His umbrella-toting professor type was initially eccentric to the point of bumbling, giving apparently rambling speeches before his clever solutions became apparent. No incarnation of The Doctor has had as startling a character arc as Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor. Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor (1987-1989) At the end of his first story, Robot, the Fourth Doctor treats companion Sarah Jane Smith (herself a GOAT) to his code for living: "There's no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes." Isn't that the joy of the show in a nutshell? Time, space, the endless battle of good against evil… and Jelly Babies. The Fourth Doctor could be warm, silly and occasionally shockingly callous – he tells a team of Antarctic explorers who are about to be absorbed by alien plant monster the Krynoid "You must help yourselves" – but he always landed on the side of right in the end.īest of all, the children's show that adults loved now had a star who delighted in being something of a big kid himself. In place of Pertwee's suave Time Lord, he reinvented the Doctor as a kind of intergalactic Toulouse Lautrec, an unpredictable cosmic flâneur with bohemian get-up and a supernova grin. The longest-running Doctor, with seven years' Tardis-time, Baker made himself the definitive article.Ī former novice monk born in Liverpool, Baker was between jobs and working on a building site when he got the call to replace Jon Pertwee. For decades afterwards, when comedians or cartoonists spoofed Doctor Who it was the fourth incarnation, Tom Baker, that they were doing, with his scarves, hats, Jelly Babies, and robot dog K-9. It's not just a pivotal moment in this time-travel saga, it is the time-travel story, the ultimate moral question: could you kill the infant Hitler? And it works chiefly because it's delivered by an actor whose outsize charisma and burning moral intensity – and, elsewhere, absurdist levity – were powerful enough to remake entirely everyone's idea of who and what the Doctor is. No-one who saw this electrifying scene in episode 5 of Genesis Of The Daleks has ever forgotten it. ![]() "Simply touch one wire against the other, and that's it, the Daleks cease to exist," breathes the Fourth Doctor. But the man's expression is of impossible torment. Touch them together and the greatest evil ever visited on the universe will never come to be. ![]() A man with a shock of tumbling curls and a colossal multi-coloured, striped scarf holds in his hands two wires. Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor (1974-1981)Ī Saturday night, April 1975.
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