Tom Baker is the Fourth Doctor!

FIND OUT MORE AT THE BIG FINISH WEBSITE: ❤️❤️➕🧣 Since 2012, Big Finish has released dozens of full-cast audio dramas in the Fourth Doctor Adventures range, starring Tom Baker. Returning to the role of the Doctor after a long absence, Tom Baker effortlessly recreates the trademark wit, wisdom and humour of his incarnation in a series of full-cast audiobooks. Paired with Leela (Louise Jameson), Romana I (Mary Tamm), Romana II (Lalla Ward) and K9 (John Leeson), it’s a nostalgic trip back to the 1970s in stories designed to capture the distinctive flavour of the era. Tom Baker in conversation with Big Finish’s Paul Spragg in November 2013: Without Doctor Who, you would (or would not)… what? Oh, nothing without Doctor Who. It was the greatest and most positive thing to happen to me. Barry Letts and the others took me out to dinner and at the end Barry said, ‘So Tom, how do you see it? What are you going to do with it?’ Now, if I had not signed a contract, I would have done a big spiel but as I’d signed a contract and I was safe for a year – no one gets fired before they’ve even started! – I said, ‘I don’t know’, and it was true, I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe I had got it. He gave me the scripts, all of which, the first couple of years I was doing it, were written for Jon Pertwee. Pertwee stamped on it so hard that all the writers were used to writing for him so it was all sarcastic putdowns. And then I realised, as I was saying these lines the way I wanted to do them, everyone was falling around laughing. Then I realised – because I’m often slow to realise things – this is what I was born for. There was no acting about it. Everything about the character; being a benevolent alien, indeterminate age; he didn’t think like other people. Maybe he didn’t even walk like other people. You could do anything you wanted to as long as you didn’t break the trust of the audience. So without Doctor Who, well, I certainly wouldn’t be here. I might have actually been able to go into production; I don’t mean as a leading producer, but as a production assistant or something like that, but as an actor? Well, when I was at the National at the end of the Sixties, the place was absolutely teeming with talent. Derek Jacobi and Anthony Hopkins and Ron Pickup, all those people. Jeremy Brett. No chance of me really getting leading parts. And so I didn’t even get to play human beings; I think the first part I had was a horse… What’s your one biggest Doctor Who memory? I remember a man stopping me in Oxford Street once, looking at me with absolute incredulity; he couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘Tom Baker?’ A man in his late thirties. I said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘Tom Baker?’ I said, ‘Yes!’ And he looked at me and in his brain he catapulted back in time and he said, ‘You know, when I was a boy, I was in a home for children; nobody wanted us, you know? It was terrible. And you made Saturday night good.’ And I went to say something to him and I could see him so close to tears that he couldn’t speak. And he shook his head as if to say, ‘Don’t go on, don’t remind me’ and he just did [a thumbs up]. Such a common thing, isn’t it, but suddenly backed up with an expression on his face through his tears that was a knighthood. It was a knighthood. Just thumbs up, meaning it was great, and thanks. It’s incredible, isn’t it? Just a gesture.