Within half an hour of meeting Tom Baker at his weekend cottage on the Kent/East Sussex border, he has been snapped by a passing stranger who confessed she would “never forgive herself” if she did not have her photograph taken while in his arms.
He has given us the whereabouts of his multicoloured scarf (in a Blackpool museum of memorabilia) and played along with a knock-knock joke, courtesy of my six-year-old son.
It is, of course, the one that goes: “Knock knock!” “Who’s there?” “Doctor!” I’m a bit nervous at this point but, at the punchline, Baker roars with laughter and then, bizarrely, gives the boy all the loose change from his pocket. “Well, he told it so well!” If he were accustomed to doing this every time he heard that particular joke, Baker would be a rather poor man. As he puts it: “I have never left Doctor Who. I’ll never get over it. I never let people down about it. Even when they come up and say to me, ‘We do so admire you, Mr. Pertwee.’”
Baker, 72, replaced Jon Pertwee to become the fourth Time Lord in 1974, a role he played for more than six years. The scarf, the curls and the robotic dog all conspired to establish him as a national treasure and explain why middle-aged women now leap out of cars and press their pastel knit-clad bodies close to his.
Some, of course, want a bit more — like a woman he met two years ago on a train for London. “She was gorgeous. Quite divine, with a stunningly perfect set of teeth,” he says, baring his own impressive set. “I thought about how lovely it would be for her to nibble my ear. When we arrived at Charing Cross, she got up very neatly and, on her way out of the carriage, she leant over and whispered in my ear, ‘I have loved you all my life.’ Then she was gone.” He grins. “Marvellous!” With this sort of fan base, it is a wonder Baker ever thought of leaving Britain. Four years ago, however, he did just that. “I thought my career was slowing down, so why not go off on an adventure?” he explains. At the time, he and Sue, his third wife, were living in a quaint Kentish property, a converted 19th-century schoolhouse. After a boozy evening with the comedian and actor Vic Reeves — as Baker explains it: “We were a bit plastered after filming Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and had some rare beef and red wine together” — Reeves fell in love with the house.
Baker sold it to him in 2003 and relocated with Sue to a five-bedroom manoir in Toulouse, France, which they spent two years renovating.
To keep a foothold in Britain, they spent £300,000 on a tiny, red-brick cottage in Old Heathfield, East Sussex.
But far from slowing down, his career suddenly took off in a new direction. Little Britain, for which he did the voiceover, had started on BBC Radio 4 in 2001. In 2003, the comedy show moved to television, reintroducing Baker’s mellifluous tones to a new generation. He soon realised he would need to be in Britain for more than the odd weekend.
The couple also missed British life. “We simply yearned to be back at home,” says Sue. Her husband puts it more fruitily: “Well, the pub restaurants aren’t as good over there.”
Really? I thought French food was great, I say.
“The boring thing about French restaurants is that the better they are, the more f***ing solemn they are. I mean they are like f***ing chapels of ease!” says Baker, who, as a former monk, would probably understand this analogy more than most.
“They watch each forkful of food going into your mouth! And sigh, and whisper! Oh, France is wonderful, but for a short break. Then it can be a fling. An affair! An indulgence! And, of course, if you are having a fling, you don’t remember the delights back at home in the UK. I mean, we have wonderful girls here. Wonderful!” Sue gives him a stern look. “We missed speaking our own language,” she explains. “And all that travelling back and forth.” So they are selling both the Toulouse house (for an undisclosed sum) and the East Sussex cottage (on the market for £369,000). With the proceeds, they plan to buy a townhouse in Tunbridge Wells.
They haven’t done much to the steeply gabled cottage since buying it three years ago from a German couple, who themselves had used it for country weekends. The main living area is decorated in a startling lemon-yellow and black Pierre Frey wallpaper originally designed for Madame de Pompadour at the Château Montretout.
The style of the chatelaine actually works rather well on the humble walls of a house built in 1873 as servants’ quarters for a nearby manor. There’s a huge fireplace and a lovely view of the village church on one side. On the other, the cottage looks over rolling fields currently inhabited by a herd of grey horses. A cosy kitchen, also in yellow, completes the downstairs arrangements. Upstairs, there’s a guest room, a shower room and a main bedroom. That’s it.
“You wouldn’t call it spacious!” booms Baker, ducking his 6ft 3in frame beneath a beam. He gestures to a framed picture of Chancery, London. “Got that in my Dickens period. I was infatuated with Dickens. Prior to that I was infatuated with God. Now I’m more interested in what the devil has to offer. Sadly, however, he’s not all that interested in me. Ha!” We swoop past a shot of a kilted Baker in Monarch of the Glen (2004) and another couple of photos, one of him as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), the other as Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer (National Theatre, 1984). Outside, the small gravelled side garden contains a table and chairs, at which one could sit as the sun sets and the distant echo of clapping wafts over from the village cricket pitch.
It is idyllic, but perhaps not quite big enough for the man who has been the voice of, among others, UniBond glue, Burger King chicken burgers, Pedigree Chum and Nestlé Cheerios.
“I always give people what they expect,” says Baker. “Usually, they want warm extravagance. This I give to them,” he says, in a warmly extravagant way.
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