The Doctors Who's Who (18 page)

Like Pertwee before him – someone he holds in high esteem – Baker loves pantomime and is a Christmas regular, happy to dress up as a female and wow his audiences, young and old alike. In recent years, he has attended various
Doctor Who
conventions and signing sessions, where he meets up with old friends such as Nicola Bryant and Louise Jameson, and has taken part in celebrity reality shows too.

His first reality jaunt was on the show
Celebrity Come Dine With Me
. His Christmas Celebrity Special (26 December 2011) included Linda Nolan, Nick Bateman, Bianca Gascoigne and Danny Young. Pantomime was the theme throughout, so Baker was very much at home there. His dinner party was the last of the week, and his episode really complements the calmness and great fun of the man. Before he did any cooking he had to go out and buy his ingredients; he was served by a Cyberman in his local butcher’s, which he took well.

Baker cooked Charming Salmon Mousse for starters, followed by One Little Pig’s Shoulder of Pork à La Karina with Pommes de Terre Purée, and Berry Chocolatey Christmas Pots for dessert. No one seemed to complain about the food but
there was a moment of drama when Nick Bateman seemed like he might walk out of the house after feeling a little too heavily criticised by his fellow guests. It was Baker who brought things to a happy conclusion, getting everybody to ride a fake rodeo bull and being flung onto crash-mats. The laughter and camaraderie meant that Bateman scored Baker a 10 out of 10 card, meaning that he had won the whole week and making him very emotional - although he downplayed the whole thing by saying, ‘Frankly I’m overwhelmed. Now I can relax and let my wife do the cooking again!’

Celebrity Come Dine with Me
proved a triumph for Baker, even though it was laced with
Doctor Who
references. One pink disaster of a dessert earlier in the week was compared to a
Doctor Who
monster – a Vervoid - and when we returned to Baker in the kitchen during the last episode of the week, the link commentator stated, ‘Back at the TARDIS, Colin cracks on with dessert.’

But if
Celebrity Come Dine with Me
ended up being a pleasant experience for Baker, his next venture into reality TV wasn’t. In 2012 he agreed to be on Ant and Dec’s
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!

‘I’m Colin Baker and I played Doctor Who in the 1980s,’

from Colin Baker’s opening profile in
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!

For a man in his sixties
I’m a Celebrity
… seemed a bit of a bad choice of adventure to embark upon, especially as Baker confessed to having a fear of heights and spiders. But from the moment his celebrity-filled rowing boat sank at the beginning of the show, he met each jungle challenge with enthusiasm and good humour, endearing himself to his celebrity comrades.

Baker was the fourth of the 12 to leave the show, after a particularly unpleasant bushtucker trial called ‘The Panic Rooms’, where he had to put his hand in various boxes to retrieve stars (and therefore food for the whole camp) and get bitten, stung or nipped by an assortment of jungle creatures in the process.

He had told everyone that his family was ‘ridiculously delighted’ that he was on the show, but he said it felt ‘remarkably good’ to leave. Of course his exit was full of
Doctor Who
-related quotes: ‘Colin has been exterminated from the jungle’, and ‘Buenas TARDIS’. But this didn’t faze him one bit, for he had achieved what he had set out to do: lose over a stone in weight.

Baker explained that he adored his food – he could happily give up drink – but one of the worst things about appearing on the show would be the lack of a fridge to raid at night. However, yet again, he fared well on reality TV.

‘Children should be scared daily in my opinion.’

Colin Baker from Robert’s
Full English Breakfast

To this day, Baker continues to hold
Doctor Who
close to his heart. He classes ‘The Empty Child’/‘The Doctor Dances’ (Christopher Eccleston story) as one of the best two-episode stories ever, alongside ‘the one with angels’ (‘Blink’, David Tennant), explaining, ‘They’ve got it right now.’ He also stated that
Doctor Who
was like a Roald Dahl novel and that Dahl got the scare factor ‘dead right’, when thrilling a child with his fantasy. He is of course, completely right, also stating that when Mary Whitehouse decided to criticise the programme (most fiercely between 1975-77), it had also ‘got it right’. And most sensible people are in total agreement with him.

For a while Colin Baker left TV acting to re-join the theatre, and also to become a school governor (and look after the
education of his four daughters), but, as time has shown,
Doctor Who
is still a happy part of his life. He continues to embrace the show, even presenting Chris Evans with his multicoloured coat to wear during the last broadcast from BBC Broadcasting House on 22 March 2013 (which also included Sylvester McCoy).

Baker doesn’t cling senselessly to
Doctor Who
; he has gathered many other strings to his bow since leaving the series. He is a book reviewer, a lyricist and the writer of a children’s musical,
Scrooge – A Ghost of a Chance
(written with composer Sheila Wilson and performed in over 100 schools). He has also contributed regular weekly columns to the
Bucks Free Press
, which culminated in an anthology of articles in his first book,
Look Who’s Talking
(Hirst Books, 2009); so not dissimilar to Sir Terry Pratchett there, who was a columnist for the
Bucks Free Press
for a while (before becoming a bestselling author).

Colin Baker will continue to surprise and delight his many fans around the world. His love of panto is well known, as well as his continued love of
Doctor Who
and, with star turns in shows such as
Celebrity Come Dine With Me
and
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!
he continues to venture into our living rooms when we least expect him.

‘A great reason for the programme’s continuing success has to be the fact that every four or five years you have a new generation of kids growing up. The time I liked the least was when the Doctor became the person the establishment rang up and said “Help us out, Doctor!”’

Verity Lambert
Doctor Who – A Celebration, Two Decades Through Time and Space
 
Peter Haining

CHAPTER EIGHT

SYLVESTER MCCOY

‘Then up and spoke the Cameron,

And gave him his hand again:

“There shall never a man in Scotland

Set faith in me in vain.”’

‘The Saying of a Name’

Robert Louis Stevenson

SYLVESTER MCCOY WAS
born Percy Kent-Smith in Dunoon, Argyllshire, on 20 August 1943. His father (Percy James Kent-Smith) came from Pimlico, London, and was an acting petty officer in the Royal Navy. Unfortunately McCoy never met him. Within six weeks of meeting his Irish mother, Molly Sheridan (which included a two-week honeymoon in Ayrshire), he was blown up in a submarine in the Mediterranean. McCoy’s father was only 23 years old when killed and his mother never recovered from the trauma, receiving medication for the rest of her life as a consequence and, as McCoy would later say, spending a lot of her life in an institute for the emotionally distraught. He spent his formative years being
raised by his mother, grandmother and aunts, and he attended St Mun’s, a local Dunoon school.

McCoy never started out with the intention of being an actor. His first vocation was the priesthood. Between the ages of 12 and 16 he trained at Blair’s College, Aberdeen, to become a priest – the same choice of career as the young Tom Baker and, like Baker, he eventually decided that it wasn’t for him. He left and completed his education in Dublin before returning to Scotland for a while. Following this, he went for a holiday in London, where he stayed and worked in an insurance company until it went bankrupt.

It was around this time that he became a hippy and took a job at the Roundhouse Theatre, London, where he was reputedly one of the most unlikely bodyguards of The Rolling Stones, as he explained: ‘The Roundhouse in the 60s and 70s was a wonderful place where lots of avant-garde plays were put on, and lots of rock concerts. I was a bouncer for The Rolling Stones one night.’ So, more of a fluke than a serious vocation then.

It was at the Roundhouse that McCoy met actor Brian Murphy (later to star in TV comedy
George and Mildred
), who was out of work and selling show tickets. One day a producer came in seeking an actor to replace someone who had let him down, whereupon Murphy suggested McCoy (wrongly presuming that he was an out-of-work actor too) by saying, ‘There’s a guy in the box office who’s crazy…’ It seems this particular craziness has followed McCoy ever since, as his most famous roles prove.

The producer was Ken Campbell, and through his wacky road show McCoy began to develop his own unique routine. Another actor who enjoyed the road show alongside McCoy was Bob Hoskins. Murphy also joined the fray and devised the
name Sylveste McCoy in a play called ‘
An Evening with Sylveste McCoy
’, in which McCoy would stuff ferrets down his trousers and set fire to his head.

The name Sylveste McCoy stuck because journalists thought that it was indeed the actor’s real name, and McCoy only lengthened it to Sylvester McCoy (because he favoured a 14-letter name to a 13) much later.

McCoy remembers his tour with the Ken Campbell road show as one where he ‘learned to do the impossible with total conviction’, and it was surely his apprenticeship to the world of acting.

In 1976 McCoy did a bit of serious acting in
Twelfth Night
, which also starred his future nemesis Davros – actor Terry Molloy. He followed this with
She Stoops to Conquer
, albeit, at that time, still under the name Sylveste.

BBC2’s
Big Jim and the Figaro Club
was an early sitcom success for McCoy, although it was only meant to be a BBC Bristol one-off. The club were a group of builders who lived and worked around a seaside town in the 1950s. The show was broadcast between 1979 and 1981 and apparently captured the nostalgic 1950s feel so much that audiences adored it.

McCoy played the deranged ‘Turps’, a role that brought him his first true character actor plaudits - although, again, he was still billed under the name Sylveste McCoy at the time.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he took madcap parts in children’s programmes such as
Vision On
(where he played Pepe/Epep, the man in the mirror) and
Eureka
, as an eccentric professor-type character; it was appropriate then that his
Doctor Who
companion Ace would nickname him ‘professor’ when he later took the part of the Doctor. His often madcap antics fitted the show perfectly.

In 1985, McCoy played in the six-episode serial
The Last Place on Earth
. The serial was a dramatisation of Roland Huntford’s book
Scott and Amundsen
, which studied, in detail, the historic race to the South Pole.

The programme, like the book, shows where Scott made some vital errors, which caused a bit of an outcry when the book was first published. The mini-series is faithful to the book and a largely overlooked classic nowadays, not unlike Paul McGann’s
The Monocled Mutineer
, which was also castigated for the politics of an historic event (but more of that later).

McCoy played the part of the heroic Bowers, one of Captain Scott’s most trusted men, and the serial showcases one of McCoy’s finest – and most poignant – performances.

In mid-1986, McCoy and Timothy Dalton performed together with Vanessa Redgrave in a season of Shakespearean plays at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The duo discussed the rarity of regular quality parts in the acting profession. A year later McCoy was cast as the seventh Doctor Who, and Dalton cast as James Bond in
The Living Daylights
(1987).

‘And to Koppelberg Hill his steps addressed,

And after him the children pressed,

Great was the joy in every breast.’

The Pied Piper of Hamelin
 
Robert Browning

An incredible coincidence is that one of the strongest themes in
Doctor Who
history,
The Pied Piper
, became the catalyst for McCoy getting the part of the Doctor in the first place.
The Pied Piper
was a colourful theatre production written for McCoy by Adrian Mitchell, with a very 1980s ‘Pied Piper Rap’ in it (performed by McCoy).

McCoy learned that the part of the Doctor was available
again while performing
The Pied Piper
and duly went for it. This wasn’t the first time he had gone for the role, as he had done so when Davison had given up the part, but that time he had lost out to Colin Baker.

At the same time as approaching producer John Nathan-Turner, a producer who knew McCoy got in touch with Nathan-Turner and told him that McCoy would be a great Doctor. Although Nathan-Turner suspected conspiracy here – which there wasn’t – he went along to see McCoy in
The Pied Piper
(6 January 1987) and came away suitably impressed.

On obtaining the part, McCoy sent out an introductory signed letter to the first fans who wrote to him, along with a colourful flyer publicising
The Pied Piper
at The National Theatre (29 October 1987–20 January 1988) and a one-page biography on
Doctor Who
headed notepaper entitled ‘The Real McCoy’, where he is asked at the conclusion if he has a favourite Doctor, to which he replies, ‘We are all the same person, so why should I?’