A brief rumble with Tom
Baker
A brief rumble with Tom
Baker
Tim de Lisle
Wednesday
February 1, 2006
The
Guardian
Tom Baker's voice is rich, dark and traditional, a great big slice of fruitcake soaked in molasses. And it has slowly turned into a national treasure. The Former Dr Who has become The Voice of Little Britain, and now he's going to play you and me. Send a text to a BT landline and your words will be spoken by a disembodied Baker. BT chose him for his broad appeal; at 72, he is the young person's old person.
I call him to talk voices. His seems to have become an icon. "Well, yeah," he booms, " but that's because of comedy, isn't it? It's because of Little Britain. Advertising people are very reassured if you've been in something that has done well with the young. Yesterday I was doing McDonald's hamburgers!"
Telephone voices tend to be cool, clinical and female. Not this one. "You wouldn't want a freezing, robotic voice," he thunders. "I had thousands of nonsensical phrases to read out, and I read them very warmly. Most text messages are passionate or funny, and some, of course, are utterly treacherous or wicked. We don't want any indifference! Wickedness is marvellously expressed when it's warm."
Voiceovers have been Baker's constant in a hot-and-cold career. After making his name as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra in 1971 (for which he received a Golden Globe nomination), Baker was working on a building site before landing Dr Who. His first voiceover came along in 1973. "I was filling in because they couldn't get someone well-known. It was for [his voice darkens] Noir, the after-dark aftershave. They hadn't quite written it and there were a lot of people from the agency, all throwing in their threepennyworth. I was going for it, very keen. And it changed my life, because these people knew who I was, and soon I was doing Sainsbury's."
I wonder what other voices he likes. "I don't have a log in my head of voices I like, I have a log of voices I don't," he rumbles, "like ... Michael Winner. When I hear his voice, I reach for my Magnum, and I'm not talking champagne."
His favourite voice of all, though, is someone less well known. "Michael Jayston. He has this wonderful warmth, so you want to believe in what he says. It's a very dangerous quality, it's the great quality of seduction, which is why he works all the time. I don't see much of him now, but he once bought me a suit when we were in Hollywood and I had no money - a jumbo cord suit, a most wonderful light gold colour."
In the background, Baker's mobile rings. "Hello, who's that?" he roars. "Well, piss off! No, don't leave me a message because I can't retrieve it. I've got this incredibly complicated phone that I don't know how to use." Speaking for us all instead may prove less difficult.
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Midi file this page: "Basin Blues."