually died. Soon afterwards, he took up a manual job in the family's rose-growing business. Working in the fields one day, he overheard his mother-in-law ordering two fellow employees around. Spotting him, she shrieked: 'Come on there's work for you, too.'
For Tom, the pressures of the last few years came to ahead. He shouted at her, and she started to laugh. Tom reached inside his car, grabbed one of the ten newly sharpened hoes that were lying on the back seat and threw it at her. Constance ducked and renewed her verbal onslaught. Deep inside Tom, something snapped. Gripped by a murderous rage he threw hoe after hoe in her direction. He admits there was no doubt that he meant to kill her. 'When she started to mock me, I really wanted to get her and absolutely intended to murder her. When I failed in that attempt, I went to pieces.
'I just wanted to run away - obviously something had happened in my head. i remember running up to the house, where I was sick over and over again. Then I realised I had to get the boys. But Anna came back and found me in a state and I thought her response wasn't sympathetic enough. I just stormed off, I couldn't cope any more.'
He went to Birmingham, then returned and told Anna he needed some time away. 'I went to Coventry, where I took a driving job and where Anna came to see me, quite soon afterwards, to tell me that she had met this other chap. I didn't want to know how long it had been going on or how serious it was.
'I don't know if I had a nervous breakdown, it's a very glib phrase to use. Certainly I was experienceing some terrible things and I wasn't thinking clearly. You would have expected a reasonably intelligent young man to think about his children, but I thought my children were possessed by them, the Wheatcrofts. Instead of saying, "I must have my children," I was easily persuaded that my state of neurosis would just make them more agitated. I don't even think I said goodbye to them.'
After the end of marriage in 1965. Tom went to London to make his name as an actor. He worked with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, but fame eluded him and he often took labouring jobs to survive.
Between acting jobs, he was working on a building site when, in 1974, he heard he had been chosen to take over as the new Doctor Who. He became a national figure overnight, a man adored by millions of children and adults. For the first time in his life, Tom Baker felt loved.
'Dr Who was my salvation,' he says simply. 'The role fulfilled me in an amazing way and it was one part I could play off-screen as well as on. I never stopped being the Doctor and the rule, "Don't talk to strange men" never applied to me. Children just adored me.' In 1980, towards the end of seventh year as our favourite Time Lord, he fell in love with Lalla Ward, the 29 year old actress who played his assistant Romana. 'I can't remember the exact moment we went beyond friendship, but I recall my feelings being reciprocated by her. And for a short time we were happy.'
They married in December 1980, but 16 months later their relationship broke down. The fact that he was no longer the Doctor took its toll. Once he was off TV, and with a drastic haircut, no one recognised him. 'I lost my identity like Samson losing his strength,' he says.
He took to drinking with his friends and his marriage began to fail. 'Lalla said it might be a good idea if we give it a rest and see how we really felt. I was never faced with the problem because that was it, we never saw each other again. Without any hostility we divorced very amicably and I've never seen her, ever.'
Bearing in mind his record, it comes as a surprise to learn that he has been happily married to his third wife, Sue gerrard, a TV director and producer, for 12 years. Tom says, 'I find it much easier to be married now. I feel seriously committed and cannot imagine not being so, But I made it very clear I didn't want any children - I haven't been a huge success with the last two.' Tom keeps in regular contact with Piers, but has not seen his other son Daniel, 37, who is a builder, for a couple of years. He has never met Daniel's son Max.
His actorish voice drops to a whisper as he says, 'It may be that my sons were better off without me, with my uncertainties and my anxieties, but that may well be a piece of self-justification. I wouldn't say for a moment I've been a good anything, actor or father. In fact, I wouldn't say I've done a good turn to anyone. But I am trying to be a good husband.'
The totally unexpected thing about Dr Who was that a children's hero proved so fascinating to women - especially those whose tastes were, well, unusual. On our tours around the country promoting the series, I kept getting pulled by keen female fantasists.
As a younger man I had kept strict vows of self-denial and celibacy. Now, I had never been so sought after.
One young university don persuaded me to show her my Dr Who costume - and put it on herself. She looked terrific as she threw herself wantonly on the wide Holiday Inn bed and growled: 'Come on Doctor, let's travel through space.'
She really did say that. I nearly laughed in her face. But then, we were not in our right minds at the time and we had been drinking champagne. I managed to travel as far as the bed. As we grappled like demented stoats, her wearing my gear, I kept thinking I was making love to myself. At least she didn't want to whip me, as some Who groupies did.
It was all a far cry from the London building site where I was working as a labourer when I landed the role in 1973. By that stage I was a failed monk, husband and scorned jobless actor. And my actress girlfriend had called from Birmingham to say she had found 'great love with a man.'
The pain was exquisite. Things got worse when I played Hamlet for O-level children and was booed the first night, then pelted with marsh-mallows at subsequent performances. In despair, I gave away all my possessions, wishing for death.
Then one day in the warm little world of a pub called the Fox and Hounds, whose landlady, Diane, was the Mother Theresa of licensed victuallers, I was told to go to Elbury Street the next day at 7.15am and stand outside number 182, where the young Mozart wrote his first symphony.
There I would meet a man, Arthur Cordes, who needed a labourer. The work was menial, with no security, and the wages were the legal minimum. In deep apprehension and joyous depression I met Arthur, who led me to a building site near Mozart's place, gave me a cup of tea and a piece of bread pudding the size of a half brick and set me to work. Fuelled, I set to work, happy that nobody knew where I was or even cared.
The work was so hard that it soothed me. Being shattered at the end of each day helped me get through the night. As it sank into my poor nut that sheer bone shaking activity was good for me, I redoubled my efforts and always asked to take the Kango drill.
Using the Kango without ear protection for three or four hours a day took away any fears of death and memories of old loves finding new loves in Birmingham. But drilling left my arms shaking so much that I couldn't eat properly. I had to put my bread pudding on the floor and get on my hands and knees to it, sipping tea from the same dish. Some years before I'd been in The Millionairess with Maggie Smith, for the BBC's Play of the Month series.
Directed by Bill Slater, it was a success despite my not very good impression of Peter Sellars doing a foreign doctor. Now sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a room in Pimlico, London, I remembered Bill and wrote him a desperate letter: there had to be some part for me in the BBC's huge series and serials department.
That letter was written on a lonely Sunday night - Sundays have always been bad for me. Often I've drafted a suicide note on a Sunday evening. I psted it the next morning, on my way to the building site.
My poor begging letter reached Bill Slater's office on the Tuesday morning, after he'd left for a meeting with Barry Letts, a senior serials department producer.
Jon Pertwee had given up his hugely successful role as Dr Who, so Barry Letts and colleagues were discussing a successor. That was the first coincedence; the second was that Bill Slater was about to become head of serials.
It was 11.15pm and I was lying on my mattress, three-and-a-half miles away, when Barry Letts rang, setting up a meeting for the following day.
Barry and Shaun Sutton, head of drama, were nice men who seemed pleased to see me the next day. Someone fetched a glass of beer but I couldn't drink it. They said they 'had an idea' and asked me back the following day.
At work on the site, I mentioned that the BBC was considering me for some job. That started the teasing that actors get between jobs, getting referred to as 'Sir Laurence' and having the mickey taken.
I rushed home for a swill and a change of clothes, and took the Tube to the TV Centre, arriving a bit late. Back in Shaun Sutton's office, Barry Letts said: 'Tom, we'd like you to be the next Dr Who. What do you think?'
Dr Who was a plum job in television, I was living on the smell of an oil rag and bread pudding. All I could do was nod. I couldn't stop nodding. They laughed kindly, we all shook hands and I felt reborn.
Arthur and my workmates were amazed. On my last day at the site, I swore eternal friendship with everyone before I tottered off past Mozart's house, full of tears and good resolutions.
I never saw them again. I was Dr Who now. I was an alien.
The enthronement of the new Dr Who took place at TV Centre when I was presented to the Press. I wore a white suit and a Peruvian sweater and a painted tie. There was clapping, there was the flashing of cameras, and I hoped it would never stop.
I whirled and posed and smiled and looked alien, and the more they gasped, the more I did it. Everyone wanted to touch me and I wanted them to touch me, too, and it was just marvellous.
After signing the BBC contract, things hotted up. From all directions chaps wanted to discuss projects, and girls looked at me in a meaningful way. Plenty did more than flirt. Once I accepted an invitation for coffee in someone's hotel room. She seemed so proper and serious when she asked me up. Several large gins later I entered her room for that coffee, which became a green chartreuse.
After a couple of sips and with few clothes left on, I noticed a Bible on the bedside table with a whip laid across it. These scenes scared me a bit. I didn't like the whipping to be to fierce and I cheated on the bondage, always making sure I wasn't to tightly bound.
Several of these women wanted to whip or cane me. For most it was probably a punishment for my performance, so I couldn't complain too much. But when it was my turn to be spanker, my passion faded a bit.
Before starting Dr Who I made a film and met a very different kind of girl. Marianne Ford was marvellously amusing and very good to me. When filming finished I went straight into rehearsals for the title role in The Trials of Oscar Wilde at the Oxford Festival, and Marianne came with me.
thanks to her we were sometimes very happy over the next few years, and the times we were unhappy were all my fault.
I went to live with Marianne in London's Notting Hill Gate and at first we were happy. But the programme's success brought temptation after temptation from those curious females wanting to lay a Time Lord. It had very little to do with me at all. How could it, they were strangers?
When I'd given up the monastic life after nearly six years of prayer, and especially chastity, I had been slightly disabled in a way - too timid to mix easily or even go into restuarants - and after years of prayer or silence, it took a while to speak an English which people could understand.
Afterwards I couldn't get enough of people. Looking back, I tried too hard, and though some people quite liked me, something also repelled them. 'He's quite nice,' I heard a woman say, 'but there's something odd about him, something disgusting.' I still have that effect on quite a lot of people I meet.
That seemed to have changed when I became Dr Who. I didn't spot the falseness. Thinking , myself genuinely irresistable, I gave in to most of the female time travellers.
Marianne was very patient, and she may have thought that the madness would pass - but it didn't. And so I hurt the very person who was protecting me.
At the beginning, the programme and the role were my greatest concerns. All that was required was an ability to speak gobbledegook with conviction, which I found easy because all my life, including the years in the monastery, I had been taught nonsense by priests and teachers, on all sorts of subjects.
After getting to know Liz Sladen, who played my assistant Sarah-Jane, and other regulars on the programme, work became full of fun.
Towards the end of my run as a Time Lord, Lalla Ward took over as my new assistant, Romana. She was marvellously witty and good to be with that I fell in love with her. Our wedding, in 1980, made the national news. How we laughed. For a while the terrors of real life were eased by my marriage. I was comforted in my anxiety by Lalla's steadiness and wonderful wit
But Lalla is more intelligent and serious than I am, and she didn't need the low life I was enjoying. After a while I realised that I prefered the smoky comfort of the Colony Room in Soho - where I drank with Jeffrey Bernard and the painter Francis Bacon, among others - to the domesticities of life at home with Lalla.
Our relationship was not moving in any direction. Drinking heavily, I wasn't going anywhere accept Soho. It was a mad and dangerous time for me, and it could not continue at that pace, but I didn't care. I was just waiting for something to happen.
As it did. One evening in the middle of 1982, following 16 months of marriage and after a gentle, kind, and quite short conversation with Lalla, we parted. She had quickly realised that the home life did not nourish me and she very kindly made it easy to escape. We decided to go our own seperate ways and see what happened.
We never saw each other again.
But then, a blighted marriage was no novelty for me. Years before trying - and failing - with Lalla, the self-destructive insecurity rooted in the loss of my faith on leaving the monastery had led to the loss of my first wife and two sons. Driven to desperation I tried to kill myself and then my mother-in-law.
The BBC missed the opportunity to make two programmes for the price of one - our rehearsals and arguments would have made excellent light entertainment.
The chaps playing the Daleks wore their top bits at rehearsal. During threatening scenes, they held out their right arms in place of the regular sink plungers. They all took it highly seriously which, of course, only added to the fun.
Very often the cast of Z Cars crept into the back of the rehearsal room and watched with delight. My turn-of-the-century style of pretending to be frightened reminded Frank Windsor of his great-aunt Mimi who never married because she was scared of men. whom she saw as aliens. I was very flattered by this.
Dr Who performers were often more fascinating than characters in the script. Michael Wisher, who played Davros, for example. rehearsed while wearing a kilt, with a paper bag over his head - maintaining his feel for the part. (Davros, for those who don't remember, wore an ugly mask - through which Michael couldn't see - and had no legs.)
He took his part so seriously that he would not remove the bag, even during breaks. to see coffee and biscuits being pushed under the paper, followed by a cigarette, while the bag kept expressing Davros's feelings about things, was bliss. He did allow us to make a hole in the top of his paper bag, though, so that smoke could escape.
For one Cybermen adventure, I proposed it should start with a clip from a Fred Astaire movie. The idea was that the Cybermen had got hold of an old musical and admired his style. Naturally, they also liked Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred did, while travelling backwards on high heels.
Cybermen moved as if their knickers were twisted, and tightly twisted, too. It would be funny if we started on a clip of Fred and Ginger before panning across to Sarah-Jane and me, tied to a post. We'd be challenged to teach the Cybermen to move as gracefully as Fred and Ginger.
Bob Holmes, the deadly professional script editor, did laugh - then filled his pipe in order to create a smoke screen while he turned down the idea. Most of my suggestions were rejected and I got used to it. One can get fond of almost anything, even rejection.
After more than 120 episodes I felt so proprietorial about the Doctor that it was hard to take direction notes from the directors. During the shooting of the story Planet of Evil, I had to seize a poor alien at knife point. When the knife was offered to me, I felt disgusted by the idea of such a coarse threat in our lovely programme.
'Take me to your leader," I said when the camera rolled, 'or I'll kill you with this deadly jelly baby' (an orange one, my favourite). The director wasn't thrilled.
But when I asked producer Philip Hinchcliffe about the rushes, he answered: 'Oh, terrific, really fantastic. I loved that bit with the jelly baby.'
A few weeks ago, at a bookshop in Manchester, a boy of about ten offered me a jelly baby. He was so happy when I laughed, and he quoted the threat from that episode - my turn to be happy.
Of all those who played Dr Who, Tom Baker held the role longest. He appeared in more than 170 episodes over seven years and his zany, eccentric style made him the most striking Time Lord. Viewers could never have suspected Baker's tormented past. Failures as a monk and a husband drove him to a lifestyle more bizarre than any he created for the screen. Yesterday, he told how, after a humiliating stage flop, he sought anonymity as a builder's labourer. But soon success with Doctor Who turned him into a womanising hedonist. Today in another exclusive excerpt from Tom Baker's autobiography, he recalls his extraordinary first marriage. The working-class actor from Liverpool married a drama-school sweetheart and became her wealthy family's despised drudge. The strain drove Baker to despair...
Anna Wheatcroft was very pretty, with shiny hair and white teeth and wonderful soft, honey-coloured skin. I so admired that skin. Thinking back, I realise I just wanted to be near Anna's lovely skin.
She was a nice girl too, but above all that she had the ring of confidence that comes from having a few bob. 'Blessed are the poor' should read: 'Cursed are the poor.' They are desperate to get away and join the rich, have glossy hair, bright eyes, and gleaming white teeth.
I was always afraid of being poor. As a former monk who was professionally poor and chaste, I hadn't liked it at all. I was never at ease with poor girls. Most of the time I couldn't even perform for them; their poverty made me feel insecure.
And so I got married to a nice girl from a rich family. Anne's uncle was Harry Wheatcroft. Wheatcroft's Selected Roses grew one and a half million blooms a year; Harry wrote books about roses and often appeared on television.
After finishing my National Service as a Royal Army Medical Corps nursing orderly, I was convinced I could be an actor.
At one drama school I visited, The Rose Bruford College at Sidcup, Kent, I saw beautiful young girls sitting beside a lake, feeding the swans and learning sonnets. There and then I wanted to be there, too, and passed the audition.
Christmas 1957 was spent with my friend and fellow student Laurie Taylor. Anna, two years behind us at drama college, was there too... She was attractive and I was duly attracted.
And so we married and the Wheatcroft's felt towards me what I felt towards the poor: I made them uneasy.
They really would've preferred that I hadn't come into their lives. To be near one Wheatcroft was saddening, but to be near a coven of them made one utterly embrace despair.
Skint, jobless and with a pregnant wife, I worked at a Stoke-On-Trent potter's. The boss was John Saddler, another of Anna's uncles. He liked us to get on our hands and knees and crawl down long ovens, pulling trucks of hot pots a bit faster than the machine wanted. You couldn't stand or breathe deeply. Sometimes my gloves burst into flames.
I was in hell. But it got me out of the house, so I loved it. The exertion didn't break me. I was young and strong; the only way I could cope was to attack work like a madman. Sadler liked it when I howled as my fingernails fell off in the heat. But he advised me not to overdo it.
Next, I worked for the famous Harry Wheatcroft, a monster. A man of firm opinions, he was thrifty, too. I once saw him sell a handful of roses petals to a partially-sighted flower lover.
His workers hated him.
He would creep along hedges at his nursery, hoping to catch somebody leaning on a hoe. As hairy Harry, with his handlebar moustache, loped away again, there were murderous mutters and men would deliberately damage the young roses.
Every day, I went home to Harry's brother Alfred, my father-in-law. He wore an ill fitting truss, which he was constantly adjusting - it was procured, some said, from an elderly, dying relative, who sold it for a keen price. Alfred's second-hand truss was only an approximate fit; after his death, it was burried with him.
My son Daniel was born in Nottingham in 1961. Alfred and his wife, Constance, adored and lionised him. Like many bullies, Alfred was devoted to babies.
He would bob Daniel up and down with loving noises and that ghastly smile, saying over and over; 'Hello, my baby. You're my baby, aren't you?'
Once, Anna used her favourite daughter status to say lightly; 'He's not your baby, Father, He's Tom's baby.'
Alfred's rage was instant and terrifying.
'Tom's? He's mine. Who paid for the best nursing home in Nottingham? Who paid for the finest gynaecologist in the whole bloody country? Have you any idea what the bill was?'
My father-in-law was close to apoplexy. Pointing at me, he roared; 'He's got nothing. I paid for it all, so the baby's mine.'
I did nothing, I was lost in utter self loathing because I did not even protest. Fading in my own estimation, I couldn't even weep.
Gradually, I got used to the abuse and the terror.
Constance, the Fishwife, my mother-in-law, was always going on about the Wheatcroft's invulnerability. 'I can see you wish us harm,' she'd say, 'but nothing can hurt us - nothing.' Then she'd add reflectively, after a pause: 'Except maybe an atomic bomb.' I love the arrogance of that 'maybe'.
And then came another son, Piers, for Anna and me. He was blond with honey-coloured skin.
'What a pity you've got such working-class skin,' Anna remarked. That really hurt and still does. It's not my fault my skin is rashy and working-class. But, Piers was one of the sacred line, and they were pleased with another golden boy.
Anna and I took a short break in Devon for three days and, on returning, were called to her parent's house, Castle Dracula, the dragon's lair, also known as Spinney Hill.
'Alfred's had a stroke,' crowed Connie the Triumphant (she and Alfred used to argue to loudly they could be heard by men working in a field nearby).
There he lay, the man who never stopped reminding us that he owned us - an abandoned, whimpering old Guy Fawkes dummy, not at all frightening now.
Thanks to the skills that I learned in the Royal Army Medical Corps, I knew what to do. I bathed the old rip with a little white spirit and talcum powder, saving him from bed sores. Clean sheets and pillow-cases improved his lot. After that, Alfred clung to me in terror at being left to his fate. 'Get Tom Baker, keep Tom Baker. Don't let him go.'
The irony was not lost on me. The man he hated most was the only one who could comfort him. The cruel bastard was in my hands. And I did comfort him. It is possible to nurse someone you hate.
The family did not want to look at their pole-axed father and were glad to leave him to me, for his helplessness filled his wife and children with absolute disgust.
Alfred refused to believe that he'd had a stroke.
'I can't have,' he grated in a terrible rage, 'I've got £93,000 in my current account.'
The doctor merely coughed politely; Alfred was a private patient and as we all know, they can talk any old rubbish they like and get away with it.
Three successive male nurses quit before the family handed over the raging Alfred to me. For nine months, I tended Alfie the Ungrateful. He wore me out.
Alfed used up so much of my energy and time that I had no opportunity to refresh myself elsewhere. I was impotent with Anna, which swiftly led to misery. I had left the monastery and the service of God to pursue carnal pleasures, and now these were lost as well. I began to lose my well to live.
Alfred was prescribed anti-depressant pills and, because he was often asleep when he was supposed to take them, I hoarded a good number. I had resolved to take all the hoarded pills at once and die of happiness.
Constance the Unspeakable was away at a National Rose Society meeting.
Deciding to die on a day when nobody would come to the house for hours, I gave Alfred a large tea of smoked salmon and brown bread, followed by raspberries soused in sugar and cream. After that, he had a good-sized custard and two cups of tea. Enough to keep him going while I got out, laughing.
Sitting in the kitchen, I swallowed all the pills. But I was awoken half an hour later by the old devil banging his stick on the floor. He was very agitated and wanted to go to the lavatory. My misery was compounded on discovering I was still very much alive.
Bad as it was to be trapped with my father-in-law, it was better than being in the hands of many other members of the family.
Most of the Wheatcroft's mistrusted anyone who was not bending to his work. The sight of anyone sitting goaded them into inventing tasks - Constance alone could have kept a battalion of Welsh Guards busy.
If I was reading in the kitchen while Mr Wheatcroft slept, I kept a bucket of water, scrubbing brush and floorcloth ready. When the front door would click, I would hide my book and throw myself down on the floor, scrubbing as if it was my vocation.
My home life provided no consolation to my misery. I couldn't look at Anna, my wife, because she looked like her mother. Nor could I look at her brothers, because they looked like their father. And I couldn't look at my children because they looked like my wife.
I felt very isolated. 'Don't die, Alfred,' I prayed, 'and leave me to the rest of the pack.' But he did die, of course, and I washed the corpse before it was laid out.
After his funeral, I took the day off. It proved far to long to be with my wife, so I went to work at Wheatcroft Selected Roses.
My job was following the special harrow, straddling five or six rows of young rose trees. This involved bending very low, protecting plants, from 7.30am until 5.30pm.
After bathing the children when I got home, I would fall into bed and blank out until 6.30 the next morning, when the torture would start all over again.
This went on for two weeks, until Constance the Cruel started acting like a mad drill-sergeant.
I had to collect paint and a set of sharpened hoes from Nottingham, and when I got back she cawed: 'Come on, there's work for you, too.' I had begun to lift heavy paint cans from the car's back seat.
'Never mind playing at nothing,' she nagged. 'You've had it easy for too long - time for real work again.'
Now I was honestly very nervous of Constance Wheatcroft. Her whole family was afraid of her. Dogs were afraid of her; bindweed withered as she passed; birds forgot their nesting instincts and flew back to North Africa at the sound of her hideous cries.
Suddenly, it was unbearable. Why don't you **** off and leave us alone,' I said. As the word emerged, my legs began to shake and my sigh became strange. I turned away and tried to get into the car, with difficulty because my legs were out of control and my sight was failing.
'Don't you dare get into the car when I'm talking, you kept man, you,' Constance shrieked. 'That's all you are, a kept man.'
She seemed very large and very ugly. She laughed when I opened the back of the car. I reached into the bundle of hoes, drew one, took aim at the screeching old bat and hurled it straight and hard.
She was only about 15ft away and my aim was excellent, but old she-devils don't die that easily.
She ducked, scooping up the fallen hoe to defend herself, wailing: 'who bought you that shirt you're wearing?'
As she bent, faster than I could have expected, Connie broke wind tremendously. 'You're common and disgusting, too,' she shouted, as if I had made the offensive noise.
That did it. I threw hoe after hoe at her. I was utterly frantic. But not one got to her She ducked and weaved and skipped and panted, all the while screaming 'Take off that shirt, you kept man' until, like a banshee, I fled screaming across the fields to the house where I lived, about a mile away.
Anna was off shopping in London that day. I prepared Daniel and Piers for bed - Anna once told me I was very good at it. Certainly, the children seemed to enjoy it. Their night clothes were kept immaculately clean and I enjoyed that marvellous moment of holding two happy, clean children before putting them to bed.
As I said goodnight to my sons, we all laughed together. It was to be the last time we would do so. Fleeing the Wheatcrofts, my marriage, and my family, I went off to London to be an actor again.
My children grew up without me, and I without them. But more than a quarter of a century later, on the other side of the world, Doctor Who and a breathtaking coincidence were to reunite me with Piers, the golden child.
Knock, Knock Who's There?
Being a children's hero was my supreme pleasure and pride. In any family with children, I was welcome. There were no exceptions. Children all assumed I was Doctor Who and responded accordingly.
As for adults, never once was I challenged to 'come outside and let's see how hard you are'. In any case, to avoid unpleasant scenes, I carried photographs from the programme, hundreds of jelly babies and all sorts of little cards to give to anybody who approached me.
During one story in 1976, there was a scene in which I had to appear afraid of death. I hadn't seen the edited version and worried that it would be to disturbing for younger children.
Unfortunately, I was on my way back from a Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool when the episode was screened and I really did want to see it for myself.
Somebody suggested I stop and watch in the window of a TV shop, but sets in the windows of those we passed were all tuned to other channels.
We were driving through a suburb of Preston when I spotted a house with a couple of kids bikes in the garden.
The programme was due on at any moment, and I was anxious to see it. Although I felt self-conscious about barging in on an innocent family at tea time, I needn't have feared.
'Do you watch Doctor Who in this house, by any chance?' I asked the young man who opened the front door.
For a split second, he looked puzzled, then he smiled and simply said, 'Come in, Doctor.' The title music had started. I quietly sat in the chair indicated. Two small boys were on the sofa, eyes glued to the screen. Eventually they glanced at their father - and me.
Just as they did so, I reappeared on the screen, their heads turned, and they saw me there to. Their amazement was, well, amazing. They were utterly gobsmacked. They couldn't grasp how I could be in two places at once. And, to their dad's delight they couldn't believe that Doctor Who was in their house.
What a wonderful visit that was.
For the first time ever I had no souvenirs with me, not a single jelly baby, having used them up at the Blackpool event, and the boys were afraid that nobody at school would believe that Doctor Who had dropped in at the weekend.
The BBC sent them pictures and the lads became locally famous. Those were the days. I was a hero in Preston and far around the world. And now what? Now I get mistaken for Shirley Williams.'
No one could have suspected the extraordinary life led by Tom Baker, TV's most popular Doctor Who. At 16, he entered the austere world of the monastery. Chafing under the vows of poverty and self denial, and avid to sample earthly pleasures, Baker quit the monastery after six years - but his loss of faith and sense of failure shadowed him for decades. After two failed marriages, an attempted suicide and estrangement from his two sons, the chances of lasting happiness were stacked against him. Here, in another exclusive chapter of his autobiography, To Baker explains how he beat those daunting odds.
After seven years and 178 episodes - the equivalent of 45 feature films - I was finding Doctor Who a little arduous. New characters in the series didn't stimulate me at all. It was 1981 and time to go. The though of leaving filled me with apprehension, but I pretended to be philosophical. I thought I could beat the problem of being typecast. But I couldn't.
With my hair cut short, nobody recognised me. Suddenly, I was invisible. The very success of the programme and my efforts to promote it with public appearances, worked against me.
The hardest thing was realising I was no longer a hero to children. I had been used to their ecstatic greetings and I suffered dreadful withdrawal symptoms, bereaved of a fictional existence much more important to me than the real one.
Following years of adulation, the future seemed bleak. Nobody wanted an old Doctor Who. People kept saying: 'I suppose you've retired?'
Retire? Go back to the identity from which I had been struggling to escape all my life? What kind of fate was that? But I wasn't finished with Doctor Who, nor he with me. Recently I went to New Zealand with my third wife, Sue, to shoot commercials there as an old Doctor. We even managed, in the wild few days before flying out, to locate my original scarf - from Madame Tussaud's, where I still stand after all these years.
One evening, Sue and I went to a restaurant, where our perfect waiter turned out to be the spitting image of my friend and bygone Soho drinking companion Sir Anthony Hopkins.
At the end of the meal, Sir Anthony's double appeared at my elbow and said the bill had been paid. Another waiter told me that the gentleman who had paid was at the bar, knew me and would like to say 'Hello'.
'A fan,' I whispered to Sue, and we guessed that dinner might now cost us two hours of talk on the history of Doctor Who.
At the bar the waiter indicated a tall figure standing in the strong light and smiling quizzically at me. I studied him carefully, about to say that there had been no need to pay my bill, when a tiny feeling of unease hit me. His steady smile was unsettling.
'My name is Baker,' he said, 'Piers Baker, I'm your son.'
'Piers?' I whispered.
He nodded, glancing from me to my wife, and still he smiled. I looked at Sue and saw that she was smiling with real delight. 'It's my son,' I told myself, putting my hand out, and he took it firmly, holding on.
I remembered him being born, second of two sons by my first wife, Anna Wheatcroft, a member of the Midlands rose-growing family.
The memories would not stop. I saw Piers as a baby.
Then, I hadn't known of the grief to come. My suicide attempt. My attempted murder of my mother-in-law, Constance. The end of my marriage to Anna and the loss of our children from my life.
And now here he was, Piers. He ordered drinks with great confidence. I looked at him and suddenly thought: perhaps all may yet be well. Perhaps this encounter - it took place earlier this year - could bring a new beginning for us.
And still he smiled and it was fine to see him. Oh, Piers!
That chance reunion was a needless reminder that my life has seldom been conventional.
Losing my religious faith after spending nearly six years in the monastic order I entered as a teenager in the fifties was the source of all that. The betrayal of my faith, leading me back to the everyday world, left me with deep self-loathing. I was insecure, prey to depression and the fear of being inadequate.
Entering the monastery was easy. Staying there was the test.
I was born in Liverpool and grew up during WWII. My father was a merchant seaman and my mother a cleaner and barmaid.
Our house filled with refugees from bombings. It was noisy and crowded and smelly - keeping clean in a group of 14 people wasn't easy.
We were Roman Catholics and the Church offered an escape from home; among other advantages, the smells were much nicer. Desperate for comfort and distraction, I got more and more involved with services and became an alter boy.
Men came to my school regularly, recruiting future farmers, miners, emigrants to Australia. One told us about being a hero for Christ, labouring in a vineyard. His promise seemed to combine farming, grape picking and going to heaven. Oh yes, I put my hand up.
To have a child in religion conferred great status on our working-class family. For a boy to go to God as a priest or a monk or Christian Brother...gosh!
How the teacher's perception of my thickness reconciled with my potential usefulness in God's vineyard, I don't know, but I went off, at 16, to the order's mother house, Maison Bon Secour, the house of succour, on Jersey in the Channel Islands.
Discipline was extremely severe. Lots of deep silence was deemed good for the soul. Our day started at around 4.30am. Though silence was the great idea, we were roused by an appalling siren.
Going to bed at 8.30pm, we had a few minutes to brush our teeth and swill our faces. Then each of us glided to the foot of his bed, waiting like a statue until the last man was in place.
On two ominous hand-claps from the supervisor, the room was plunged into darkness, so that was could not catch a glimpse of each other as we got into bed. In two minutes you had to undress and lay your soutane - your cassock - across the top of the bed, lie down flat and fold your hands across your chest as if dead.
Two more spooky claps from Brother Audifax and the night light came on. We lay bathed in Hammer Horror red light as he checked beds.
We lay like figures on tombs in order to maintain modesty in the eyes of our Guardian Angels. If you moved in the night and made the bed springs creak, Brother Audifax materialised at the bedside, hissing: 'On your knees.'
Yet for a time, it was all worthwhile, just to be in a frock. The soutane was great to wear. It carried all the authority of the Church and made me feel special.
I was Tommy in those days, but whoever heard of a Brother Tommy? So I chose to become Brother Sylvester.
Our Brother Superior was a tall, bald man with, I thought, a rather insincere stoop. He looked at me as if he suspected that I wanted to slap him. That was exactly what the Devil was always urging me to do, but I resisted.
I got used to the terrible regime. I had no way of knowing what the other novices were feeling or thinking - such discussion was not allowed. But every few weeks another would disappear.
I stayed, but it was the impulse to be anywhere other than Maison Bon Secour that led to me becoming a full-time sniffer of insence.
Taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience got me out. I was moved to Market Drayton, Shropshire. As time passed, I chaffed at the authoritarian demands of elders. I grew to hate them all, but I was too scared to do anything about it.
People who left a religious order were considered traitors and were said to go mad in the 'outside world', unable to cope with it.
After nearly six years, I was institutionalised. The thought of the outside world I wanted so badly made me afraid. But I felt I had to have it, no matter what the cost.
So I confided in Father Bernal. When I told him of my doubts and desire to break the Commandments, he looked as though he was not sure whether he should hear my confession or call the police.
All the same, he sniggered when I told I had thrown rabbit droppings in the bother's soup - a small and not-too-serious attempt to poison the lot of them.
He began to call me Tom, bringing memories of my other life. He asked: 'Do you want me to help you out?' I nodded with such joy that he laughed. A few days later, Brother provincial, with his pitiless grey eyes, beckoned me to my cell. He whispered: 'Take off your crucifix and your soutane and put on these things. You are going away from us because of your selfishness.'
I caught his whiff of carbolic soap, the odour of sanctity.
Lying across my bed were a dark rain coat and a lumpy green pullover, both very shabby. My trousers were ragged and baggy. That didn't matter when they were covered by the soutane, but now I would look a laughing stock.
Brother Provincial lead me outside, were a small van waited to take me to Crewe station. He handed me £4 and whispered: 'Ask God to forgive you and to send us someone else to do His will.'
Brother Provincial had a false leg and it's leather harness creaked. Old Creaky averted his face in disgust and with one last creak he stepped back and closed the door.
At home, my mother, seeing my distress and hopeless clothes, pulled me inside.
'There, there,' she comforted, 'it's going to be all right.' After several cups of sweet tea, she listened to my story and nodded and nodded and carried on loving me.
During the run of Doctor Who, I was introduced to a new assistant, played by Lalla Ward.
We fell in love and got married in 1980, but happy as we were for a while, the attractions of drinking and low life around Soho were too strong for me - stronger than our union, which ended within two years.
The swift break-up of my second marriage (the first had ended long before, with my violent departure from the Wheatcroft dynasty) had not deterrent effect on my drinking, so that self-destructive life went on as usual.
But after parting from Lalla and between bouts of madness in Soho, I began seeing Sue Jerrard again. We had first met when she was an assistant editor on Doctor Who and, for a while, things went well.
Then, as usual, they went very badly, which was all my fault. I went off and married Lalla and that was the end of Sue Jerrard, I thought. But it wasn't the end at all.
After I separated from Lalla, there were times when the cracking pace of Soho was too much and I looked for peace and comfort elsewhere.
I called Sue, we met and laughed and began having a good time again.
The itch to get to Soho everyday began to fade. After recording a voice-over or commentary in the area, I found myself walking past the drinking clubs and bars and going back to Sue.
Gradually, I realised that I might be ready to leave London and live in the country. Sue who was working at TVS, near Maidstone, in Kent, was driving through a Kent hamlet when she saw an old school for sale.
I rushed to see it. Her intuition was right - I loved the place. We could have cats, lots of cats, I thought. We could be happy there.
So in 1986, we bought the house. I wanted to be with Sue in the country and be quiet and have lots of cats.
There are eight of them now. Ten years ago, on April Fools' Day, we got married in Maidstone.
We are still together with no complaints and really very happy. We are.
click here to go back to Tom Baker's Front Page
click here to POP to Top